the problem is that professional success alone doesn't make me happy.







i'd be so lucky if it did.

[...]

I would say that the weather makes me lonely. But I got lonely on Saturday and Sunday, too.

The turn that April's cruelty and general weirdness (particularly in both my academic worlds) have taken is to leave me feeling incredibly fragile, yet still, somehow, unable to tear myself away from, say, Nerve, where I still see D. in the "who's online now!" section almost every day (why can't I block just one person...they should give you that, I think, as long as you don't waste it on garden variety awkwardness, as long as you save it for the person who kind of broke your heart even if you didn't know him that well) and which generates mostly time-consuming dates that don't make me feel better even when they seem to be okay. I really liked the guy from Friday, but he hasn't gotten in touch with me and I'm always the one who seems to like the other person more than they like me, so I don't email him. I spent Thursday night with the Australian and now nothing. I mean, I know he had a friend in town over the weekend and all, but a quick email to make plans, maybe? I sent him a couple sentences last night but it didn't go anywhere. And I'm sure that if I emailed him right at this moment saying I wanted to sleep over tonight, that would happen. But I don't want to have to send that email; it feels like a ploy.

Oh, and my old LiveJournal account got hacked and deleted. Just some other fun thing to make me feel insecure. Seriously, all of this is like being hollowed out, or slashed to shreds with a million papercuts.

And all of this keeps ripping me apart, but I can't stop doing it; it's hard to stay off the internet and I somehow have to get this article rewrite done at an incredibly busy time of the semester and I'm scared and my friends are annoying me but it's not their fault and I wish something here didn't have to be this damn hard.

But of course sometimes it's fine and validating and all that and so much stupid hope. I probably have to break the Nerve habit again soon, though. Two weeks seems to be my limit.

Also

It might just be worth my noting here, for posterity as well as myself, that it is sometimes disturbingly, depressingly easy to have sex in New York if you're a straight girl able to steel yourself to play the game. And it's incredibly hard to find a boyfriend once you realize that's what you want.

In some ways, my problem is likely that I know too much about what it's like to be with too many different people. I have a couple different types and the important parts don't transfer.

Going to try to stop thinking about this right now, though.

What I'd forgotten...

was more or less the affective stress of being on Nerve. There's a certain addiction to it, a not-so-secret narcissistic indulgence. Getting in a loop of clicking to see who's been looking at me, not that I have any intention of meeting most of them, not that I write most people back. Sometimes there's a sense of regret in this, since it's not like I do a particularly good job of picking the people I do end up with--it all feels like a kind of willed randomness sometimes, undermining the sense that I think I'm getting better at all this.

I wasn't on the site long enough in January before I met D. to remember what this was like. It's only this week that the frenzied loops have come back, that I feel my schedule closing up, a kind of running running running and most of the time it never gets past that point. It's not entirely ideal to be doing this during the semester, especially when I have two writing projects on, but to some extent I know this is all related, that there is a necessity here, that this right now is part of the path in some sort of crazy and occasionally sordid way. After the whole thing with D. collapsed, the weekend I spent convinced that I was going to move to St Louis in less than two months, the weird convergence of various academic rockstar stuff, and going back on the site--at some point I feel like my entire sense of identity broke open and suddenly I'm asking myself questions about who I am, who I want to be with--basic things that I more or less try to ignore are suddenly pressing on me with a kind of urgency, and the thing that I realized about Nerve this weekend is that this is part of it, that I'm more or less trying out different identities in conflict with different people, trying to figure out who I want to be, trying to articulate some kind of sense of who I am--not so much in the sense that I have to be with someone to be anyone but more in the sense that being with different people helps me work out where I can find myself.

I'm not sure that makes any sense. But, then again, I'm not sure what I'm doing makes any sense. Not internet dating per se as much as the weird extremes my dating life in general seems to swing to, where I can go from The Poet to D. and learn what I gain and what I give up--and the truth is, I haven't decided yet, would like not have to decide, who I'm going to be. Suffice it to say there's a very big difference from being the 28-year-old woman with the 57-year-old man and being the 28-year-old chick with the 34-year-old guy and that some of these differences are irreconcilable. (Though this may help explain why I'm most comfortable with guys who are in their early 40s, even though this may also end up being a less happy medium.)

There are things about all this that I can only say elliptically. This is largely an attempt to empty out my own head, but keep the specifics to myself, the idea being to focus on a proposal related to my MLA panel tomorrow and so on. So I went out on dates Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. The dude from Friday night was like many of the dates I remember from before. Very cute (in a kind of hipsterish, of course you live in Bushwick kind of way) with a lot in common with me on paper. We had a perfectly cordial and chemistry-less conversation over drinks and dinner, went our separate ways on the subway.

The guy I went out with on Thursday was in his mid-40s, runs a for-profit cultural organization out of his apartment. He's tall, big, kind of goofy-looking (think a more fit version of Jack Black, perhaps), and exactly as brash and unapologetic as you'd think a guy like this would be if he were also Australian. (As a result of this last thing, though, it's possible that I'd be willing to talk on the phone with him forever.) He was a little intense when I first met him, but we had a good time together. He turned out to be really nice. But not in that pushover nice-guy way. More in the way that The Poet is nice. Like, kind. I wasn't sure what to do with it all immediately afterwards. There were some complications, as there always are. But I found myself thinking about him (well, when I wasn't thinking about D. or The Poet) for a lot of the rest of the weekend. I sort of wish I'd been able to swing my own work to see him tonight; in a way it might have been comforting, though I know it's better to go to bed here relatively early, go to the gym so I can continue to fit into my skinny black jeans, head to the zendo to focus, and then work on everything else ever instead tomorrow.

Yesterday...yesterday is one of those days I probably won't ever talk about with anyone. If nothing else, it proved that I'm still capable of doing things that are kind of twisted and not all that enjoyable in the end. And it reminded me of something I really had blocked out about Nerve--the possibility of ending up meeting someone who, over the course of a day and several beers, brings out some of the worst things about you, who pushes you to something without even having to try, who under other circumstances you'd be indifferent to, but the right day, the right mood....And you will always be the crazy chick with the Snoopy tattoo for him to talk about and the next morning you're still a bit shaky, but it's mostly because--well, as I said before, it reminds me of what kind of things I'm capable of doing--and not in a good way. I am trying to let it be instructive. Fortunately, this doesn't happen to me often, but...wow.

Starting to line up a couple of other things for next week. One guy's really on the young side...I think he's okay, but I'm going to have to be more on guard than I'd like. I think I'm pretty much going to stay away from guys under, say, 38, for a bit...the younger ones tend to bring out the crazy.

Right now I'd very much like someone with decently broad shoulders to lean on. That I know for sure.

I'd be lying to say that your band sucks, but I am an academic rockstar

Deciding that this will be the week of some kind of rebound--not that I'm going to go trolling specifically to get laid or anything, but only that I will be focusing on awesomeness and focus. Admittedly, it hasn't started out quite like that. Didn't go to the gym as planned this morning because I was in a lot of pain, and I've been futzing on the internet for most of the weekend, only barely getting the teaching stuff done. Nevertheless. The zendo is now open on Mondays for midday meditation. I owe far less money in taxes than I'd been assuming I did. The decision about St Louis is no longer contingent on my mental state on May 1: at this point, I'm prepared to make whatever move makes sense based on the funding situation. Writing fellowship, I stay. Dissertation year fellowship or no funding, I go. Simple as that. I mean, not simple. But less fraught than it's been.

And I'm not saying it wasn't incredibly exciting to wake up yesterday morning to an email from the scholar who has perhaps been most influential on my work over the last five years--inviting me to contribute a longer version of my MLA paper (which was accepted, but the panel still has to be) to an essay collection. The collection proposal is uncannily similar to my dissertation proposal, and it dawned on me that--against all odds and without setting out to do this explicitly--I may have just actually read the field correctly.

I had my recurring dream about K. last night, the one where his wife is always finding me or in danger of finding me. It's weird to be having these dreams now: we haven't even been alone in a room together since last September, and it's been almost two years since everything happened. I saw him last about six weeks ago at school and have had this dream twice in the last three. Strange.

D. did finally break up with me on Friday, which I can't remember if I mentioned here or not. There were some things about it all that were shady, especially the part where I saw him online on Nerve last night. But I've archived his email, poured out the half and half, thrown away the hot chocolate, and that's all there was. I still can't quite walk past the Brooklyn Museum (managed to avoid it in everywhere I went this weekend), and sometimes I hear one of his band's songs in my head. But all the knifethrusts went on last week; Friday was just the last stage in it all. It's something that'll make me sad in the back of my mind for a long time, but I got a kickass conference paper out of it, I rediscovered something about myself as an artistic writer (though I always work better with an audience, alas), and it all provided the occasion (albeit painful) for rethinking several of my personal narratives--including the one about how I *have* to write my dissertation in New York.

And so. On with the rainy day.

Today's Zen Story / Yesterday's Commonplace Book

1. Today's Zen Story

I actually calculates the basics of my federal taxes back in January because I needed to get some numbers for a financial aid form. I found that I owed around $850-900. While I've owed that much before, this was particularly disheartening / panic-causing / traumatic / thwarting / depressing because I thought I'd finally gotten my withholding figured out at this point in grad school, when I wasn't freelancing, and so on. That was not a particularly stellar evening, to say the least. At the time I decided to take my dad's advice and just not think about it for a few months, keeping the money in the savings side of my checking account until April.

I revisited my taxes today, and, perhaps needless to say, I had to work through a lot of aversion to get there. Even when I finally sat down at my desk, I was procrastinating like mad, and I would stop every few questions to go through all the usual internet places: Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, my Not-NYU email account, Nerve (yes, alas). Since I hadn't figured out the exact tax back in January, I didn't know exactly what I was in for. And it wasn't encouraging to see that I'd made an adding error in my income that had it *under* by $100.

And then I realized that I'd missed one of the personal deductions, so that I'd calculated my income as several thousand dollars *over* what it actually was and was thus looking at the wrong tax table altogether.

I still owe a few hundred dollars (and I can't get the NYS forms to work on my computer, so I have to wait until Monday for that), but it's about $500 *less* than I thought it was going to be, than what I've been assuming and stressing out about for the last two months and change.

I can't even really describe the sense of relief, not unalloyed by sheepishness, that I'm experiencing.

2. Yesterday's Commonplace Book

"Already how am I so far
Out of that minute? Must I go
Still like the thistle-ball, no bar,
Onward, whenever light winds blow,
Fixed by no friendly star?

--Robert Browning, "Two in the Campagna"

In resisting idolatry, is the reluctant lover protecting himself against illusion? Or in looking for intimacy without risk, is he losing part of his soul? Because the heavy caesuras match the lover's halting heart, they contradict his boast of confronting no obstacles or barriers. Since the words that appear to lurch forward over the line endings are brought short by early-breaking caesuras they also inadvertently disclose to the attentive reader far more than the lover intends to say.

--W. David Shaw, "Masks of the Unconscious: Bad Faith and Casuistry in the Dramatic Monologue"

Also from Shaw:

But the despair of the jilted lovers in Maud and "Locksley Hall," like the anguish of St. Simeon decaying by slow degrees on his pillar, is a mere pretense. Such speakers act out a fantasy of anguish in order to escape genuine despair.

Is it so unreasonable

...to want to be more than the thing that distracts you from all the other things in your life?

In two years of sleeping with various people, some of whom I liked very much, I never once had the kind of relationship where I could come to a party with a date. There was a little of this with The Professor, but it was always fraught, and a couple of other theatre dates where introductions had to be made, and some awkward run-ins. But nothing substantial. Nothing that would ever suggest that I was part of anyone's life.

And even with The Poet--perhaps the most loving man I've ever met--dealing with me crying on the phone over D. (so over, as of today, but I basically had to ask him straight out just to break up with me already), meeting me after class to bring me a couple of Xanax--as bad as things are with me, they're almost a welcome distraction from what he's going through in his real life.

It seems like such a simple thing. I guess I have to stop thinking of it that way. Because there's no such thing as a reasonable expectation, not in New York, probably not anywhere.

New set of plans

My options for next year are something like the following:

1. I get Fellowship A. Fellowship A would mean working at a college in New York, secretly keeping my job at not-NYU to maintain library access, etc. It would be an insanely busy year, but it would buy me at least one more summer of diss work. If I get Fellowship A, I stay in New York, but try to move somewhere nicer / cheaper around October.

2. I don't get any fellowships. In this case, I move back to St Louis by mid-June.

3. I get Fellowship B. This one is less money, but more prestige and no strings attached.
3a. I get Fellowship B and take the money to St Louis. Financially, I could live on Fellowship B in St Louis, though I might pick up an adjunct gig for easier access to libraries.
3b. I get Fellowship B, continue to teach at Not-NYU, and stay in New York, at least attempting to negotiate a rent reduction or move

If #3 happens, I will set myself a goal of July 31 for making the decision about whether I stay in New York or move to St Louis. The decision will be made on the basis of whether I'm happy here. If I had to make this decision today, I would be planning to move back to St Louis the day after classes end at Not-NYU this semester.

There's a Zen center in St Louis. My parents say they'd help with a car and getting my stuff back to the midwest.

Yes, it's come to this. I'm too worn down by this city to remain committed to it. I've been absolutely wretched all weekend. Some douchebag called me a cunt at Franklin Park last night, which means I won't be going there again, and I probably will also be avoiding Soda Bar on Vanderbilt because it's the same owners. I haven't gotten any work done for my teaching stuff today, mostly because I've been crying. I'm trying to pull myself together enough to go get cash and food and possibly cigarettes. Because I don't care right now. I probably have to apologize to everyone who was in a meeting with me on Friday. I think I'm falling apart. I don't want to talk about D. right now. I just need someone to hold me through this night, through the remainder of the weekend, but it's not an option I have. I try so hard. I'm not clingy. I'm not unattractive. I'm smart but not pretentious. I'm good at what I do, but not snobby about it. I'm trying hard to be a better, more spiritual, more compassionate, more flexible person. Somehow that's not enough here.

In the elevator after zazen

I said that I couldn't deal with New York anymore, that what had always allowed me to put up with it was the thought that things were going to get better, that I had lost that sense....

"Don't worry about things getting better. They aren't going to," he said, and laughed.

I'm adopting this as my koan.

Friday miscellany

I saw David Cromer's production of Our Town with Caroline last night. We sat on the stage since the tickets were $40 cheaper or so and--wow. I only have fuzzy memories from seeing this performed a couple times in my childhood (and from the episode of My So-Called Life where Rayanne tries out for Emily's part), so it was in many ways a mostly new play to me. The house really is set up for a kind of proximity--I was going to say intimacy, but I think that would be the wrong word--not only with the actors but with the rest of the audience, which I think is an incredibly interesting choice. And it did take me back a little bit to some theatre experiences I stumbled into when I was much younger, like the night I saw The Caretaker at the St Mark's Theatre--probably the first time I'd been even remotely close to the action of a play and all of the sudden it's taking place three feet away. Our Town really is an incredibly meditative play. The last twenty minutes seemed to accomplish everything that Synecdoche, New York was struggling with over two hours to achieve, and it did so much more elegantly, without the elaborate machinery that was Caden Cotard's self-centeredness--the point being here that even good people are blind. (And in this sense we care in a way that we don't in the film.) Had I not been right on stage, I probably would have started crying--the only other time this happens to me is at the end of the Axis Company's Hospital series.

The play was also quite a wonderful illustration of Coleridgean suspension of disbelief at its best--particularly the part about transferring from these shadows of the imagination a human interest and a semblance of truth--but in a way that, I think, complicates any sort of "live for today" message at the end. It's possible that the blindness isn't a tragedy after all.

Other things. It's my last weekday of spring break. I've accomplished very little and it's snowing. I need to go to the gym, sit zazen, put in several hours with Browning and get my life back in order. Was in Charlotte visiting family last week at this time; the weather was awful and my aunt got the stomach flu (which I am still worried about coming down with, since it seems to appear about a week after you think you should have gotten it) so there was a lot of sitting around, but in many ways this was perfectly fine. I didn't really have to think. Just thought that by the time I got back to New York I'd be ready to do that again. Not so much. Not sure where these days have gone...possibly too much fuzting and a bit too much drinking on Wednesday. By tomorrow I'm going to have to switch back into teacher mode and prep virtually the entire rest of the semester. Of course I am not looking forward to this.

On the other hand, I'm finally (mostly) over the cold I had for two weeks and I have my voice back. I'm also not as miserably run down as I was during the first two weeks of March. So this is good. The downside is that while I was sick and not going to the gym for 2 1/2 weeks, I ate a lot of takeout and then just ate a lot of food in general in North Carolina. So I'm feeling pudgy. Disappointing, too, because I lost like three pounds in February and have certainly gained that back. And I've certainly not been doing well with food this week. The whole thing is annoying, but I'll go to the gym after this and I should be able to get in at least four days next week. I need to keep up confidence here, just saying.

Saw The Poet on Tuesday for the first time in two months. Mixed feelings. Don't really want to be back with him, but very much want to be his friend. I'm not sure he has friends like me and it became clear over the course of our conversation that he is, in many ways, extremely isolated right now. And he would switch back and forth between these crazy future plans of how we're going to end up together in a couple of years living in some cute place in Hoboken or something and talking about our relationship in this weirdly extreme past tense. I have a feeling that there's a lot of this that's being displaced from other things going on in his life. I hope I can continue to be there for him in some way, though.

Saw D. the Tuesday before I left. He drove out to Brooklyn on one of those nights where I had more or less lost my voice. Did my best to function in the fog. We had a really great phone conversation on Wednesday, and I haven't heard from him since so now I'm all nervous again. It's the nervousness of a relationship (such as it is) that's pretty much non-fucked up and I do tend to worry that I'm nothing without the sense of the sordid. But I also worry about seeming to put demands and expectations on him--which I'm not, except that I really do like seeing people I'm sleeping with at least once a week. Which has been difficult for us lately for various reasons. Also, I ended up talking a lot with C. about her stuff last night which meant that I kind of unconsciously started obsessing over D., which is never good. But I do know that if I continue to not hear from him today, it's going to be distracting.

Had my recurring dream about K. earlier in the week. Still, everything's less wretched than last March. And with that, I should probably get ready for the gym so that eventually I can make spring break mean something productive. It's never too late to hit the ground running--right?

(By the way, I signed up for a Twitter account, for no apparent reason. It's my firstname/middle initial/lastname.

On the pleasures of the textual exchange

I don't have time to go into this right now--I need to get to Not-NYU well before 5:00 to make copies of a handout I have not yet created, et cetera--but I wanted to note this nonetheless...

I know there was that big article last year about the whole ritual of looking over the bookcase of a potential lover. Fine, of course. I've been judging people on the merits of their books my entire sexual life. However, at least for a certain type of people, there's another, more intimate exchange: the part where you begin to exchange texts that you've written--ones that are not explicitly addressed to the other person, but examples of whatever you're working on, whether it's creative, critical, or some combination of the two. There are a couple ways this can be presented, depending on what kind of feedback you want. There's the already-written move, where you send a lover something you've published in one form or another, looking more for a reaction or discussion than anything else. Many times this is posturing (especially when two academics are involved), but possibly not in every case.

At the other end of the spectrum, there is the work in progress submitted--at least ostensibly--to the lover and looking for feedback and critique. This is the more fraught situation, of course, for both parties, but particularly for the lover (or, I should say, potential lover) who is asked to respond. First, you have to determine whether they really want feedback, how serious it should be, how much criticism they can take. And then, of course, it's your critical skills on display....

Anyway. You know where I'm going with this. There's an intimacy in all this that really goes beyond the email thing, and I know that I'm probably (or was probably) more likely to sleep with someone than solicit his feedback on something. I'm beginning to think that this marks a specific milestone--at least in a certain kind of relationship--this moment of editing, or of textual exchange more generally. It was pretty much the hottest thing that The Professor and I ever did with each other, especially when we were both still dating other people. The Poet sent me all kinds of things he wrote, almost right away, too, and as our relationship went on he'd have me read things for school. Every now and then I'd reciprocate, but more in terms of "oh, this is what I did today."

And now, D's doing it. I spent the first part of my morning ripping up and restructuring something he sent me, this brilliant and funny hybrid piece. We talked about what he wanted me to do and I did it, with more confidence than I usually have at this point in a pseudo-relationship...mostly moving things around, leaving the sentences for him to play with. And it feels momentous, in a certain way...he's also sent me a poem and a song, but I don't read that kind of thing as critically. (It's a policy I have with the work of my friends in general.) It's a kind of intimacy that helps make up for not having seen him in awhile. (Though hopefully that changes tomorrow night.)

In return, I sent him a copy of the conference paper I gave on Friday. Obviously, not an entirely equal exchange, but one that I think helps make us even, where I'm exposing myself in the midst of What I Do and How I Think.

Also, I do sort of loosely follow his occasional online writing, mostly on sites attached to his band. It's kind of fun to see the things we've talked about (too crazy and too specific to discuss here) get transmuted into his prose; there's an intimacy in that too and I may be slowly figuring out how he thinks.

-----

In completely unrelated news, I haven't taken a shower today because there is a large roach in it. I'm pretty sure it's dead (hello, morning's epistemological debate!) but I'm still traumatized from having come face to face with it near my desk at 1:00 this morning. It's too big to vacuum and I really don't want to look at it. I'm out of paper towels. I'm wondering whether it will go down the drain if I poke it with a long stick. Augh.

Also, in spite of my best intentions, no gym today. Partially a time crunch with prep, but also continuing congestion and rundownness; would rather be reasonably healthy to teach and see D. tomorrow. And I realized that I'm not sure I'd really want to use a treadmill after myself today.

Words kicking around in my head makes it hard to deal with composition papers

Variations on the Search for Fresh Produce, scribbled in the margins of 3/8/09. Not really a poem or anything much.

Queen of the peppadaws
Strawberry season
Now it's turnips and fingerlings
As far as the eye can see
The market reminds us
That nothing is timeless
Hydroponic red peppers and mesculun mix

(And I'm not so sure about you this time)

Grand Army Plaza / Prospect Heights / Park Slope
But I'm the wrong side of the museum lights
(Where else can you express the bargain in those terms?)

Hazeleye bursting green
I looked up into them
Washington Avenue but you aren't there

Queen of the peppadaws
Strawberry season
I saw your face in a canvas bag back recycling back weekends of fresh eggs and summer squash

(And I'm not so sure about you this time)

The fountain's covered in ice
The socialists are patrolling the library steps
That car is heading right for me suddenly swerving
(It's just the road baby, you know where the lines are)
And this is only Saturday morning
This is only Saturday morning
Saturday's warning
This is only Saturday morning

Queen of the peppadaws
Dreaming of summer
Flatbush Avenue but it never pays to look ahead, no not that way
Setting up a day against the rest of your life
Attention veering off
Cars in the roundabout
Coming at you
Queen of the peppadaws
I'm not so sure about you this time

Not sure I'm doing it right

Well, okay, no. There's one thing that I know went right this week--I gave the best fucking conference paper of my life on Friday morning. It's not something that would have come about any other way than how it did, and every time I've thought back to it since I'm kind of amazed by it. Just in terms of the convergence of events, how I would never have had enough confidence to give this paper in this way at anywhere other than a grad conference at my own institution--but also, I think, in the sense that I both wrote the paper the day before the conference (in a particularly dismal/socked in exhausted six hours in the department lounge after a dismal and frustrating day of teaching) and that I had been writing it for the last two and a half years, more or less. The frame--autobiographical but not marked as such--was something I decided on the week before, a risk undertaken precisely because of the situation of the conference and feeling like I had nothing to lose. It was related to something I told D. before we met but also to a set of experiences I had last summer and an idea I blog about quite frequently. It turned out to be a disturbingly successful metaphor and frame. (I only wish K could have been there. We'd run into each other in the cafeteria a few days before and managed to have a nice conversation about a number of things, including this idea...but no such luck.)

The last conference I'd been to before this one was the one in Toronto last April, and I was struck by how much I *miss* conferencing without even knowing it. Even when no one says anything wildly earthshattering, it's still inspiring to think alongside new people, to spend an entire day or so thinking mostly about books and ideas. It's mentally regenerative even though it's physically exhausting--and, in this case, physically exhausting on top of the worst cold I've had in three years and one of the most horrible and draggeddown weeks I've had in ages--two of them actually, and I'm not sure next week is going to be any better. (More on that anon.) It was enough to make me think, in this horrible, paradoxical, "oh my god I really am an academic and in this economy that's seriously going to fuck up my life" kind of way, that many of my frustrations of the past few months can be traced to having gone to Wisconsin (where I experienced a lot of lethargy and frustration when I actually did want to think) instead of to MLA.

The conference, though, was wonderful, in spite of the fact that I had pretty much lost my voice by the end of the night. Sometime in the afternoon, D. sent me a piece he'd been working on....something crazy and brilliant that I read through instead of listening fully to the faculty panel. This made me grin, especially since he wants me to give him some feedback. (Also, he wrote me a song, he said, and sent the lyrics.) On the downside, I haven't seen him since we went to Edgar's show two weeks ago, and I'm going out of town on Thursday. This is precisely the sort of thing that makes me all stressy. But I'm realizing, though, that my saying last week that I didn't want to go back to The Poet was important, so I don't have to look to D. to provide a reason not to be with The Poet. I did actually talk to The Poet for awhile on the phone yesterday and got a better sense of what's going on in his head and his life--and all of this rather affirmed the fact that it's best I'm just a friend right now, and that he's using my breaking up with him as a way of thinking around something else that's actually much worse.

The rest of this week pretty much sucked, hardcore. I got everything done that I needed to, but it was miserable, sloggy, frustrating. I was almost in tears all day on Wednesday, feeling jerked around by stupid requests from professors treating me like a secretary rather than a colleague (too many flashbacks to my first job in Chicago), frustrated with my students, exhausted from the performance of engagement, too sick to go to the gym, everyone around me seemed to be dragging me down. I almost didn't go to zazen, though that at least temporarily made me feel better, even though I had to start running again right afterwards. I do not want people telling me that I am supernecessary for one group or another to succeed. If I ask you to do final proofreading on something, I do not want to get the okay to do the final copy and then hear three days later that there are changes that need to be made. And so on. I skipped my monthly field seminar on Wednesday night for the first time since I started grad school, was still in the library until after 7:00 grading papers, and so on, so on. The week before was like this too--just as busy but slightly less miserable--this past week--which was all supposed to be about doing my best to get everything done, suddenly had me on the rack.

The teaching thing is especially frustrating and overwhelming: this is the part where I have to keep telling myself: UR NOT DOING IT RIGHT. Basically, I feel like I'm back in my first semester at Erstwhile Teaching College, where I'm spending insane amounts of time on this thing with absolutely no payoff and then when the lesson plan fails because no one can be bothered to do the reading or, if they've done the reading, to talk about it, things only get more frustrating. I realized that part of the reason why I have an aversion to grading papers is that they seem, unlike drafts or even homework assignments, to be a kind of referendum on my ability as a teacher. Which is completely bullshitty, just not so much that I can believe it's not partially the case. And that, in turn, is clearly not helping my mood. I keep feeling like I'm failing this particular group of students and I don't know what's going wrong. Partially, it's teaching too many things I'm not familiar with, but--still. I think I'm better at first-semester comp than I am at second semester comp. But this, too, seems like it's emanating from self-centered reasons: I feel more secure when I know my students don't have anyone else to compare me to. So I think I get all weird in the spring. (Then again: the first spring semester I ever taught was the semester when I broke up with The Ex and got raked over the emotional coals with The Professor. And last spring I taught the fall version of the class, which made it the easiest semester ever. So perhaps it's time to give myself, and my students, a break.)

Right now the idea is basically to get better and get to spring break. The week is going to be pretty much running uphill. Today is grading, midterm evaluations, and the letter of recommendation for one of my fall students. Tomorrow is prep, hopefully being well enough to go to the gym (I haven't been in over a week and feel tubby--I'm sure this is also one of the reasons why this past week was so unremittingly miserable), getting a few stupid things done at school. Conferences all week, and somehow finding the time to do laundry, pack, maybe buy some cute shoes for spring. And then--down to Charlotte to hang out with one contingent of my extended family. And spring break, which is already being filled in for me, but I have to believe that things will get better after that, that I will eventually stop being sick, that D and I will get many walks through Prospect Park and that things will be okay for a little while.

I hope. Now zazen. Then grading.

Still kicking my own ass, though not as hard

He writes back something very sweet that helps set my mind at ease, just rights things again. Predictably, my own self-recriminations start immediately--everything was fine, what happened all of the sudden, why do I always *do* this, etc.--but I'm trying to do the thing where you just notice those thoughts are happening and then don't invite them to stay for tea (or, in my case, a Flying Pigs Farm pork chop, despite my not having gone to the gym today). Recognizing that my angst has little to do with him in a way, remembering that I am not actually clingy or overly expectant and that I can just continue to sit with this, as it were, because what else am I going to do? Holding lightly is always so much easier when...something.

I think I did the right thing in being up front about some things--like my recent readiness to actually be in a relationship if I had the chance, something that's a bit different from where he is--without serving up the whole plate of traumas and pastness. I gave general outlines and just said that the decisions I made in 2008 were motivated by a desire to mitigate my loneliness and heal a bit. That's all that needs to be said for now, I think.

At least I'm writing today. Did a first draft of the fellowship app that like 9,000 other people I know are working on just now. It doesn't fully hang together, but I can address that in an edit tomorrow. (Another day I probably won't make it to the gym, but perhaps that's also not the thing I need to beat myself up about today.) I still have four papers to grade after dinner that I didn't get to last night due to exhaustion and the bat call that probably started all of this. My other blogging duties may have to wait until tomorrow. Would love it if Not-NYU called another snow day, but this seems unlikely.

I feel not unlike an ass, by the way. But less so than I did with J. Some of this was at least illuminating, like when I found myself typing to him that I trust other people more than I trust myself when it comes to these interstitial kinds of spaces--the not just hooking up and one night standing, but also not the boyfriend/girlfriend thing. I think it's important that I'm even recognizing that.

Okay. Must do dishes if I want food.

The entire stupid play by play

Sent off the MLA abstract. Spent the next hour and a half composing a response to his email. Back on forth on how much to share, erred on the side of not a lot of detail. Too many flashbacks to a similar missive sent to J to little avail. Wondering how I can be so astonishingly deluded about the possibilities of my own life, even as I still think it could maybe be okay. Listening to Liz Phair because, of course. Steeling myself for the fellowship application and then grade papers; resisting the urge to curl up in bed for the rest of the day instead. Wishing I'd gone to the gym despite the weather, too late now. Hate this, hate this, hate this.

And I hope this isn't the beginning of another end

I don't know. I just don't. He said it wasn't intended to be grave and heavy, but still--the disappointment is there for me. I'm tired of all the waiting I have to do for people. I'm back to my old mantra about wanting to, just once, fully coincide with someone. You know, find someone who's already worked through some of their shit, like I have, finally, after two years of running uphill. Someone who can be here, just because I would like them to be, here. Someone to help me justify all of -- this -- whatever this is.

I want a boyfriend. Can I just say that and have it be okay? Something really simple. Or just simpler. Someone ready to be counted on. And I don't like this position--it makes me worry that nothing I do is based on actual affinity ever, that it's all just because I want it to work. The J. problem. And the fear that the only thing that ever worked was The Poet precisely because there was no way for it to work, because I still to this day don't really know what working would mean in that context, except that he managed to make me happy and save me from a couple pretty bad mental spots.

I don't want this to be so hard. Browning and MLA abstracts and faking interest in fellowships and planning classes--this I'm willing to allow to be hard. The rest of it--come on, universe, really? I would like someone I can trust myself to count on, if that makes sense. In some ways (and they may not, of course, be fully evident on the blog), I'm too good at self-sufficiency and dependability and non-clinging.

It's possible that this is all premature. There's a dialogue to be had, but I'm not sure it will end well for me. As much as I'd be willing to...I don't even know. I thought I was getting better at this, but what a fucking learning curve.

I have too much work to do to be thinking about any of this. I need to finish my MLA abstract, at the very least, before I write back, and this is going to require an enormous overhaul so I better get started, pretending it's still last week, or two weeks ago, slipping back into the generally possible and reclaiming the composure that I had that wasn't externally constructed.

The thought of going back to Nerve again--or, for that matter, of being more than friends with The Poet--these thoughts do not alleviate the descending bleakness.

Maybe it's all nothing, maybe there's a dialogue to be had. But I can't have it before I send in this abstract.

Psychology of the Snow Day

I got like 600 text messages from Not-NYU telling me that school is cancelled today because of the snow. That's lovely, but of course I don't teach on Mondays, so it has little actual effect on my life. (The snow is, however, likely to make me less excited about slogging to the gym, which also might be having a snow day.) Nevertheless, knowing it's a snow day is making it much harder to get work done; I feel like I should be able to curl up on the couch and watch movies--even though it's not a snow day for, say, turning in one's MLA abstract or grading papers. Augh.

I'm thinking of two other March blizzards. One was my first Spring Break in New York, when the cheap platform boots I bought at the Joyce Leslie on University Place basically split in half. It was also the Spring Break when my then-boyfriend showed up for the St Patrick's Day parade having Bic-ed his head. I had recently received The Worst Haircut of My Life at Astor Place (as one does while a freshman at NYU)--we made a fantastic couple. The St Patrick's Day parade I remember as involving beers hidden in winter hats, long lines for the bathroom at Sbarro, and high school kids from Long Island puking on the side streets. I have not attended since.

The other March blizzard was two years ago, the day of the new student recruitment event, which is sort of a perpetually weird day. (I just found out I'll be in Charlotte for this year's and I'm not sorry.) Before that I was at West Village Coffeeshop with The Professor and ran into someone from my very deep New York past--the archetype for a lot of things that happened to me since college and the sometime hero, sometime villain, sometime addressee of much of my LiveJournal posts circa 2001. It was awkward and came out of nowhere and we smoked a cigarette on the steps of West Village Coffeeshop and then The Professor decided that he needed to leave, so I ended up talking to this guy for awhile and then going to school and a lot of this is a blur. This may be why the snow day has left me somewhat unsettled, needing to focus and finish this abstract, make a decent effort to finish the fellowship application, and grade the rest of the somewhat dismal first set of papers from my class.

Well, that and the fact that I ended up on a bat call with L last night, found out about something The Poet did that I found somewhat less than amusing, came home at 1:30, made popcorn and sent D. a kind of gooshy drunk email, and then went to sleep and had a dream about my latest Facebook friend. Good lord.

So, Sunday. And, Saturday.

I think I'm kind of glad that February's over. It's kind of an overdetermined month for me to begin with, and it's one where, increasingly, its meanings aren't readable until much later anyway. It also inevitably seems long and sloggy--perhaps even because it's so short, you're always surprised it's still going on. Mostly I'll keep telling myself that at least I'm far less wretched than I've been at this time in either of the last two years.

And I feel slightly better today, calmer. Could be it's all just Saturday, something about the way I experience a week making it inevitably--something. I've never really had a comfortable relationship with the weekend, not when I was growing up or working a 9-5 job either. Saturdays rarely sit well with me, and I can't really remember the last time I felt like I actually accomplished something on them, other than going to the farmers' market and making a nice dinner (or going to the museum to meet a cute boy whose recent silence has me going a bit churny). Perhaps there's a lesson in this, about changing my expectations. (I feel much more ready to work today, much more ready to go to school and sit down with all this. The idea of going to school on Saturdays, especially if the next plan is to just go home when I'm done, is incredibly, crushingly depressing even now.) Like perhaps I could have gone to the afternoon sitting at the zendo yesterday--that might have been a good thing to do, something to take me out of the loop I got myself into. These happen once a month; perhaps I should look up the next one and plan for it now. (Of course, now that I look at their calendar, I see they don't have another one on there for awhile. Anyway.)

I suppose the point is that I should maybe ease up on myself where Saturdays are concerned. I'm starting to do that informally already, but even when I'm cleaning the apartment I feel a kind of guilt of how I should be reading or working; I sit down to read and immediately fall asleep no matter how much sleep I got the night before. Perhaps as the weather gets warmer (which is not happening this week--wtf, winter storm warning?) I'll just make a point of being outside, trying to do something to ease some of the anxiety I felt yesterday. Of course this will / would always be easier with another person around. I know what gets me on Saturdays a lot of the time is the solitude, which is why it was so great to have D around those couple of times. But right now I'm not sure that's something fully in my control.

But I'm feeling calmer this morning. I hope it lasts. About to sit zazen, then make an egg sandwich or something to fortify me on the way to Manhattan, which will probably suck. Going to hide out in the department as long as they'll let me, only going to the library under duress. (Though something tells me that if I do go to the library I'll run into K. Which might be amusing. I do occasionally wonder what he's up to, how he's doing.) Mostly, though, I want to spend today really focusing on the strength / productivity / creativity / non-wretchedness that's bigger than the last couple weeks of having D. in my life, something a bit more--grounded, perhaps? I don't know if that's exactly the right word--less contingent, maybe, or at least something that's expressing its contingency in a different way. Like one that isn't so tied to another person, because at least at some level, I know it's not, not entirely anyway. (On the other hand, I don't think that my conference paper for this Friday would be starting out the same way, but that was something I've been thinking about ever since I read Hegel last year.)

And maybe he'll call me. Maybe he won't. I don't know what I'll do in the latter case. I may call him and I may not. I'll see how I feel several hours from now; I'd very much like to get in a solid 7-8 hour workday if I can. (Which means I should have been sitting zazen like 20 minutes ago, but, alas.) I'm getting to a point where I'm simply ready to say: I want a boyfriend. If he can do that right now, if he wants to do that right now, then--great. I'll be in 100% as they say on teevee. If not...then I have to think of something else, someone else.

I often have a hard time figuring out my posture when I sit--I don't really have a good sense of my own body position, whether I'm actually sitting up straight or not. The foregoing paragraph is more or less an emotional correlative of this physical confusion.

Thoughts on a day that was less productive than I would have liked

Enlightenment and clarity of the mind occur only in response to the sustained effort of study and practice. Endeavoring in the way ripens the conditions of your practice. It is not that the sound of the bamboo is sharp or the color of the blossoms is vivid. Although the sound of the bamboo is wondrous, it is heard at the moment when it's hit by a pebble. Although the color of blossoms is beautiful, they do not open by themselves but unfold in the light of springtime. Studying the way is like this. You attain the way when conditions come together. Although you have your own capacity, you practice the way with the combined strength of the community. So you should practice and search with one mind with others.

A stone is turned to a jewel by polishing. A person becomes a sage by cultivation. What stone is originally shiny? Who is mature from the beginning? You ought to polish and cultivate yourself. Don't diminish yourself. Don't be lazy in your study of the way.

--from Enlightenment Unfolds: The Essential Teachings of Zen Master Dogen, trans. Kazuaki Tanahashi

I think I am slowly learning things about myself, belatedly, perhaps, about the way I work, about the knots that I will have to untie. I ran myself ragged in my teaching week--Tuesday I was "going" for about 18 hours--woke up at six as usual, then teaching, looking at drafts, going back to Brooklyn to run errands then go to the gym then do laundry, then look at more drafts, answering personal emails then finally sleeping a bit after midnight. Wednesday it was hard to do anything except sit zazen and have lunch. Thursday was much like Tuesday, without the gym and with seeing Caroline later. I have three major, unbreakable deadlines next week in addition to all the teaching stuff. While I haven't exactly pissed away the last two days I don't think I've exactly rocked them either. I understand that I need to rest. I'm not sorry I had some time to myself finally. And yet--

I miss D. Already. It's stupid how fast I got used to seeing him regularly--even when he went upstate, I'd seen him Thursday, but nothing this weekend, not even an email since Thursday. I know he's going through a lot--more than I can imagine--and yet...I miss him. I missed having someone here, just to break up the work. I think I have sort of a base level of productivity for a weekend, and it would be nice to see him. It's much easier to be self-sufficient during the week; I feel like the writing I'm doing would be more interesting if I had somehow been able to be in his presence. We talked on the phone a bit Thursday night. It was the first time I ever called first. I know he's just going through a lot. I wish we'd made firmer plans. I'm not obsess-y, yet, really, not like I was with J., but still...I get unsettled. I start to doubt. I start to overcompensate for the doubt. This time, I can see it happening. I've tried to sit with it. I've tried to walk with it. I've tried to write with it, to read Dogen with it, to cook with it, and to drink mediocre white wine that I will not be purchasing again with it. And still. Jittery. Spending so much energy calming down my own restlessness and gnawing loneliness that I can't do anything. Feeling the edge of missing The Poet. And it's not like we even had plans--it's just...I get used to good things fast. I know that in some sense I always wish I could start in the middle, skip this part. I said this with J., too: I'm fun on a first date and I'm a very good girlfriend. I am horrible at the part that comes in between. I'm trying to be careful with him. I am trying to sit with this, to do the nonattachment thing, to not invite all the usual worries to sit down to tea with me. My apartment's pretty damn clean. I made a good dinner tonight. I had some inspiration yesterday, but my classes for the week are not prepped, the MLA abstract due on Monday is not finished, the statement of interest for fellowships that I am not interested in but must apply for anyway by Wednesday has very few complete sentences in it, and the paper I am giving on Friday will be fine by then but is not fine now.

Perhaps needless to say, I will be going to school tomorrow to try to deal with all this somewhere other than my apartment.

And I guess I'm learning something about myself. At least I can see it all happening now, and not completely confuse some of my work/life balance issues with either being madly in love with someone or rejected by that same someone.

I hope this all works. And I kind of hope he calls me first tomorrow. I think we really complement each other and that I could be much shinier with him around. But I worry that I'm going to trip over his neuroses, or he mine. And that's a hard place to start from.

I do think I must like him, though. For what that's worth.

Saturday thoughts

"For it is with this world that we shall always have to concern ourselves: the world is not to be learned and thrown aside, but reverted to and relearned." -- Browning, "Essay on Shelley"

This might be the year we all become famous. So far, I've had two friends' shows get fantastic (and well-deserved) reviews in the NY Times Arts section. Another friend is in what's apparently a major off-Broadway revival of a classic play. Yet another is having a play he staged several years ago (and which, at the time, I thought was one of the very best things I'd ever seen) mounted at another major off-Broadway theater. And, though it's not quite as big or artistic as these, I'm about to have my first article published in a major (in my field) academic journal.

Yes, this might be our year, as the world begins to collapse, no longer just the crumbling around the edges that we noticed for years before. (What happened in my hometown just over a year ago now becomes readable as a kind of harbinger, a very particular kind of despair--half-triumphed-over in the election of Obama, but also lingering unredressed.) It's a strange precipice. At times it feels sublime, but then again everything does if you stare at it long enough to let your eyes unfocus. Which I almost have to do when I stare at the parts of the NY Times that are not the Arts section, when I think about the post-May future, trying to inhabit moments of wall staring meditation. I've been doing these intensive cardio workouts that have me at the gym for nearly an hour and a half. Yesterday it was treadmill / elliptical / then back on the treadmill. I don't even read magazines there anymore; it slows me down. Sometimes podcasts. San Francisco Zen Center and The Moth. Or music, but so much of what is on my iPod isn't particularly helpful for keeping up the pace. I'm not sure why I started doing this, but I do know that I was furious when I ended up not being able to do it on Thursday--going to the gym only to find all the machines taken, waiting around until they were supposed to be free and having my face lied to instead--I snapped like I haven't snapped in months--a kind of sputtering and shaking and all this stored energy of pulling myself through the exhaustion of a teaching week comes out on the Nevins Street subway platform and I hold myself to myself and try to make it home but everything's slow and it's one of those nights where I hate Brooklyn or more specifically being poor in it, though eventually some beer (Karma Ale, natch) and spontaneous company pulls me back up--that and a phone call from D., as he drove home from some show in East Williamsburg.

My days are busy but more or less stable otherwise; it's my dreams that are ominous. I had hoped that the cardio workouts would help me sleep better, especially when I want to go to bed earlier before days I teach. I thought I would crash at 10:30 on Wednesday night and instead am up using the bathroom at 11:15, 11:25, and 12:04. I wake up at 5:00 on Thursday morning after an intensely realistic dream in which I lose my keys and engage in an extended and somewhat violent self-recrimination. This morning, only half sleeping with D. in the bed next to me, I start yelling at security guards at some airport-like checkpoint for entry into not-NYU, complete with metal detectors and no one will tell me where to go....this afternoon, napping on the futon in the sun, I am staring at my torn-up face in the mirror and I don't know what happened. I am afraid that this is anticipatory deja-vu; otherwise I am happy and solid and working (kind of--I've been tired today and just trying to get my bearings again after the intellectual sinkhole of Tuesday-Thursday and living for others) and it's getting lighter earlier and staying lighter later and I don't understand why I sleeping to scream.

We both have trouble sleeping, and these problems have been intensified the three times we've shared a bed. I worried a lot, in that first year after breaking up with The Ex, that I was going to lose the ability to share a bed with someone else. Even now when I'm alone I tend to sleep only on one side of the bed, nearly falling off the edge. And it's true that I don't sleep especially well with other people. Of course you're only going to sleep fitfully on a one-night stand, and it occurred to me today that, up until last Thursday when I went to D.'s house, the last time I'd been in someone else's bed when it wasn't a one-night stand was with K., right before I moved to my current apartment. I never slept particularly well with E (the lawyer) or The Poet. D. is actually somewhat easier, at least to the extent that he doesn't snore and I can at least doze a bit when I'm really close to him, which tends not to be the case with a lot of other people. And the thing is--I like having him here, I like being with him at his place. Even the exhaustion has its sweetness, though of course this is of somewhat limited utility. He's possibly the first person I've wanted to sleep well with me.

I watch him move, I watch him interact with other people. Some of it I understand. This kind of cultivated unpredictability--I start to wonder where it comes from. I admire it. I wish my mind could move that quickly, could make these kinds of jumps. There's a softness to it. It's not the Shelley-esque assault that The Ex used to perpetrate--he's never out to annihilate the other person. But there's so much about it that seems opaque to me right now. I suppose this is okay. It's hard to remember that we've known each other for basically three weeks. Four dates, three nights spent together, one brunch and a walk in Prospect Park. If we make it to Spring Break, I'll turn off my Nerve profile. I want to believe that we could work and write together--not collaboratively, necessarily, but simply that we could find each other's company in a shared space helpful as we work on our very different projects. Could we hope to work in the same room if we can't sleep well in the same bed? I don't know. In some ways he seems incredibly young (he's about six years older than I am, which makes him younger than The Ex and there's no point in talking about either K. or The Poet in this context)--this is both exhilarating and terrifying. At some point I will have to tell him the things I haven't yet.

I want to write a story or a poem about using numbers as metaphors.

My brother sent me a bunch of drunk text messages from the Mardi Gras parade in St Louis. In retrospect, I realize he was doing this because my SIL probably didn't want to hear it while she was at home and pregnant and certainly my mother's not interested. I hadn't realized it was that time of year. No doubt my Catholic grandparents would spin in their graves to know that their Protestant granddaughter would be going to a Buddhist zendo on Ash Wednesday. But one thing that practice has allowed me to do as of late is appreciate certain kinds of Christian rituals from a slightly more formal standpoint and I find the idea of Lent to be kind of compelling right now. Not so much in the renunciation department. While I've certainly cut back on drinking lately, I'm not interested in a vow of sobriety, nor am I interested in becoming vegan for a month or giving up caffeine. (These being the sort of stupid and decontextualized ways that we talked about Lent in the church youth group.) What I find appealing is the intention to clear a space in your life to allow something else to come in--something as unexpected, perhaps, as the resurrection itself. Spring cleaning in the being-human guest house, to distend a metaphor from Rumi. It's possible that I've started that work a bit early this year; I want to take the opportunity in the next couple of days to form that work into a more deliberate intention. And all of this seeming especially powerful since the period of Lent (if we're meteorologically fortunate, of course) takes us from winter into spring--a sense that this space may potentially get easier to maintain as each day passes, that we can look back over this period of weeks and see a progressive loosening of tensions, relaxing of preconceived notions, letting go of distractions.

Something like that is my prayer for the next few days.

In the archive of the evanescent

"...a certain silvery grace of fancy, nearly all the pleasure of which is in the surprise at the happy and dexterous way in which a thing slight in itself is handled. The sweetness of it is by no means to be got at by crushing, as you crush wild herbs to get at their perfume....A sudden light transfigures some trivial thing, a weather-vane, a windmill, a winnowing-fan, the dust in the barn door. A moment--and the thing has vanished, because it was pure effect; but it leaves a relish behind it, a longing that the accident may happen again." -- Walter Pater, "Joachim du Bellay," from The Renaissance

It's probably a travesty of modern literary studies that people think that all you have to read of Pater is the Introduction and Conclusion to The Renaissance. This last line to me seems to be worth a hundred gemlike flames and I'm not sure we understand that either.

A few days into our correspondence, I told him that I was writing a secret dissertation motivated by the question of walking on water. This is true. It has already developed here, it is still developing--and I am slowly, belatedly, beginning to find it everywhere in Browning. It is the place where my life and my work--very long estranged, breached by teaching and other alienations--strain back to touch each other, promising the kind of coherence that I used to take as a kind of birthright, back when life looked a lot easier because we didn't know a damn thing about it. It's something with moments, like the Browning sonnet I posted last month, to get beyond asserting and against...I am sitting at my desk right now and looking at the quote I wrote out from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind a few months ago, the quote about "losing its balance against a background of perfect balance." The right to a beginner's mind not entirely recognized where I am, except in matters that are convenient to others. (A brush with triggermemories of the Worst Job I Ever Had this morning reminds me that I will never volunteer to organize an academic conference if I can help it.) And yet. Finally clearing spaces, a few at least, and this is all I can do for now. Withdrawing from the world, from excuses to spend money taking car services instead of just walking in silence, a withdrawal from talking to people all the time so that I can come back to my archive of the evanescent, to start thinking again.

"And what does the spirit need in the face of modern life? The sense of freedom....For us, necessity is not, as of old, a sort of mythological personage without us, with whom we can do warfare. It is rather a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network, subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the world. Can art represent men and women in these bewildering toils so as to give the spirit at least an equivalent for the sense of freedom?" -- Pater, "Wincklemann"

My funny Valentine needs a pseudonym

But nothing seems right just yet. Perhaps because so much of our interactions involve the invention of monikers for ourselves and each other, because these move quickly, because he comes up with the best ones--and so, anything I attempt to pull out of the current will be rendered almost immediately obsolete. It will never make sense and it will leave me feeling a tiny bit guilty for writing behind his back. (He has a blog, tied to his band's website, where he writes things that are impersonal and crazy and funny and beautiful. He's only written one post since I met him--it is based on a conversation we had over email and in person over the last week, and it includes a reference to something that I said, which makes me rather weak-kneed and butterfly-stomached--and all of it is completely surreal and nonsensical. He doesn't have a Facebook account.)

For now, then, he'll just be D.--the biggest box I can put him in, as non-signifying as possible.

He's beautiful, funny, and smart--a madman to be sure, but not one that raises redflags. He is changing the way I think about presence and the present. He spontaneously started reading from De Profundis when I was at his house on Friday morning. We share certain neuroses about noise and sleep and our fighting for mental and emotional space. I managed not to lead with all my traumas this time.

In short, I could get used to this, to this being able to smile without being obsessive, to getting phone calls at thoughtful times and mindspinning emails that make me laugh or empathize or--perhaps most of all--think and create. I could get used to holding hands in Prospect Park, to mornings in the suburbs, complete with a schoolbus and a hausfrau waving in sweatpants and overcoats. I could get used to white noise and not drinking so much I get hung over and to the ability to put uncertainty and stress into a box that doesn't take over my life. Yes--and I hope I get the chance.

For the moment, though, I am working through Browning, finally, trying to deal with the enormous amount of work that has piled up while I have been grinning into greenbrowngrey eyes over brunch tables and museum exhibits. Jeff Buckley's cover of "Hallelujah" is on Radio Paradise. I decided this week that it's stupid to even think of going on the market in the fall, and that stressed me out for the rest of the day but now I feel better. I am trying to remember that impermanence and uncertainty has to be welcomed even when it seems like a bad, destructive thing, and that I need to keep practicing even when I don't think I need to.

And I wouldn't tell you that my life is perfect. School is hard for a number of reasons. My computer is dying and I'm worried about money perpetually. My work habits have been embarrassing. I know that there are a lot of loose ends right now and I don't know how that's going to shake out.

But what I will say is this--I looked back here at the archives for last February, and I am grateful to have many of the same problems without the feeling of abject wretchedness.

And so, happy Valentines day indeed.

"When the shoe fits / The foot is forgotten"

I was wrong in the post that I made last Sunday, about how by now I'd either be foolishly and stupidly happy or I'd be disappointed and angry with myself.

I am happy, yes, but it's not the feeling I've expected. All I can say is this:

Yesterday was one of the best days I've had in New York in a very, very long time.

Perhaps that's it; nothing else to say right now except to mark this calmness. Certainly a bit of grogginess--I've come down with a head cold, so I'm pretty run down, going to bed soon, and facing the lesson planning monster for most of tomorrow, hoping for a good night's sleep. But even this cold may be, in a certain reading, auspicious--I was telling him just the other day about my experience of the psychosomatic head cold related to Maud and certain other texts--and in a way it's possible to see this as a gift, the sheer physical impossibility of working myself up to the heartracing nervous excitement that accompanied most of my interactions with J. What I feel instead is a kind of groundedness and peace, a sense of gratitude, almost, for a day of being in affectionate physical contact with another person. I've never had so much fun at the Brooklyn Museum. Holding hands over dinner and in the car as he drove....But I don't want to get all mushy about it because it isn't that, not at all.

I'm trying, for the moment, to realize trust in the present, to allow myself to be present to where I am and who I am with. Another small gift: I was awake at a certain hour this morning, in spite of head cold / grogginess / it being Sunday because I thought my bathroom ceiling was going to be fixed. That didn't happen, but it made me available for something vastly more important.

And, again. Reflecting on the week, it seems now that I can perceive a kind of opening to this, how everyone else who could have made these kind of claim on me had faded a bit. The Poet in Puerto Rico and not emailing or calling (until tonight, a bad signal before we could even say hello and I didn't call back), other email exchanges dropping off, a substitute meditation leader on Wednesday, not running into K despite many hours spent in the library, making peace with J on Monday in a way that cleared some space there as well...I didn't even have time to sign into Nerve this week, and it stopped seeming important. It wasn't just him, it was the beginning of school, the need to be present for several friends, to finish the fellowship application, to go to the gym, and on and on. And I won't put too much on this. It needs to remain what it is for now and we'll go from there. I'll appreciate things like the fact that, for now, most of my apartment is spectacularly clean and that I woke up this morning feeling more ready to work (in spite of the cold) than I have in a long time. I did my Key Food grocery shopping to make this fantastic bean / sweet potato / peanut soup. I finished The Renaissance and started thinking again, despite the slowdown feeling from the cold. I don't feel my usual Sunday night impulse to make a thousand impossible lists. There is a lot to be done tomorrow, but I know what I have to do, I always know what I have to do, but this is different. He's coming to Brooklyn again on Friday.

(Parenthetically, I will admit to the fact that he is also incredibly pretty. In the best way possible. In certain lights he reminded me of a taller, somewhat less tough version of J; from other angles he could seem almost impossibly young. All of this should make me nervous, but how could I be nervous when less than five minutes after we enter the museum he threw his arms around me from behind and we proceeded to spend two hours walking around holding hands? This never happens to me....)

I'm going to sleep now, hoping that the cold will work its way through my system tonight, having done the work I needed it to do. In the meantime, the text of the poem by Chuang Tzu--the source of the title of this post and something that's been quoted in several of the podcasts I've been listening to lately:

Ch'ui the draftsman
Could draw more perfect circles freehand
Than with a compass.

His fingers brought forth
Spontaneous forms from nowhere. His mind
Was meanwhile free and without concern
With what he was doing.

No application was needed
His mind was perfectly simple
And knew no obstacle.

So, when the shoe fits
The foot is forgotten,
When the belt fits
The belly is forgotten,
When the heart is right
"For" and "against" are forgotten.

No drives no compulsions,
No needs, no attractions:
Then your affairs
Are under control.
You are a free man.

Easy is right. Begin right
And you are easy.
Continue easy and you are right.
The right way to go easy
Is to forget the right way
And forget that the going is easy.

I suppose I will have to find him a pseudonym.

How it is in the new semester / lunar year

* I was halfway to the subway this morning, walking with the groggy half-formed intention to go to the gym, when I realized I'd forgotten my shoes. Decided that was a sign that I should go to the gym later in the afternoon instead.

* I always forget about the difficulties of building a rapport with a class in the first week. Duh. But I think they will be good. It's the first time I've ever taught two classes in a semester, though when the dust of registration settles, I'll probably have about as many students as I had in my first year at Erstwhile Teaching College. Nevertheless, it's a weird sensation to go through everything twice and I'm sure I'm going to end up both repeating myself and forgetting what I've told which class.

* J. came over on Monday night. It was okay. We were able to explain some things to each other that made the past less uncomfortable. There's still a bruise that hurts if I brush across it the wrong way--denoting something like the state of noncoincidence that I feel like I write about a lot--that neither one of us was in a position, a place, a time, that allowed us to be anything like our best. I'm trying to trust that reading.

* J. was supposed to have come over on Sunday, but he never got in touch with me and I decided I'd rather talk on the phone with the guy I haven't met yet but who keeps sending me the fantastic emails. The phone conversation was similarly pleasant. I wish I didn't know all the things that could go wrong here. And yet: I give myself over to these missives--in part, perhaps, because I feel like he's also doing the same and I rarely ever feel that kind of parity. And the emails are just so damn charming, and it's been awhile since I've had a correspondent who can kind of pull me up like that. Even if it only ends up lasting for ten days, that's something.

* I am trying to trust the present moment. This is something I said to myself at the beginning of last semester, too, but it was knowledge that never reached the level of realization. Trying to get closer to realization this time around--which means, among other things, going to the zendo in today's disgusting weather.

* I keep having dreams about moving and about amateur spectacles. Usually I'm not the one doing the moving, but last night I had a dream where I broke up with The Ex all over again, but it was actually much easier and we lived in a sort of 50s-style midtown apartment complete with twin beds. I wonder if there's some displacement that I'm not dealing with.

* I've started listening to KCRW a lot.

* I fear that I've lost the thread of my dissertation over the last three weeks. This disturbs me. Need to address that. Also need to write a conference paper for March. Augh.

* On the plus side, I'm getting a surprisingly large paycheck from Not-NYU this week. I may try to buy new pants.

I clearly don't do guarded optimism

I've never had a correspondence quite like this one. The rest of Nerve bores me. I listened to his voicemail three times.

And next week at this time, I will either be ridiculously, foolishly happy (with the bittersweet task of once again telling The Poet we should see other people, not long after he was talking about how he'd totally come see me in Duluth if I got a job there)....or I will be banging my head against my desk, failing to focus on prep, and wondering why I once again let myself get textually invested in someone before meeting him in real life.

Mid-January funk

Yeah, so that New Year's resolution lasted about as long as Robert Browning's one about writing a poem a day in 1853, except for the part where he wrote "Childe Roland" on the third day. (I've been doing somewhat better at the weekly project I've undertaken at the place where I blog under my own name.) I think a lot of it was just the reality check I had last weekend when I realized that the start of the spring semester was a lot closer than I thought it was--and this is a really intense prep this time around. (New course, new material, not a topic I know much about.) I spent a lot of last week going back and forth between the library and the adjunct office at Not-NYU so I could use the photocopier, it's been ridiculously cold, and my shoulders are still in a lot of pain. I don't have the huge amounts of emotional angst that I had last January, but I don't feel grounded or productive or engaged--not like I did in the first week, but I wasn't really working efficiently then either. I've done really nothing dissertation-related since the latest draft of my fellowship application; I was going to do another draft today but just never really got around to it. My syllabus is due on Wednesday. It's closer than it was, but there's a lot that's still vague and unread, some holes that still need to be addressed. A bunch of offices have been moving at Not-NYU and I don't know what the tech situation will be this week.

Being on Nerve has been a bust so far, though at least I got to see an interesting play. Have been on two dates that went nowhere and that were clearly going nowhere from the first half hour, though for different reasons. The highlights of last week lay elsewhere. Mostly having to do with The Poet. I sent him an email when I got home last night that basically said, I wish I'd been able to know you at 40. I don't indulge in that feeling often, but I had been feeling this powerfully as my eyes glazed over while reading the profiles of all these dudes who are just that--dudes--not men. I know that some forms of masculinity get a bad rap, but I want to believe that being a douchebag is not the same thing as being a man.

J. seems to want to get back into my life, but I told him I wasn't going to have these text-message exchanges again.

I haven't been as good about going to the gym as I could be. I also seem to have very little lunch-appropriate food in my apartment, so I ate brussels sprouts at like 2:30 and now I'm starving and I still haven't read The Craft of Research and my shoulders and upper arms hurt, and I gave up on zazen today and it's hot in here and I'm going out in 45 minutes. So what I'm probably going to go do now is make a to-do list and marvel that this is the last night of the Bush presidency.

Where frustration and watching Private Practice online while drinking white wine leads:

I rewrote and then reactivated my Nerve profile. I'm not sure how I feel about this.

Epigraphical poem of the day

(Presented in full and without much comment because--well--just because, I think. This is the best I can get in words from a day like today and I'm simply trying to read and work so I have one less reason to feel frustrated, thwarted, and alone by the end of the day.)

Robert Browning, "Now" (1889)
Out of your whole life give but a moment!
All of your life that has gone before,
All to come after it,--so you ignore,
So you make perfect the present,--condense,
In a rapture of rage, for perfection's endowment,
Thought and feeling and soul and sense--
Merged in a moment which gives me at last
You around me for once, you beneath me, above me--
Me--sure that despite of time future, time past,--
This tick of our life-time's one moment you love me!
How long such suspension may linger? Ah, Sweet--
The moment eternal--just that and no more--
When ecstasy's utmost we clutch at the core
While cheeks burn, arms open, eyes shut and lips meet!

--

I kind of just wish I could figure out what I'm doing wrong, why I can't work and focus, while I'm always tired no matter what I do, why certain reversals and changes of plans still bother me and wreak a kind of bodily sensation of being dragged down. I want to break out of all this for more than a couple hours at a time. I'm afraid of it catching up with me and then this entire charade is up.

"The small becomes the dreadful and immense"

Browning, "Mr. Sludge, 'The Medium'" (1864)

(It's over 1,500 lines long, so I think this can make up for the fact that yesterday got away from me before I could read a poem, much less read and post. And, hey, I kept my resolution as long as Browning kept his, yo.)

This is one of those ridiculously capacious Victorian poems--not exactly In Memoriam, to be sure, but able to pack in quite a bit of material. Most of which I'm not actually going to talk about here because I need to accomplish something else today other than the Poem of the Day post. Briefly, however: I know that this is supposed to be Browning's great indictment of the spiritualist movement and in particular the medium that had counted Elizabeth Barrett Browning among his disciples. And, yeah, it works at that, with the American connection being a nice twist on it all--the notes in my edition of the poem (Penguin Classics) mention that this is Browning's only dramatic monologue that features an American speaker. Sludge's construction of his credulous, status-obsessed, exploitative patron is also kind of interesting, especially since there are a couple of points in the confession where we seem to veer towards the epistemological concerns of nineteenth-century (British and American) philanthropy--basically, Sludge taunts his patron with the view that, if the patron exposes Sludge as a fraud, then the patron is also exposing himself as someone who has been taken in by a fraud. And so everyone (we get the sense) ends up affirming belief so as not to look stupid. (And they create philanthropic institutions to figure out who's really deserving of charitable aid. The modern equivalent is the ads on the subways that discourage people from giving to panhandlers and recommend charitable contributions as an alternative....)

Definitely something going on with issues of class and epistemology here...something I wasn't expecting, but perhaps there's something in this idea of the "medium" as a stand in for a kind of ascendant middle class who simply gives their customers what they're asking for, regardless of whether they believe it or not....but, see, I'm already not doing a good job here--I felt throughout the poem that I was being kind of twisted around. I know some of this is rhythmic, having to do with the way that Browning is using caesuras and dashes within the blank verse line, but it also has to do with the structure of argumentation, which has the effect, more or less, of shutting down the experimental narrative--for Sludge, you test him and he seems to succeed! There's an interesting discourse here around the idea of what someone can or can't know: what Sludge's observers read as his supernatural powers is really just a symptom of their own dullness in underestimating (misunderestimating?) him: they assume he "can't know" what he knows, when in fact, he can. This seems like a discussion I want to pursue a bit further, especially as Sludge also talks about reading / observing the world in a way that evokes both the figure of the poet in Browning's earlier poem, "How It Strikes a Contemporary" (and, indeed, Sludge twice remarks that his own discourse seems to be falling into poetry) and the opening sections of Foucault's The Order of Things. And I wonder if one of the things that makes the "medium" (at least in this rendering) such a frustrating figure is precisely his resemblance to poets, philosophers, artists--indeed, to anyone else who aims to remake the world in a meaningful way. And I'm not sure that makes a whole lot of sense, but I'm going to leave this for now to allow myself to keep working this one out in my own head. I made many more notes than I'm sharing here, of course.

Possibly not unrelatedly, however, is the sense I've had today of simply needing to be open to things and present to them. It's an okay place to be in for January at least. Must keep working now, though.

A quick poem of the day

Robert Browning, "Apparent Failure" (1864)

Looking at suicides in the Paris morgue--this would have been interesting to have come across when I was in my premature burial phase last summer. The speaker, at least as far as I'm concerned, seems to reflect a kind of obnoxiously narrow view of what might motivate someone to commit suicide, though I realize that may be part of the point of calling the poem "Apparent Failure"--it begins with an epigraph related to the tearing down of the building and the speaker's seemingly quixotic vow to save it.

The poem ends thus:

It's wiser being good than bad;
It's safer being meek than fierce:
It's fitter being sane than mad.
My own hope is, a sun will pierce
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched;
That, after Last, returns the First,
Though a wide compass round be fetched;
That what began best, can't end worst,
Nor what God bless once, prove accursed.

--and it's these kind of moments in Browning (orthodoxy flirting with tautology yet also possibly sincerity) that I find most disturbing.

----

In other news, I joined a gym, worked out for two hours, and got a haircut. Let the 2009 model begin.

"'Tis only a duplicate, / A thing of no value! Take it, I supplicate!"

Robert Browning, "A Likeness" (1864)

Deserves more attention than I'm able to give it at this very moment, but resonates with "Youth and Art" at least to the extent that it expresses a similar situation of investing objects, images, people, with a significance or other meaning that they can't possibly have. Expressing also something the weirdness of a culture where images are commodified, where you could buy a portrait of a complete stranger and hang it on your wall, as in the first stanza:

Some people hang portraits up
In a room where they dine or sup:
And the wife clinks tea-things under,
And her cousin, he stirs his cup,
Asks, 'Who was the lady, I wonder?'
' 'Tis a daub John bought at a sale,'
Quoth the wife, -- looks black as thunder:
'What a shade beneath her nose!
Snuff-taking, I suppose, --'
Adds the cousin, while John's corns ail.

This would be a fun poem for thing theorists, since it contains one of those eminently Victorian lists of objects that make up a bachelor's home...and there's a certain sadness that surrounds the scene. I wonder if this is a sadness somehow particularly linked to the awareness of referential instability--even the poem's title has that built in.

----
I'm having mouse drama in my apartment again. Basically, the odor that I thought was coming from the stinky cheese I'd saved from Christmas Eve lingered long after the cheese had been disposed of, and around 3:00 yesterday afternoon I had the sudden horrible thought of the glue trap in the kitchen. Fortunately, the building's handyman was coming up to look at something else, so I asked him to check that, too. Apparently, there were like four dead mice on the thing. Ew. Nevertheless, my apartment began to smell better immediately.

The drama didn't end, though. As I was relating the story on the phone to my father later, I saw--from the other end of my apartment--yet another mouse out for a stroll on my kitchen floor. This displeases me, and mice are one of the few things that I remain incredibly squeamish about--in any form.

Fortunately, the handyman should be coming back today to repair the hole in my shower and patch the one under my sink where I think the mice are coming in. And hopefully that will defer the drama a bit longer. At least I'm coping better this time than I did in May.

I'm also really going to try to do some actual work today. I probably didn't need to watch Private School on Hulu last night, did I?

Things that are not the poem of the day

Yesterday (Jan. 2) was an anniversary of sorts, being one year to the day when I first went out with The Poet. We met for a drink at the KGB Bar and accidentally found ourselves at a poetry reading that seemed to be dominated exclusively by awkward, skinny dudes in their early 20s reading mediocre poems about Nebraska and Times Square. And at one point, The Poet leaned over to me and said, "It's awful to be a young man. If one has to be young, one should be a woman." I still think this is kind of awesome and hilarious.

I was not, I should say, treating this as a date at the time. I was just coming off the several months of drama that had been my online dating experience, I'd done enough digging to know more or less how old he was and feel like that was possibly too old, and I was still very committed to not sleeping with anyone in my department (having previously reneged on my resolution not to sleep with anyone who went to my school at all). The vicious cold that I'd brought back from MLA with me was just insurance. We went to dinner after the poetry reading at a restaurant that we've been to many times since, though it was located for me in what was, at the time, something of a Bermuda Triangle of trauma. (My route from the subway to the bar had taken me, unexpectedly, past the hotel bar where E. broke up with me--a bar which later came into tabloid headlines as a major hangout for Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson. I can, fortunately, joke about that now, too.) I remember not being able to taste the lasagna because I was so congested. And I was kind of surprised when he emailed me later in January. I hadn't been sparkling, nor had I wanted to be, necessarily.

Of course, now it's a year later, and he's one of the best things that happened to me on a personal level in 2008.

I spent January 2, 2009, tearing up Chinatown with one of my favorite people ever who is also an avid reader of this blog so I don't really need to go into details except to reiterate that *she's* the one who should be writing a novel, not me.

I'm still getting stuck in these really slow and unproductive mornings. I guess it's kind of forgivable since it was Saturday and I was skipping the Greenmarket in order to attend to the food I already had in my freezer. But I'm still letting all this time slip away. It was telling that when I got home from the bank with the half of my rent that I pay in cash, the first thing I did before even taking off my coat was sit down at the laptop and see what was going on on Facebook. These are the kinds of things I need to be more aware of. This didn't, of course, stop me from watching four episodes of Arrested Development (all of which I have seen before) during a two-hour "lunch." Augh. Am trying to slowly cross some things off the old to-do list this evening.

Robert Browning, "Youth and Art" (1864)

"Each life unfulfilled, you see;
It hangs still, patchy and scrappy:
We have not sighed deep, laughed free,
Starved, feasted, despaired, --been happy."

A young man and a young woman live in the same street (probably in a neighborhood a bit like my own) as they pursue their artistic vocations--his as a sculptor, hers as a singer. She's telling the story: "You wanted a piece of marble, / I needed a music master" and "For air we looked out on the tiles, / For fun watched each other's windows." An unspoken intimacy develops, though neither one ever talks to the other. Yet even in spring, the time of year when birds of a feather flock together, as it were (and I take the image from the poem itself), they never really intersect, no sign is given, no connection made--as if genre and gender are impassible, allowing only these sorts of passive-aggressive performances that have her singing "in a playful mood" to the "foreign fellow" of a piano tuner as revenge for the models she sees going into his studio, "some minx / Tripped up-stairs, she and her ankles."

It should have been different, of course. They should have gotten together, swept each other away to heights of artistic achievement. But our young artists aren't "rash" and they grow up and sell out instead. He becomes academically respectable, she marries "a rich old lord," their old rivals still stand unchallenged:

And nobody calls you a dunce,
And people suppose me clever:
This could but have happened once,
And we missed it, lost it forever.

This one strikes quite close to home, particularly in the stubborn suggestion that the intimacy might be all in Kate's head as she recalls this time in her life, a time whose poverty is marked not only by the images of picking at crusts but also by the way in which intimacy is fashioned from absences, from the missed possibilities of encounter in a shabby street, and from a kind of romanticization of the camaraderie of struggling artists in the city. How easy it is, in these kinds of situations, to begin to look out of your window as people go about their lives across the street in their own homes and to think that maybe they're looking back and thinking as hard about you as you are about them. (And it's not just starving young artists in the city--isn't this one of the fantasies that gets played out in American Beauty? and other movies, I'm sure.)

The text of the poem is here.

Bonus epigraph, for something

Already how am I so far
Out of that minute? Must I go
Still like the thistle-ball, no bar,
Onward, whenever light winds blow,
Fixed by no friendly star?

Just when I seemed about to learn!
Where is the thread now? Off again!
The old trick! Only I discern—
Infinite passion, and the pain
Of finite hearts that yearn.

--Browning, "Two in the Campagna," stanzas XI and XII

A poem a day and other more specific resolutions

In spite of my decision to do rather than to resolve that I outlined last night (right before the awful bass started up again, prompting me to make two trips upstairs to have my knocking on the door ignored, and nearly necessitating another night of sleeping on the floor of my living room and much angst), I am also thinking in terms of some more specific ideas for supporting my overall intention to live for myself. Many of these take the form of more traditional "resolutions"--for instance, I'm joining the gym my friend Caroline goes to on Monday and we are going to be responsible for helping each other get back in the habit of going. (Personally, I think that once the semester starts I'll be shooting for a minimum of twice a week, since it's not somewhere I can walk to.) I let my membership at the Erstwhile Teaching College gym lapse once I wasn't teaching there and no longer could keep my workout clothes in my desk--plus, it became really out of the way when I started teaching at Not-NYU, which doesn't have its own gym facilities. And I do feel better when I'm going to the gym at least occasionally. There are also things about keeping my apartment in better shape, buying a few things that will improve my life in concrete and necessary ways (one of those alarm clocks that gradually makes the room brighter, an external hard drive for my Mac, an electrostatic mop so I don't have to keep buying Swiffer sheets, and so on).

One thing I just thought of this morning, however. One of the more famous stories about Robert Browning is that he made a New Year's resolution to write a poem a day in 1853. He kept this resolution for roughly three days, but one of the poems that came out of it was "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. I don't write poetry, but I do--of course--write about poetry. I tell people that I got into the field I did because it made me happy; that's something I feel like I've lost sight of over the past couple of years as I've started to go pro, as it were, with the exception of a few emotionally fraught late-night recitations of Maud and "Dejection: An Ode." So my version of Browning's resolution is this: I will read a new poem every day in 2009, starting now. Obviously, many of these will be poems related in some way to my work, and there will be days when I no doubt will read many new poems for reasons other than this resolution. But I want this to be somewhat separate, even as I leave room for it to serve multiple ends. The only reason for doing this is to stay in touch with the reasons why I'm doing this in the first place, beyond the specific instrumentality of the dissertation. I'm also going to try to record this here--even if it's just noting the name of the poem and a brief description, as I'm probably going to do today. Probably the quickest way to fail in this would be to expect to have brilliant close readings about everything.

I'm starting with a Browning poem, because I'm reading a lot of Browning these days anyway. ("A Death in the Desert" was incredibly haunting--possibly in ways that will make me rethink the basic chapter proposal.) And so:

Robert Browning, "Confessions" (1864--originally in Dramatis Personae). Short poem of 36 lines in nine stanzas...speaker is a man on his deathbed talking to his confessor, remembering the world not as a "vale of tears" but recalling instead trysts with a girl in his youth, evading the eyes of everyone in her house to meet her in the lane...joys of evasion, perhaps? (The dying man as a recurring scene for RB--of course there's "The Bishop Orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's" and "A Death in the Desert" but also an image in "Childe Roland"....) Most interesting, perhaps is the speaker's use of the line of "physic bottles" on a nearby table to evoke the "suburb lane"--mentioning the Ether bottle twice, the second time in a way that somewhat collapses the referential levels: "As she left the attic, there, / By the rim of the bottle labelled 'Ether,' / And stole from stair to stair."