Erika Writes:
If this were Caturday, I might be writing something about being pinned down by cats and discussing with them why our 30 Days, 30 Poems selections have not yet included any poems about cats. Especially when there are so many excellent poems about cats. But it’s not Caturday. Regardless, I’m still pinned down by cats, and deeply engaged in reading poetry. Again. This scene has become so common over the last two years. I’ve certainly grown to appreciate a lot of poetry I didn’t necessarily enjoy before. I can’t say that the cats are any more appreciative of poetry than they were before.
Coleridge
I am of course reading more poetry than usual as I go through the selections for 30 Days, 30 Poems. This week I’ve read Samuel Taylor Coleridge–never a favorite of mine as a student, and still not a poet whose work I’d reach for first. But I did have some goals in mind when I came up with the idea for 30 Days, 30 Poems, One of them was to make myself reach beyond the most well known works of familiar poets, to those whose work I am less familiar with or whose work I don’t particularly like.
As someone who writes poetry (I’m not ready to call myself a poet) there are things I can learn from reading more deeply into those works, and perhaps I’ll discover something I didn’t see before. And so instead of Kubla Khan or Rime of the Ancient Mariner, I chose “This Lime Tree Bower My Prison.” The poem is about how Coleridge’s friends are going on a hike without him. Somewhere he has been before. And Coleridge, due to injury, can’t go with them. But he can go with them in his mind. As I’ve become more disabled, the feelings that Coleridge expresses in this poem are definitely ones I’ve experienced. And while it hasn’t changed my overall feelings on Coleridge, I did enjoy reading the poem in a way that I hadn’t before.
Alok Vaid-Manon
I’ve been reading Alok Vaid-Manon this week, too. Most people aren’t familiar with their work. I have no idea where I first heard their work–it was a while ago, but it’s always been on the periphery of what I’ve been reading. I was feeling drawn to it this week after writing a piece called Why We Need to “Flaunt” It. Composing the piece had me spending a lot of time thinking about the faces we present to the public and what it means to represent an identity. We featured The Loneliness of Being Yourself as part of our poetry celebration but I found myself hyperventilating after watching the performance of Trans/Generation. Truly some incredible feelings.
Too Bright to See by Kyle Lukoff
I also participated in Banned Book Challenge this week, too, and read Kyle Lukoff’s Too Bright to See for the challenge. Big Cat and Little Cat hung out with me while I read. It’s a story about gender, ghosts, and self-discovery and has been a book I enjoyed every time I’ve read it. I’m very excited for the next book from Kyle Lukoff to come out, too.
I know I mentioned Bridgerton a while ago, but I’ve been saving the new season. Managing my energy is such a delicate balance sometimes, and I know I’ve got a project ahead of me that will leave me requiring some serious downtime after. Probably several days of mostly rest and not much else. Recovering will be a great opportunity to binge on the new season of Bridgerton. I’ve enjoyed a few other things in the meantime.
Big Mouth and Human Resources
The creators of Big Mouth have a new show, Human Resources, which I’ve enjoyed. It’s interesting to see how expansive the universe of anthropomorphized human emotions is, and how they interact with each other, but also to see how the creators of Big Mouth have gone beyond middle school and addressed things like marriage, parenthood and grief through these creatures. I wouldn’t have expected to cry at the end of one episode, nor would I have expected one storyline about contraception and pregnancy either. I also had fun with Is It Cake? Sculpture, cake, and competition that had no malice. It was fun and full of positive energy, which has been lacking in my life lately.
The Adam Project
I watched The Adam Project last night, too. Ryan Reynolds and Mark Ruffalo in one movie? That alone might be enough to make me watch it. But I often like a good time travel story, and I liked the way this one used the canonical butterfly effect storyline that time travel stories have to address. It was a nice distraction on a night when my mind was trying to take me elsewhere, to much darker places.
Because of that darkness, I’ve really leaned on music this week. In my Facebook memories today, I found one of the earliest skirmishes in the Viola Wars. Apparently we were discussing triple meter and I mentioned Telemann’s Gulliver Suite. A composer I love, but not necessarily my favorite piece. I even put some Schubert (not a favorite of mine) into my argument. I’ve been really listening to the Bach Inventions this week though. Probably the last thing I played on piano before I couldn’t play anymore and something that makes me feel very safe.
Queer Music Week
In some ways it’s been a very queer week here, though, as music goes. I’ve been listening to the soundtrack from Legally Blonde after the “gay or European” stereotype came up the other night, and Adam reminded me about this song:
But truly, all week, I’ve had Cosmo Jarvis’s “Gay Pirates” which is sweet and sad and full of love. And I’m pretty sure it’s about Sebastian and Antonio in Twelfth Night, too. Alas, poor Shakespeare. Love is, indeed love. And pirates are sometimes gay.
Adam Writes:
This is my first post since returning home from India. I got in yesterday afternoon. I want to be able to tell you that I have been listening to some of the great Indian music Anuja and I have both shared. Like this collaboration between Norah Jones and Anoushka Shankar.
Norah Jones and Anoushka Shankar
Would you believe I saw Norah Jones in concert when I was 17 but never knew until recently that she was Ravi Shankar’s daughter, and thus the half-sibling of Anoushka Shankar? They sing really well together. And yes. Because I’m writing this. Because I’m reminding myself of what is expected in such a circumstance, I will go back and listen to those pieces. But I haven’t yet. I’ve been too sleepy.
Reading on the Airplane
I always get a sense of wishful thinking when I take the airplane. I used to bring Latin textbooks with me, certain that I would be able to devote hours and hours to study. Or a big fat book that I was sure would be finished by the time we landed. Especially a long trip. From India back to New York was only 20 hours. Only! But if you add in the 3 hours in the airport beforehand, plus packing, plus plus transit to and from the airport. Plus the hour I spent in line at customs in JFK because I didn’t realize there was a separate line for US citizens. Yeah. I know. Dumb. In my defense, JFK is widely recognized as the worst airport in the global north. So I guess I just expected my experience there to be miserable and the expectation became self-fulfilling.
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
I also had trouble getting into a new book, Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell, which I picked up at the airport for the low-low price of 68 Qatari Rial. Okay It’s not that low a price. It’s about 19 dollars. But I was curious. A novel about Shakespeare’s son? Hamnet Shakespeare was the subject of one issue in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. And why not? He is a sadly fascinating case. Hamnet died in 1596 of unknown causes. A few years later, Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, which, Stephen Greenblatt helpfully informs us in the prologue to O’Farrell’s book, is the same name as “Hamnet,” or at least it was in those days of wildly varying spellings and pronunciations. Seriously. You’d be surprised. The last name of Shakespeare’s rival, “Marlowe,” gets rendered: “Marlow,” “Marley,” “Marlon,” and probably others. O to be a dyslexic during that Wild West of naming and spelling.
But yeah. I had this vision that I would be able to spend a good chunk of the flight reading. Reader, I did not. I did get through about 50 pages. But there was something about the writing. Atmospheric. Descriptive. Beautiful. Uneasy. Other circumstances would have had me glued to my seat; my eyes glued to the book. But something about the environment of an aircraft. It’s certainly atmospheric enough already without the seductive prose. And unfortunately, it also made me sufficiently uneasy without all of that.
Managing Expectations
I mention all of this because it’s an interesting case study in what media I want to enjoy versus what I end up actually doing. For years, particularly when I was trying to do the research for my Ph.D., I would self-flagellate on a daily basis because I wasn’t reading enough. Wasn’t writing enough. Wasn’t reading the right things. Part of the reason why Erika and I started this website (and the one we worked on before this) was to provide an antidote to such thinking. Negativity will never get you to read more. It will only provide additional distraction.
Or at most what you can hope for is to turn reading into a chore (as it became one for me during grad school and for a while after). You may be able to read then but you will not read easily or well and you will drain your energy. That is, if your experience is anything like mine.
Schitt’s Creek (Maybe This Time…)
So what I have been doing is rewatching Schitt’s Creek. I’ve seen the show before. Anuja recommended it to me. And when, I was in India, it was our go-to distraction when we wanted to eat quietly, just the two of us. Or when being around our relatives became too much.
I was struck anew while watching the finale to season 5 how excellent is Emily Hampshire’s performance of “Maybe this Time” from Cabaret. There’s a way that she shapes the poetry of the lyrics so that her performance feels completely natural. And yet I find I am waiting for the rhyme to land at the end of each line. And it feels rhythmically sweet when it does. Perfectly natural; perfectly synthetic. It reminds me why the word “artificial” meant something positive (literally meaning ‘fashioned artistically’) in the 16th and 17th centuries. The way you can feel herself psyching herself up; slowly believing her own lies. I found myself starting to believe it as well, in one part of my mind, and furthermore asking myself, then, if everything is really going to be alright, why are so many people crying: Stevie, Moira, David. Oh, and me.
