Friday poetry challenge: It's not about the Vikings

We stumbled upon the Indian pipes just past the Viking encampment and immediately tried to protect them--the plants, not the Vikings. 

You wouldn't expect to encounter Vikings deep in the Hocking Hills, but the absence of longboats suggests that these weren't real Vikings. If you want to encounter grown people dressed the way they imagine Vikings might have dressed and living in tents in the woods for a weekend in July, then stroll through the Viking encampment, buy some sourdough bread, look at some taxidermied foxes, and try your hand at tossing a hatchet at a target--at no charge.

We hadn't driven 90 minutes through intermittent rain just to see a Viking encampment, but the parking area for Lilyfest was Viking-adjacent, so we dutifully walked past the Vikings' tents and through thick woods to enter the annual art and nature festival at Bishop Educational Gardens. When we saw Indian pipes growing smack-dab in the middle of the trail, my husband stuck a stick in the dirt to mark the spot so they wouldn't get trampled. A futile gesture: a few hours later when we left there was no sign of the stick or the Indian pipes. We saw some clumps growing in the woods nearby, but you can't expect hordes of beauty-starved visitors to notice tiny delicate plants in the middle of a trail through dark woods.

It's been a few years since my last visit to Lilyfest but it was just as wonderful as I'd remembered. The rain kept the crowd thin and made photography difficult but also provided a welcome respite from oppressive heat and humidity. We wandered the gardens, bought some lilies to plant at home, and sat beneath the trees eating lunch while a young girl nearby played bluegrass tunes on a fiddle. 

You never know what you might find among the gardens: gorgeous orange lilies on one side of the path, sinuous glass sculpture on the other, a butterfly flitting between them, and always music wafting through the air. Despite the presence of vendors, visitors, and Vikings, it feels like a place of peace and poetry. To celebrate small but intense pleasures, let's try some haiku:

Lilies, lotuses, 
sinuous glass: nature, art,
and music bring peace.

Indian pipes, before the crowds trampled them

At the lotus pond. I love the subtle colors.

They seem startled to see us. 

I love this cat hanging from a tree.

Dumb luck

Lucky guy, the aide said as he handed my son a chicken salad sandwich and a bag of chips. 

Lucky? A luckier person would have avoided lymphoma entirely, but I guess luck is relative. If you get out of bed just after 4 a.m., eat a quick breakfast and then vomit it all back up again before being driven two hours to the James cancer hospital, and if you survive the first two (of four) annoying procedures before 11 a.m., and if you then realize that you're feeling a bit peckish and ask the aide for a bite to eat before starting chemotherapy, and if the aide then delivers a chicken salad sandwich and your favorite brand of chips, that's some kind of luck! We have to take our victories where we find them.

In the four months since my son was diagnosed I have been lucky enough to avoid driving duty on four-procedure days, but yesterday I drew the short straw. Blood work, chest x-ray, two kinds of chemo, lumbar puncture--a scenic tour of hospital procedure rooms and a very long day. 

Twice my husband has been the designated driver on multi-procedure days that have stretched beyond twelve hours, but then he is also better equipped to entertain himself for long periods at the hospital. By the time he's ready to leave, he will know the personal history of everyone in the waiting room and will have stories to share about their interesting lives. 

I have a different method of surviving long hours of waiting: I mentally wrap myself up in a warm cocoon sequestered from the hospital milieu. Sure, I'm up for a conversation with my son and I'll ask for his help on whatever crossword puzzle questions fall within his areas of expertise (like what's on the flag of Mali or which U.S. state capital has the second-smallest population), but mostly I retreat and try to be anywhere but where I am. On good days I can read a book or article or draft a blog post on my phone even though I can't even see the letters on that tiny keyboard, or I'll play some mindless game that makes my eyes so blurry that I can't read road signs on the drive home.

It's hard to wrap myself in a warm cocoon, though, in those frigid hospital rooms. When we arrived before 8 a.m. yesterday the outdoor temperature was already close to 80 with humidity to match, but I carried a thick sweater because I knew where we were going. The aide who provided the lucky sandwich also gave my son one of those wonderful warm blankets, but no one ever offers me a warm blanket. 

Of course I'm not the patient, the person whose suffering is the center of everyone's attention, but that doesn't mean I'm not miserable. His illness shrouds my every thought, especially when he e gets coughing fits so severe that each cough feels like a dagger stabbing me in the heart, but I'm the healthy one in the room, the one who doesn't have to choke down a dozen pills a day or inject himself with medications that seem to make him sicker or shuffle through a growing pile of medical bills. Lucky me!

I try to hide my misery so I can be helpful to the sick guy; I count my blessings to counter the nagging malaise, but every blessing comes shrouded with a but. I found a great parking space--but it was in a hospital parking garage that fills me with dread. I remembered to put barf bags in my car--but I'm living a life that necessitates barf bags in my car. The treatment is allegedly eliminating every sign of lymphoma--but the side effects make me want to lash out at whoever is hurting my kid.

So I guess I'm lucky, ish, but I won't feel really lucky until we can banish the word lymphoma from our family's vocabulary. Meanwhile, I could really use a warm blanket.

She who dithers, withers

That's comedy gold, my colleague said, causing an instant shift in my perspective: instead of agonizing over an ethical dilemma posed by repeated encounters with an extremely annoying person, why not perform some literary alchemy and turn it into a funny story?

And so I did. Words and sentences flowed easily off my pen (er, keyboard), and afterward I sought feedback from trusted readers, including the colleague whose words had inspired me to stop griping and start writing. It healed something in me, she said, which is exactly what a writer wants to hear, but now I face an even bigger dilemma: what do I do with it?

Outlets for subtle comic essays of around 2000 words are limited, and the main character in mine would be instantly recognizable to those in the know so I would have to use a pseudonym. And so a piece of writing that made me feel energized more than anything else I've written all year sits languishing in a file folder as I dither. 

Dithering seems to be what I do these days. I've been dithering over small decisions, like whether to replace my hefty leather tote before the fraying straps fail and spill all my precious stuff all over the floor, which would no doubt happen at the least convenient time, like while I'm walking through the security scanner at the hospital with my son or while I'm waiting in the checkout lane at the grocery store with a long line of customers behind me, and if I do replace my everyday handbag, should I go for something more compact or stick with a bag that can hold a Norton anthology, a laptop computer, and three stacks of student papers? 

I looked at purses. I priced purses. I thought about buying a purse, but they're such a commitment! I understand that some people have a whole wardrobe of handbags to suit different occasions, but I've never been that person: I buy a bag and I stick with it until it falls to pieces, and while I'm trying to postpone the purse-apocalypse, I dither. 

But I also dither over big decisions, like whether to get a knee replacement this summer or wait until next year, whether to get surgery under my current health insurance plan or wait and see what Medicare can do for me, and then of course I got a cortisone shot as a stopgap and now my knee doesn't hurt at all and part of me hopes it will keep not hurting forever while the more rational part of me knows that the pain will return eventually and it will be even worse so why not fix it before it starts torturing me again? 

So I was leaning toward getting the new knee this summer until I realized that I can't drive my son to chemotherapy while recovering from knee surgery and we really don't need two semi-incapacitated people in my house, so maybe next year would be better. And now I've dithered about it so long that I can't possibly schedule surgery to recover in time for the fall semester. Dither long enough and the decisions make themselves. Options get limited. Possibilities dissolve into the ether.

Well I bought a new purse and I'm determined to get a new knee next spring, so now I need to stop dithering over where to send that funny story. I felt good about performing a feat of literary alchemy, but leaving it languishing in a file folder is an ideal way to turn comedy gold into lead. 

Hovering over the SEND key

How all occasions do inform against me, hollers Hamlet in agonizing indecision, but he was merely contemplating violent revenge over his father's murder. He never had to contend with a recalcitrant refrigerator. 

It's not even my refrigerator! It's the fridge in our Center for Teaching Excellence, and it's suddenly not cool. Granted, nowhere around here is cool today--we're immersed in the kind of humid heat wave that wraps us in thick damp layers of sticky insulation and then squeezes hard so that we can hardly breathe, but indoors, everything is cool. 

Except the fridge. It's downright warm inside, even though the lights are on and it's still humming like a functioning refrigerator. All the cakes in the freezer have thawed, and don't even get me started about why we constantly have five to seven sheet cakes in the freezer. Our work/study student has been busy this morning distributing the cakes to other campus departments before they start to rot (the cakes--not the departments), although those grocery-store cakes are pumped so full of preservatives that I doubt that they'll ever rot. This morning I threw away the remains of a cake that had been sitting out on the table for at least two weeks. Not a sign of rot anywhere.

So anyway: I arrived on campus this morning in despair over the state of my summer writing projects but determined to make measurable progress, only to be derailed by a fridge willing to hum but not cool. I have submitted a ticket to the appropriate department, which wonders whether we can make do with a mini-fridge. Given the number of food-related events we host in the Center, no. We need a fridge! But I need to write! And somebody locked the door to the Writing Wednesday classroom! And I don't have the key! And I'm fielding texts and emails related to the difficulty of replacing a 17-year-old fridge on short notice! And I'm not getting anything done!

Well, I'm getting a few things done--mostly the kinds of things that made Hamlet wonder What is a man / if his chief good and market of his time / be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more!

I need to put profound insights into winged words and send them off to journals to enlighten curious minds, but instead I'm haggling over refrigerators. This essay in this to-do folder, the one I've been fiddling with for two or possibly three summers, I've trimmed it down to a reasonable length, tightened the prose, eliminated excessive quotations, researched a journal that might be a good fit, written a cover letter, and attached the file to the email--why can't I go ahead and hit SEND and be done with it? I do not know / why I yet live to say 'This thing's to do', and yet my finger hovers over the mouse, unwilling to take the final step.

If Hamlet can work himself up into a froth of anger that leads to action, then maybe I can too. O, from this time forth, / my thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth, hollers Hamlet, but he says this in Act 4 of a five-act play, so he still has to wade through some stuff. 

I'll fetch the key. I'll deal with the fridge. I'll wrestle with a laptop that was allegedly fixed last week, although the fix required deleting all my browsing history, passwords, and settings. I'll send a student forth bearing cakes. And I swear, by all the poison poured into all the ears on all the stages on the planet, that before I leave campus today I'll hit that SEND key and boldly slash that task from my to-do list. 

The rest is silence.

A front-row seat for the summer show

It happens like clockwork every year: the minute the bottlebrush buckeye starts blooming,  hummingbird moths show up. Where do they hide the rest of the year? No idea, but suddenly, there they are.

I remember the first time I ever saw those chunky critters that looked like flying shrimp hovering among tall wildflowers near the parking area at Marie Desonier State Nature Preserve, where my daughter and I went on a hike during the weeks before she started her freshman year of college. I remember wondering what they were and how I might go about seeing them more often. Turns out all I needed to do was to plant a bottlebrush buckeye, which I did ten years ago, using money some people had given in memory of my mother.

They showed up this week after only a few of the buckeye's flowers had started blooming, but each day brings more blooms and so many pollinators that you can hear the buzzing before you see a single bee or butterfly or hummingbird. Today I ventured out in soul-crushing heat and humidity to find three zebra swallowtails fluttering around various areas of the bush, which seems too big to qualify as a bush anymore, towering high overhead and filling in a hefty chunk of yard. Two of the swallowtails got into some sort of skirmish until one flew off into the distance. I reminded them that it's a big bush with plenty of blooms to go around, but they weren't listening.

I'd like to go out and look again to see what else might show up, but it's stinking hot outside, with the sort of humidity that makes you want to plunge into a glacial pool. Instead, I'll wait until the sun goes down so I can watch the next big event: the firefly show, just outside our front window. There's no chance of getting any decent photos, so all I can do is sit here and watch.

Friday poetry challenge: No exit from Escher's stairs

This morning I turned a page in the June 29 issue of The New Yorker and saw myself--my job, my office, my life, plus a handy reply for the colleague who keeps begging me to please please please change my mind about retiring in December. 

It was already a better-than-average issue, featuring Simon Rich's delightful retelling of "The Pied Piper," Amanda Petrusich's gripping exploration of the power of grief, and Julian Lucas's long profile of Colson Whitehead, which made me even more eager to take delivery of his new novel. There's even a short story by Ben Lerner that didn't instantly repulse me--a real accomplishment.

But then in the middle of the not-horrible Lerner story I ran into Chris Gural's cartoon titled "M.C. Escher's Lab Rats" (view it here). Made my day, my week, maybe my year.

I suspect that I'm not the only academic who feels like one of those rats scrambling through an impossible Escher staircase that lures us toward some longed-for apotheosis only to flip us on our heads at the base of yet another set of steps. There's no way out, no way up, no way around, just an endless climb that can't be distinguished from descent, while everyone acts as if the futility is perfectly normal.

Well I need to get out of this rat race. I'm only staying on until December because of health insurance, and then I'm outta here. People keep asking why I want to retire or begging me to stay, which is flattering except I just can't. I could blame the wonky knee that makes standing in front of a class painful and, sometimes, dangerous, or I could blame ever-shifting college policies, enrollment issues, and rampant AI infestation, or I could mention a desire to spend more time with my grandkids while they still like me, but really it comes down to this: I'm tired of living as one of Escher's lab rats, especially when the maze has no end so there's no opportunity to find the cheese.

I don't know what happens when you combine doggerel with ekphrasis, but maybe it's time we found out:

Step up, step down,
go this way round
and through that door
that's on the floor--
up to the attic.
No one is static
but always moves
up well-worn grooves
in stairs that climb
to nowhere. I'm
a rat that wants
to leave the haunts
of Escher's stairs.
But exit--where?

It's not pretty, but if's Friday so it's time to sling some rhymes. Who's next?

Typing with my eyes shut

I wrote 1000 words with my eyes shut this morning because (1) I was having trouble keeping them open and (2) I didn't want to abandon the one colleague who showed up for Writing Wednesday. She had just been telling me how writing in the presence of other people helps keep her on task and focused, and normally I would agree but seriously, I had almost no sleep last night and it was very hard to think or speak or put any kind of prose down on the page, so I decided to stop fighting and just close my eyes and type. It wasn't pretty:

I think of my eight-grade typing teaching, mr who? Who would walk around the room slowly calling out letters—a,s, d, f, j, k, l, sem—and we had tofollow along on those big bulky manual typewriters that took the force of ajackhammer to press down the keys throgouthly. I never again used a manual typewriter afer that class but it ws a good way to learn and strengthen findgers at the same time. 

See? Barely readable. Reminds me of what Truman Capote (I think?) supposedly said about Jack Kerouac's On the Road: "That's not writing--that's typing."

With my eyes shut I can type really quickly but can't reliably back up and revise, and I don't even bother trying to find the number keys so I tend to spell out numbers. It's an effective way to disempower that annoying internal editor, but at some point I have to open my eyes and re-engage the internal editor to try to beat the words into some semblance of sense. 

Why didn't I get any sleep last night? Long story involving my son's ongoing battle with chemotherapy side effects, a story involving more vomit than you'd really care to read about plus rampant feelings of helplessness, but the result is that he's back in the hospital to get some fluids and tests and heavy-duty nausea medications so he can get back on his feet before the next round of chemotherapy (Friday!). He's too sick to drive himself so my husband and I had to tag-team the commute, but fortunately he's in the local hospital instead of two hours away. I dropped by to see him today around noon. He ate a little bag of chips and about three bites out of a sandwich, which is more than I've seen him eat all week. 

So yeah, a little too much on my mind to be able to sleep, but I had to go to campus this morning because the only IT guy who's not on vacation this week had agreed to meet me in my office at 8 to convince my college laptop that I am indeed authorized to access college resources like the printer network and Teams, so I had to get up and get to town just a few hours after I'd finally drifted off to sleep. This is the second time this summer that my college laptop has decided that I'm no longer an employee. Next time it happens, I'll just agree and walk out the door.

Mr. IT got my laptop functioning again (six months until retirement...please let it survive that long!) so I had no good excuse to avoid Writing Wednesday, where I let gravity grab hold of my eyelids and wrote 1000 words about writing, and typing, and that annoyingly arrogant grad-school student who lost an entire term paper he'd been writing in a departmental computer lab after an explosion at a tobacco warehouse nearby caused a power outage, back in the era of big floppy disks and tiny clunky monitors and (maybe this is the most bizarre part) tobacco warehouses located within a few blocks of an R1 university. I wouldn't want to be the person staring at a blank keyboard where a paper used to be, but then again, he ended up with a great story. Imagine asking a professor for an extension because spontaneous combustion at a tobacco warehouse destroyed your paper.

He was typing with his eyes wide open, which is what I'm doing right now, which is why most of the words are spelled correctly and make some modicum of sense. I'm glad I stuck it out at Writing Wednesday and got some words down on paper (er, screen), words that I might find some use for at some point in the future. First, though, I need a nap.

The view from a waiting room at the local hospital. Not inspiring but what did you expect?

 

Trying not to take this weather personally

Why do I struggle to sleep during a power outage? The house is quiet, eerily quiet, with a thick curtain of darkness blocking out the world, but my mind stays alert, aware that something is wrong: 

What time is it now? The juice is supposed to return around midnight. Sure feels like midnight, but how would I know? 

Thirsty. Where's that flashlight? Oops, can't run the water with the pump dead, and can't open the fridge lest the outage last longer than expected. Wait, here's a can of ginger ale on the counter. Would warm ginger ale help me sleep? What if it makes me want to pee? Can't flush the toilets with no power to the well pump. 

Why can't I sleep?

Next day I kept asking people at church what they thought of the storm and they all said "What storm?" Apparently it was highly localized, bringing sudden hail, rain, wind, and thunder to our small corner of the county while skirting the rest. By next morning crews had removed fallen trees and limbs from several areas of our road, but I saw little sign of damage elsewhere.

The storm lasted ten minutes at most but left us in the dark for six hours, much of which I spent wondering why I couldn't sleep. And then the power came on and we suddenly became aware of just how many little lights surround us every day, how many common noises provide the soundtrack of our lives. The clock came on, the fan started moving air around, and I soon settled into blissful sleep.  

Friday poetry challenge: Glassy-eyed wonder

When I chose the window seat, I did not expect it to become the Falling Window Seat, offering a front-row view of a smashing performance that caused diners to leap from their seats in astonishment or maybe terror. I'm pleased to report that no one was injured in the making of this spectacle, but the glass shattered spectacularly and the show, alas, could not go on.

I'd driven my son to Columbus for chemotherapy at The James, and we'd arrived early enough to grab lunch at the hospital cafe. The Juneteenth holiday had thinned out the usual crowd, so we scored a table next to a window. But what was happening just outside our window? Thick coils of rope swaying like pendulums in the breeze, scattered tools and unrecognizable equipment, and one worker, a man in hard hat and yellow vest, leaned back and looked up over our heads as he held a rope taut, trying to steady something outside our angle of vision. Moderately interesting, we thought, but not much of a show.

And then BOOM!--Something big smashed down on the terrace. 

Inside the cafe, diners jumped from their seats and ran, some leaping away from the windows and some rushing toward them to get a better view. Suddenly the cafe was crowded with onlookers chattering in many languages, wondering whether they ought to call a doctor or flee for their lives.  

Meanwhile, the terrace outside was thronged with workers looking up at the building, looking down at the shards of shattered glass, looking inquisitively at the equipment they'd been using to try to raise a massive pane of glass into place. One man talked into a radio while others began to remove the suction cups from the glass lifter. A worker stood with hands on his hips, looking up and shaking his head. Anyone who had been standing nearby when the glass fell would have been studded with shrapnel.

Indoors, onlookers scanned the shards for blood, expressed relief at its absence. Outdoors, workers in sturdy boots walked around oblivious of the dangers underfoot.

It could have been a disaster--it certainly sounded like one. But instead it was a bit of terror and shock intruding into our lunch hour before we walked back into our ordinary lives, relieved that today we would not be a part of a story on the evening news. Another day, another near-death experience. Ho-hum.

But the beat goes on:

Bless this mess, this glass that passed

so close--but missed! I must insist:

let's raise a glass and wrest a gloss

from this distress. (The shards got tossed.)

Now who wants to try turning an unexpected interruption into a smash hit?

Bumper sticker befuddlement

I'm getting too old for this, I tell myself, though it's hard to define what this refers to. I'm definitely getting too old to decipher bumper stickers on passing cars, but if I'm so close that I can easily read the words but still can't fathom what they're trying to say, that's a different kind of problem. 

I understand what it means when a pickup truck the size of Nebraska has its backside plastered with the American flag with assault rifles replacing the stripes, and I know what it means when a vanity license plate spelling BEHEMOTH is attached to an SUV so bit it makes me wonder why no auto-makers have manufactured a car by that name. These signs communicate very clearly: I'm a big tough dude who may well be armed--stay out of my way. I am happy to oblige, and kudos for spelling behemoth correctly, but do you know how to pronounce it? 

But then I stand staring at a tiny colorful car sporting a pink bumper sticker that says I got a lobotomy at Claire's, which I kind of understand because the relentless pink glitteriness of Claire's boutiques could make anyone over the age of 12 feel lobotomized, but apparently there's a whole pop-culture thing about getting a lobotomy at Claire's, an online rabbit hole I don't intend to descend.

I'm definitely getting too old for some of the pop-culture references I encounter while out in public, but often I can't even tell if a bit of text is gesturing toward pop culture or simply being silly. We need more zombie baseball: pop culture reference or random words on a bumper sticker? If someone will explain to me what zombie baseball is, I can make an informed decision about whether we need more of it.

I need less confusion in my life and fewer opportunities for annoyance over inept advertising, an epidemic I can't seem to avoid. My ears hurt every time I hear a local radio ad telling me that electronic bikes has raised the bar, but at least the problem is easy to identify: somebody  (copywriter, editor, ad manager, business owner, whatever) can't grasp the concept of subject/verb agreement. I get that, though I worry about how all those people could hear they has without grimacing. 

What I don't get is how a whole host of people could have approved a radio ad for a local flooring company that keeps telling me We want you to be where your feet are. Grammatically correct, yes, but what does it mean? I generally am where my feet are because it was my feet that got me there, and if there's a way for me to be where my feet aren't--short of amputation--I'd like to hear about it. 

Or maybe they want me to lie on the ground hugging my feet? Assuming the fetal position is unlikely to put me in the proper frame of mind to buy flooring--or anything else. I'd like to let my feet take me to whoever wrote that ad and ask a simple question: What were you thinking?

But then maybe I'm overthinking it. Maybe it's just noise intended to get attention or gesture toward some outside reference without making meaning at all. And that, I think, is what I'm getting too old for: maneuvering through a world where the gap between word and meaning sometimes seems unbridgeable.

Antidotes for summer panic

Of course it's ridiculous to suffer a midsummer panic attack when summer hasn't, technically, even started yet, but the academic calendar skews everything so that June is my only real month off all year, though it's not entirely off because I have to attend webinars (yuck) and preside at meetings to plan events funded by the grant I'm administering, a task that will double in size in July, when I will also have to plan orientation for incoming faculty (and yes, I'm glad we have a few new hires this fall, since last year I planned the entire all-day event for exactly one new faculty member) while also preparing syllabi for two or, possibly, three classes, one of which I'm completely rejiggering, and the word possibly back there is another reason I'm a little stressed out since, for reasons I can't disclose, I won't know for another couple of weeks whether I'll teach that third (very important) class and I refuse to start working on fall syllabi until I know exactly what I'm teaching, so July will be crammed full and then we'll plunge into the deep end--August, when everything starts up again.

No wonder I'm panicking! Here we are in the middle of June and what have I accomplished? I've written an essay that felt like excellent therapy but will probably never be published, and I've chaired a couple of meetings, and I've worked on publicity about the grant, and I've driven my son to Columbus for chemotherapy and to Belpre for blood tests and a transfusion, and yes, I'm troubled that he needed two blood transfusions in one week and feels really awful after the most recent round of chemo, so I walk around with a solid little lump of concern sitting on top of my brain every single minute of the day, which makes it hard to think about more important things--but is there really anything more important right now than my son's health?

I've been seeking distractions so I won't think so much about what I can't control, but then I played this online game so much that it hurt my wrist and shoulder so I had to delete it from my phone, and then I started reading too much, taking up Middlemarch again, not only because I felt I needed to do it justice after ragging on it last week but also to try to resolve a question that was puzzling me: did I miss an important element of Casaubon's character? The question arose when a friend referred to Casaubon as a conchologist and I thought wait a minute, I don't remember that, so I had to go and read the whole stinking novel (which is really delightful and funnier than I'd remembered but not, I insist, the greatest of all time) and there it is, in chapter 30, when Casaubon is recovering from his illness and Mr. Brooke advises him to eschew scholarship and take up a more relaxing pursuit, a passage well worth reading simply for the contrasting voices:

"Yes, yes," said Mr. Brooke. "Get Dorothea to play backgammon with you in the evenings. And shuttlecock, now--I don't know a finer game than shuttlecock for the daytime. I remember it all the fashion. To be sure, your eyes might not stand that, Casaubon. But you must unbend, you know. Why, you might take to some light study; conchology, now: I always think that must be a light study. Or get Dorothea to read you light things, Smollett--'Roderick Random,' 'Humphry Clinker'; they are a little broad, but she may read anything now she's married, you know. I remember they made me laugh uncommonly--there's a droll bit about a postilion's breeches. We have so little humor now. I have gone through all these things, but they might be rather new to you."

"As new as eating thistles," would have been an answer to represent Mr. Casaubon's feelings. But he only bowed resignedly, with due respect to his wife's uncle, and observed that doubtless the works he mentioned had "served as a resource to a certain order of minds."

You must unbend, I tell myself, echoing Mr. Brooke, but I certainly don't intend to take up the "light study" of conchology. Maybe I just need to read less.

And so I did. At the suggestion of another friend, I read Less, a novel by Andrew Sean Greer that neatly rebuts Mr. Brooke's claim that "We have so little humor now." You want humor? Read Less!  Middlemarch is funny (sometimes) but it takes a week to read, provided that you're not devoting any time to, for instance, having a job, but a quick reader can breeze through Less in a lazy June afternoon. I don't know how to describe the plot without evoking Homer and James Joyce and Jack Kerouac and, especially, Dante, which would make the book sound stuffy and scholarly, two things it most decidedly isn't, even though the main character, Arthur Less, finds himself in a dark wood on the eve of midlife and proceeds through various circles of travel hell. It's just a very funny account of a man running away from one problem and straight into a series of new ones while being stripped of everything that makes his life meaningful. Okay, that doesn't sound funny either, but trust me: it is a total hoot, with some marvelous moments of insight as well as a neat twist at the end. Just what I needed right now.

And so was this: "The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech," an online rant by Brian Phillips, who provides his list as a sort of addendum to the Pope's encyclical regarding technology. I suspect that every reader will find something familiar among Phillips's 40 problems, like the one concerning online tracking of packages:

Welcome to Schrodinger's UPS Vortex, the quantum rift within which your box is on a truck passing through Memphis, in a warehouse in Topeka, or on the outer rim of the galaxy, where it's being worshipped as a god by a species of semi-intelligent space protozoa. 

Or this one concerning the difficulty of finding helpful information in an emergency: 

I am in a hurricane. My house is in a swimming pool, and the swimming pool is in a tree. Emergency services are, for reasons I am not presently at leisure to explore, posting vital safety updates on X. When I try to read the relevant thread, the app tells me I can't do it unless I create an account, something I would gladly do if a Kia Sorrento were not flying at my face. I shall die peacefully here in my swimming-pool tree, knowing that at least i never had to talk to Grok.

Phillips ends his amusing rant with a mini-sermon aimed at tech billionaires, reminding them that "There are things in the world that are more important than money"--which, come to think of it, is an important principle underlying the plot of both Middlemarch and Less. All funny, and all effective at distracting from a midsummer panic attack in the middle of June.

But eek--where is the summer going?

Friday poetry challenge: It takes a village (idiot)

So I'm driving home from Aldi where I've witnessed three random acts of kindness in a single shopping trip and I'm filled with a warm sense of appreciation for the community of Aldi shoppers, and I'm on a stretch of twisty country road that runs past a property formerly owned by a con man who tried to bilk our community out of piles of money through a complex scheme thwarted by a few random locals with the courage to open their mouths--so yes, I'm feeling good about the power of ordinary people to keep their community safe and happy, when suddenly there's this kid riding a scooter in the road right in front of my car.

I'm not talking about a Vespa; I'm talking about a glorified skateboard with handlebars, a flimsy thing that this kid, who looks to be about 12 years old, is zipping and weaving and swerving around on right in the middle of my lane with no helmet or knee pads or any other kind of protection. I come around a curve and there he is, but he must have heard me coming because he quickly swerves into the other lane to get out of my way. Right: he's riding a foot-powered vehicle that clearly isn't roadworthy straight into oncoming traffic--if there's anything coming around the next curve, he's toast. Why not steer his scooter to a safer place, like, for instance, off the road?

I barely have time to think all this before I'm past him and rounding the next curve and relieved to see that no cars are coming, and I look in the rear-view mirror to see that Scooter Boy has swerved back into my lane, which is the right lane for motorized vehicles but not for helmetless boys on scooters. Someone needs to teach that kid a lesson, I tell myself, and suddenly I hear my dad yelling at a bike-rider who crossed (in a crosswalk! in a school zone!) in front of his car: It'd serve you right if someone ran you over! 

And I don't want to be the cranky old person who yells at random strangers, but I also don't want to be the benevolent old person who drives blithely around a blind curve and flattens a kid on a scooter. I can see why that stretch of road would be appealing to a scooter-rider, with all the curves and hills offering opportunities for daredevil jumps and spins, but that one-mile stretch of road serves as a shortcut between the interstate and a busy highway. It gets traffic! Someone could get killed! Someone needs to teach that kid a lesson! But there's nowhere to pull over and even if I did, what would I say to the kid--and why would he listen to me?

So I drive on home, hoping that the kid has a mom or aunt or nosy neighbor nearby who will witness his shenanigans and give him a good talking-to. It takes a village to raise a child, but unless he's auditioning for the role of Village Idiot, he needs to get his scooter off the road. 

I'm tempted to leave him a note in the style of William Carlos Williams:

This is Just To Say

I have driven
my car
past your
scooter

which you
were probably
proud to be
riding so well

Forgive me
for not stopping
(you stopped
my heart cold)

Try yelling that message! Or better yet, trying putting some unsolicited advice into verse form for the benefit of various Village Idiots.

And then we'll rank the lists of the greatest lists of lists

I'll bet I'm not the only English professor on the planet who has been asked recently--usually by people who have never read George Eliot--whether Middlemarch is the greatest novel ever written.  

I'm not remotely qualified to determine whether Middlemarch is the greatest novel ever written because I haven't read every novel ever written, but since it's summer break and there is literally nothing at stake, I'm going to go ahead and offer my unqualified answer: No. 

Now don't go hating on me already. I like Middlemarch; I've read it several times and I'll no doubt read it again; but not only do I not believe it's the greatest novel ever written, but I'm not convinced that it's the greatest novel about an intelligent woman who makes unfortunate choices. I would far rather read, for instance, Portrait of a Lady (Henry James) or Howards End (E.M. Forster) or The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton). 

Then again, it all depends on what you mean by greatest. There's a difference between an engaging novel and an important novel, a diverting novel and an influential novel. The categories may overlap, but still, there's a reason that many of the people asking me the question haven't ever bothered to read Middlemarch. It starts slowly, for one thing; the opening chapter doesn't provide a sufficient taste of the pleasures that await.

The question arises, of course, in response to the list of 100 greatest novels in English published last month in The Guardian (click here for full list), which surveyed 170 authors, critics, and academics to come up with the definitive list, which aroused so much discussion that they then assembled a second list of 100 best novels drawn from the votes of more than 3000 readers (click here for the readers' choices). 

There is some overlap; Middlemarch appears on both lists, but the readers placed it at number 2, after Lord of the Rings. I'm pleased to see that the readers' choice list elevates Joseph Heller's Catch-22 from number 99 to number 8, just one indication that the readers placed a higher premium on comedy than did the academics. 

I had a feeling that I'd read most of the books on both lists, but then I counted. On the academics' list, I started at number 1 and didn't hit a novel I hadn't read until number 42: Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, which I tried to read--twice!--but gave up halfway through because I couldn't stand to spend another moment amongst all those whiny people. Reading a book halfway through twice is not at all equivalent to reading it all the way through once. It's the only book that appeared on my PhD comprehensive exam reading list that I never actually finished, not that it's ever made any noticeable difference in my career or life.

After I stumbled on number 42, I found another 16 books on the list that I either haven't read or else have retained no memory of reading. The Leopard? The Golden Notebook? No idea. I am ashamed to admit that I've never read The Master and the Margarita, but there's still time. I'm not sure there's time to slog through more than 1000 pages of The Man Without Qualities, but then again I've read In Search of Lost Time repeatedly without complaining about the length, so no excuses!

On the readers' choice list, I start running into trouble around number 30. I've never read Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible, or if I did, I don't remember. I've never, believe it or not, read Watership Down, or Lonesome Dove, or The Outsider. All told, I've overlooked something like 23 titles on the readers' choice list, but I had trouble keeping count because I kept getting distracted by the titles on the list that I regret having read.

Hemingway? He wrote some nearly perfect short stories--"The Snows of Kilimanjaro," "Indian Camp," and others--but his novels leave me cold. 

Jack Kerouac? The prose in On the Road might carry me away, but the casual acceptance of domestic abuse in Big Sur left a bad taste in my mouth that tainted my every encounter with Kerouac.

Dune? Please, no. Impressive world-building, depressing sentence-building.

Despite my disdain, these novels got enough votes from readers to put them on the list of the 100 greatest. But again: what do we mean by greatest? The voters, whoever they are, may believe they're relying on objective criteria, but we're all human. By any rational measure, Middlemarch is an important, influential, even ground-breaking novel--but I'd rather read Edith Wharton.

The House of Mirth doesn't even appear on the critics' list, but Wharton's Age of Innocence is number 38. Wharton appears nowhere on the readers' choice list. No accounting for taste!

I wouldn't put Wharton at number 1, but I don't know which novel belongs there. Every title I choose makes me feel guilty about all the ones I'm neglecting. 

On the original list, you can click on a link to see the list of authors, critics, and academics and how they voted, which is pretty interesting. Both Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan rank Ulysses as the greatest novel ever written, but I could happily put Midnight's Children or Atonement in that spot if it didn't require shoving Pride and Prejudice and Moby Dick out of the way. Michael Chabon put Moby Dick first and so did Stephen King, who warmed my heart by including McTeague at number 10. Jennifer Egan put Middlemarch first but included The House of Mirth at number 10.

The more lists I read, the more novels I want to put in first place, or else make up different lists for different types of greatness. One of these days we can make a list of the top 100 lists of top 100 greatest novels. It might be the size of a library's card catalog, but what a wonderful invitation into the joys of reading.

Readers: what's on your list--and what isn't?

Mystery of the dying maple

It's a little disconcerting to park my car next to a maple tree in rapid decline. Last year about half of the limbs looked dead, but this year very few limbs have any leaves at all. 

Why? Your guess is as good as mine. Dig down in that part of the yard and you'll find a thick layer of gravel a few inches beneath the surface, and many things we've planted out there have failed to thrive. The maple was here before we moved in and looked okay for many years. A dogwood we planted seems to be thriving, but the Japanese maple nearby has a few leafless limbs. We've taken some dead limbs off the big maple but at some point the whole tree needs to come down.

Which is a shame because it's an ideal staging space for birds visiting our feeders. This morning I watched an adult red-bellied woodpecker grab a seed from the feeder and then fly back to feed a juvenile waiting in the tree. The dearth of foliage makes it easy to observe birds' social behavior: cardinals fighting for territory, male cowbirds putting on a courtship display for a female, and, this morning, two house finches having an encounter I couldn't quite interpret.

Taking out the sickly maple will provide more sunshine for the dogwood, but I'll miss that tree when it's gone. Is it a mistake to get so attached to particular trees? That maple seems like a permanent fixture of the landscape, but a tree that stands tall today may well start dropping limbs in the next windstorm.  

Just not on my car, okay? 

Cowbirds vying for the attention of a female.

Wish I knew what they were thinking.

Same tree, different branches.

Dead limb between two still living.

A model of sharing.

Friday poetry challenge: Mulling over mullein

Is it pathetic to admit that some days the thing I look forward to more than anything is a particular patch of weeds growing beside the highway on my drive home from work?

After a day involving too much administrative claptrap, a long but productive meeting, and an infuriating encounter with a person whose idea of an apology is "I'm sorry you feel that way," I was driving home wanting to punch someone when I passed a mullein patch and saw that the weeds had started blooming.

Elsewhere mullein may be a medicinal plant cultivated for its power to attract pollinators, but around here it's considered a weed that flourishes accidentally in sunny spots that the highway mowers can't reach. A volunteer promoting health, attracting pollinators, and providing beauty--what's not to love?

I know the spots along my commute where mullein grows best and I look forward to the blooms every summer, my eyes searching the shoulder for yellow when they ought to be fixed on the road. Yesterday my husband and I were on our way home when I pointed out a cluster of blooming mullein, maybe six or eight plants in all, and he said, "We've got more than that growing just uphill from the house."

Well I didn't know that because my bum knee has been resisting hilly walks, but it's feeling significantly better after a cortisone shot so when we got home I walked right up the hill to the spot in question. A few years ago we'd had a massive dying tree cut down there, a process that had obliterated the few mullein stalks growing nearby--temporarily. Bringing more sunshine into the area has resulted in a mullein boom--close to 20 stalks rising up and starting to bloom.

One definition of weed is a plant to which we say We'd prefer your absence, but I'm not complaining about a bumper crop of mullein bringing beauty into my back yard. They make me want to squeeze out some doggerel, but what rhymes with mullein?

I can't be sullen
around a mullein.

Its fuzzy leaves
are never dull. In

woods where there's
rarely a lull in

songs of birds,
where trees are fallen,

just uphill from
a creek that's swollen,

I can't be sullen
around a mullein.
  

So okay, it's weedy but at least I tried. Who else will give it a shot? 

Making the strings visible: Things My Grandmother Said by Amit Majmudar

"Every kite forgets its string," writes Amit Majmudar, but the poet has not forgotten the strings that tie him to the women in his life--grandmother, mother, wife, friends, and others who feature in his new collection, Things My Grandmother Said. The kite line comes from the title poem, full of pithy aphorisms expressed in a voice so familiar it could belong to anyone's grandmother:

I wasn't crying, I was dicing onions
in a memory in Ahmedabad.

Sure, the Ganges is holy
but who told you to drink from it?

                                Love
should be diving board, marriage
should be lap swim.

I like that old lady! I've written before about how skillfully Majmudar plays with voice, language, poetic forms, and images, but in this collection I was frequently struck by line breaks. In the title poem, for instance, the grandmother says this:

This girl is perfect for you, I know
her aunt.

Look at how the line break shifts the function of "I know": in the first line, it indicates a confidence in the girl's perfection; but "I know / her aunt" suggests that the girl's perfection is contingent upon her connections. 

Or take a look at the ambiguity encouraged by the second line break below: 

What does it mean when the white
man trying to enter me
in a database asks
Sweetie, aren't you hot
under all that
cloth?

These lines appear in "The Migration Diary of Hala Almasi," a long poem dealing with various violations of women's privacy, rights, and bodies. In this context, a man's trying to "enter me" suggests physical violence--but "enter me / in a database" leads to a different type of violence as the veiled migrant from Kabul gets squeezed into a little box on a computer screen. The final stanza plays with permutations of a common phrase to convey the many ways a woman may be denied agency:

The woman undergoes
the marriage. The woman goes under
the man's last name. The woman goes under
the man. The woman undergoes
the parting of the seas so the man
with the staff can enter
her promised land. The woman undergoes
the miscarriage. The woman undergoes
the man's war. The men say they promised
the women nothing. The country
goes under. The men put
the women on a raft and say:
Go. So we go. Some across, some
Under.

Another poem dealing with a woman's pain, "Regeneration," describes a traumatic brain injury:

You shaped and smashed
Your brainstuff flat
On all the scattered
Bits of matter
Gray and white
To piece your anguish
Into language
And write.

"To piece your anguish / Into language" is an apt description of the poet's purpose, especially in a world where, as "Meteorology" insists, humanity seems 

Trapped in chaos
country during
chaos season. 

"Meteorology" wonders whether the butterfly's flapping wing can affect distant weather or chance encounters can change a life:

One summer day
you see a face
in a coffee shop
and chaos pulls
a fire alarm
deep inside you.  

That fire alarm rings in other poems presenting novel images for human connections. "Recourse," for instance, is a lovely sonnet corona dealing with love, time, change, and constancy, in which the ties that bind may be benign or menacing:

I want to weave a crown for you, design
a daisy chain whose threaded stems become
a bracelet that handcuffs your wrist to mine...

And in "Remote Work," a poem decrying the isolation of the perpetually online,

We are kites without strings, strings
desperate to be strummed ...

But how can strings be strummed over the distance imposed by technology? 

Another poem, "School of Witchcraft and Wizadry," recalls the loneliness of a schoolboy who feels isolated until someone sees through his invisibility cloak:

One friend is all it takes,
one person to rhyme with the mysterious
magical word you always were.
Together, you're a spell now,
conjuring happiness
with a wand
no bigger than a No. 2 pencil....

A pencil may be a magic wand in a world where anguish becomes language. Among the poems celebrating connections among friends, relatives, lovers, and others, poems exploring grandmother's words, mother love, and Mother Earth, Majmudar concludes the collection by asserting that "We Are All God's Poems":

We are all first drafts, shy in public
and rhythmically iffy. We are all
orphan lines yearning to become
couplets, willing to rhyme slant
if that means we don't have to be alone.

In a volume full of love that survives beyond loss, Majmudar invites us, in "Cat's Cradle," to recall

how beautiful and necessary beings
who give you love can take their love
but keep on cradling you, unseen  ...

Yes, the kite may forget its string, but that doesn't erase the unseen strings that are strummed so potently in Things My Grandmother Said.