externalizing the inner monologue

All spring, every weekend has been raining or has just finished raining prior, meaning mountainbiking is a no-no.
(You see, riding muddy trails is a faux pas, because it messes up the trail.)

This weekend--and the two days prior--promise to be beautiful.

And I have to be locked in my study, chained to my desk, cranking out papers about women's voices in the renaissance and sexual liminality in Carson McCullers.

Grrr.

These are the books I read in 2008. My 2007 list is here.]

1. Secret Society Girl by Diana Peterfreund
2. Which Brings Me to You: A Novel in Confessions by Steve Almond and Juliana Baggott
3. The Myth of You and Me, Leah Stewart
4. Girl Talk, Juliana Baggott
5. My Life in Heavy Metal, Steve Almond
6. Craftsman Style, Robert Winter
7. Portable Kisses, Tess Gallagher
8. The 158-Pound Marriage, John Irving
9. Creative Sparks, Jim Krause
10. Body Surfing, Anita Shreve
11. The Silent Strength of Stones, Nina Kiriki Hoffman
12. Found Style, David Butler
13. Neither Here Nor There, Bill Bryson
14. It Ain’t All About the Cookin’, Paula Deen
15. An Arsonists Guide to Writers Homes in New England, Brock Clarke
16. The Nanny Diaries, Emma Mclaughlin
17. Master Pieces, Thomas Hoving
18. My Secret: A Postsecret Book, Frank Warren
19. From Dead to Worse, Charlaine Harris
20. Cherry, Mary Karr
21. Blood Noir, Laurel K. Hamilton
22. Working Stiff, Grant Stoddard
23. Dead Over Heels, Mary Janice Davidson
24. Strangers in Paradise: Love Me Tender, Terry Moore
25. Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl
26. Myth-Told Tales, Robert Asprin and Jody Lynn Nye
27. Possession, A.S. Byatt
28. Strangers in Paradise: Immortal, Terry Moore
29. Strangers in Paradise: High School, Terry Moore
30. The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch, Neil Gaiman and Michael Zulli
31. Rites of Spring (Break), Diana Peterfreund
32. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
33. The Pirates! in an Adventure with the Scientists, Gideon Defoe
34. My Summer of Summer Discomfort, Stephanie Gayle
35. Twilight, Stephenie Meyer
36. New Moon, Stephenie Meyer
37. The Book of Luke, Jenny O'Connell
38. Eclipse, Stephenie Meyer
39. Darker Shade of Crimson, Pamela Thomas-Graham
40. Love Letters: An Anthology of Passion, Michelle Lovric
41. Holga: The World Through a Plastic Lens, Adam Scott
42. Blue Blood, Pamela Thomas-Graham
43. Invitation Only, Kate Brian
44. Breaking Dawn, Stephenie Meyer
45. It Happened in Boston?, Russell H. Greenan
46. Orange Crushed, Pamela Thomas-Graham
47. The Fermata, Nicholson Baker
48. The Princeton Papers, Ann Waldron
49. The Sterling Huck Letters, Sterling Huck
50. Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson
51. Utopia, Thomas More
52. The Cambridge Companion to Edmund Spenser, edited by Andrew Hadfield
53. The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, Edmund Spenser
54. Spenser: The Faerie Queene, Edmind Spenser [ed. by AC Hamilton]
55. Practicing New Historicism, Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher
56. The Norton Anthology of Modern Critical Theory
57. Death of a Princeton President, Ann Waldron
58. The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman
59. A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
60. The Friend, Alan Bray
61. Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities, Jonathan Goldberg
62. Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg
63. On What Grounds, Cleo Coyle
64. Cherry Bomb, Carrie Borzillo-Vrenna
65. The Virginia Companion, The Dresden Dolls [Amanda Palmer and Brian Viglione]
66. Tolstoy Lied, Rachel Kadish
67. A View of the State of Ireland, Edmund Spenser
68. An Apology for Poetry, Sir Philip Sidney
69. The Westing Game, Charlotte Jaffe
70. The Plain Janes, Cecil Castellucci
71. The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot
72. Sex in the South, Suzi Parker
73. Early Modern English Poetry, ed. Patrick Cheney
74. Homosexuality in Renaissance England, Alan Bray
75. Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England, Bruce R. Smith
76. Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Stephen Greenblatt
77. Homoerotic Space, Stephen Guy-Bray
78. Sexuality and Citizenship, Jim Ellis
79. What is Pastoral?, Paul Alpers
80. Pastoral and Ideology, Annabel Patterson
81. Impersonations, Steven Orgel
82. A History of Gay Literature, Gregory Woods
83. Making Sex, Thomas Lacquer
84. Janes in Love, Cecil Castellucci
85. Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Rachel Cohn and David Leviathan
86. The Stupidest Angel, Christopher Moore
87. Swallowing Darkness, Laurel K. Hamilton

To do list for this weekend:

go to Chattanooga to see Shane
take glass to recycling center
buy measuring cups at Williams Sonoma
read 26 books for a research project on homoeroticism in Spenser's work
go to Milan, TN [pronounced MY-lun] to meet Adam
finish The Graveyard Book
go to Bell Buckle for the annual Webb Craft Fair
sleep. maybe.

I am alive.

But blogging has fallen way down on my list of things to do. Work has exploded--which is good, mind you, because I pulled in over $24,000 in business this week--but work topped with the two classes I am taking this semester and trying to make time to, like, see my boyfriend, on top of normal stuff like cleaning the house and buying cat food and sweeping fallen leaves out of the driveway, and, well, I'm just busy. 

My classes, by the way, are awesome--who knew I would fall in love with Edmund Spenser, but here I am, adoring his poems after I've squinted at them and read them aloud and finally figured out what they mean. I also adore my professor Dr. Hollings--she is just...charming. She's brilliant, and has such a vast store of knowledge in her tiny head, and I love how excited she gets over what she is teaching. It's fantastic. I could just eat her with a spoon.

Anyway, so yeah. Just explaining my absence. Any time I spend not working is time I could be reading for class, and the reading is freaking thick, not just in page counts but in magnitude and coherence. I can't just read while something else is going on--I have to read the work, make notes as I go, and sometimes re-read it to get the point. Which is humbling for me, because this is the first time I've ever struggled like this. But after Marx's Capital, Communist Manifesto, Poulet's Phenomenology of Reading, and Spenser's The Shepheares Calendar, well... my brain feels thick like porridge.

So, maybe I can find time to blog again around, oh, December.

The instructions:

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl [sourdough bowl? but...why?]
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth $120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian [I SO want to try durian!]
66. Frog’s Legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings or andouillette [i've had the chance, but haven't tried them... yet.]
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong [anyone know where to get some?]
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor [lobster tastes like vomit]
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Movies I've seen recently and how I felt about them:

1408: Holy fucking hell, it was good. And scared the bejeesus out of me. But then I am a weenie about scary movies.

Superbad: Not as superly bad as I expected. I was only hoodwinked into this because Todd & I recently finished Freaks and Geeks and I really loved it [not enjoyed, mind you--it was acutely painful to watch, but it was good, and totally nailed how awkward high school felt]. Prior to that I HATED all Judd Apatow nonsense I had tried to watch.

Chasing Holden: Such promise, and I adore DJ Qualls, but it fell flat, flat, flat.

Revolver: What. The. Fucking. Hell. Stylistically shot, and I'd watch both Jason Statham and Andre 3000 do their laundry, but fuck it all, have a fucking ending to the movie already. It was like Fight Club, Smoking Aces, and Searching for Bobby Fisher had a bastard love child. And it was not a healthy child.

Smart People: The sad tragedy of intellectual snobbery, yet not done as well or as entertainingly as Wonder Boys.

Lost Boys II: The Tribe: I expected it to be truly, awfully, horribly, terribly, delightfully bad. It delivered on all counts except the delightful part.

So, I own a house. Which is cool. It's a cute little house in East Nashville. It keeps me warm, or cool [seasonally depending]. It keeps me dry.

It also keeps me on my toes, because there is a seemingly neverending list of stuff I want to do to it.

Such as:
•Paint livingroom; one wall will be chalkboard paint to encourage creative doodling
•Paint the boys' bathroom and put up wainscoting with chair rail
•New bathroom curtains or both bathrooms
•Kitchen curtain over tiny kitchen window
•Re-waterseal the deck [weather being supremely uncooperative]
•Put up different shelves in laundry room, and more of them
•Paint laundry room to make it purty
•Get shutters for windows
•Paint front door, install kickplate
•Get better house numbers for house that are actually, like, visible
•Build two large planters to place in front of wall in front of house
•Install trellises for ivy to climb
•build a fence around the backyard
•build a sidewalk from the front to the back with recessed brick
•Replace carpet in livingroom and linoleum in kitchen with hardwood floors
•Screen in back deck

Needless to say, I am going to be busy.

A Saturday night, at home, house to myself; a stack of books, a pot of tea steeping, a fluffy kitty curled up on my pillow. A candle burns, filling the air with the scent of roses, and honestly, right now, things couldn't be more perfect.

Sometimes I get poems stuc in my head, like I would get a song stuck. A line or two, a particular cadence... whatever it is, it just echoes back and forth through my brain until it's done with me.

Today it's "Mending Wall" by Robert Frost:

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

I love that line... "something there is that doesn't love a wall, that wants it down". It always reminds me of my friend Rob, the first person to introduce me to the poem, and makes me wonder what he's up to now.