the rain has gone. After about 10 rainy cloudy sunless days in a row, my energy level had plummeted and my crankiness level was extra high. Today, FINALLY, the sun is shining. It is really beautiful here in Homer, especially when you can see the mountains and the ocean and a blue sky. Here is a photo of the view from our house, taken last summer, but still visually valid.
Coming down
out of the freezing sky
with its depths of light,
like an angel,
or a buddha with wings,
it was beautiful
and accurate,
striking the snow and whatever was there
with a force that left the imprint
of the tips of its wings –
five feet apart – and the grabbing
thrust of its feet,
and the indentation of what had been running
through the white valleys
of the snow –
And then it rose, gracefully,
and flew back to the frozen marshes,
to lurk there,
like a little lighthouse,
in the blue shadows –
so I thought:
maybe death
isn’t darkness, after all,
but so much light
wrapping itself around us –
as soft as feathers –
that we are instantly weary
of looking, and looking, and shut our eyes,
not without amazement,
and let ourselves be carried,
as through the translucence of mica,
to the river
that is without the least dapple or shadow –
that is nothing but light – scalding, aortal light –
in which we are washed and washed
out of our bones.
By Mary Oliver
From House of Light copyright © 1990, Beacon Press
Since it is August 1st, it’s time to start preparations for the impending arrival of the Perseid meteor showers, which are due this year, according to NASA) on Friday, August 12th between 2:00 a.m. and dawn. For people who don’t like to tilt their heads all the way back to look at the sky, my friend, Chris Wand, sent me this site for images of the weather in space.
It’s August 1st. Maybe you’ve already noticed this fact about today. Brad and I, and about ten other people in our regular Monday yoga class, failed to note the class schedule change that took effect at the end of July and showed up at the normal time for our class today; but our teacher wasn’t coming until tomorrow. So I offered to lead the class — and people were willing to go along and we did a yoga class together, which was very fun for me. I’ve been doing yoga on and off for about 20 years, but I’ve never taught a yoga class before. We moved our bodies around (safely) together and did some fairly elementary variations of the Sun series and breathed and laughed together. Tomorrow we’ll go to our regular real class with our regular real teacher and I’ll stand facing my usual direction and be grateful to be a student again.
Just when you think that maybe your mother (and The Bens (B) and (C)) are the only people who read your blog, Barry Eisler, the author of the John Rain thriller series, posted a comment on Brad’s blog (which has 2,914 subscribers at this moment) saying
And Amy and Brad, thanks for your kind words about my books. Really glad you’re enjoying them. Cheers, Barry
How cool is that? A real writer taking the time to connect with his readers..
Haven’t posted for the past few days because we have fun visitors here from Boulder. Dave Jilk and his wife, Maureen, arrived Friday afternoon, which meant that Friday I cleaned all the small nooks and crannies and corners of kitchen and bathrooms with Clorox Wipes and ran both the upstairs and downstairs Roombas and put clean fluffy flannel sheets on the guest bed and bought and arranged fresh flowers and did all the things that I think are necessary to be ready for company.
Only on page 321 of Infinite Jest because I’ve been staying up late talking with Dave and Maureen and looking at maps of Alaska and deciding that time zones are strange and nonsensical. Dave and Maureen got up and out of the house this morning to take the water taxi across Kachemak Bay to do some hiking and glacier viewing in the park. Brad and I stayed in bed, which is really one of my favorite things to do on a Sunday morning. Going to go for a long walk on the Homer Spit (an ugly name for a beautiful spot) while Brad runs, and then probably take an afternoon nap before Dave and Maureen return. We’re heading to Halibut Cove for dinner at The Saltry and are hoping that the sun will shine sometime today.
It’s a gloomy cloudy Sunday morning, following several other days of gloom. Sometimes when I first get here I get overly enthralled with the idea of what it would be like to really move to a town of 4,000 people with great coffee, and a bookstore where you can get detailed advice on hiking trails as well as books, and super fresh sushi, and the limitless expanse of ocean and mountains. It was extra easy to spin out these fantasies this year because the weather really was inordinately hot and sunny (almost 70 degrees) for the first 3 weeks or so. But now we’re back to the reality of temperate climates, which is lots of clouds and the possibility of spatters of rain at any moment. I couldn’t take months of not seeing the sun on a regular basis, which is certainly part of why we’ll be going back to Boulder on Labor Day.
Prolix: tediously prolonged; wordy, or tending to speak or write at excessive length. Antonym: concise.
I’m on page 198 of Infinite Jest, and while I’m thoroughly enjoying myself, I must say that David Foster Wallace asks a lot of a reader. You actually must pay attention, read slowly, and use all of your vocabulary — and then some. I’ve used www.dictionary.com to look up palaver and apotheosizing and, ironically, prolix. I’m not finding it to be excessively wordy or tedious; it’s highly amusing and he has a real knack for capturing different voices and small moments that feel genuine — but he does use a LOT of words. David Foster Wallace is the anti-Hemingway. Antonym: concise.
Here’s his description of an FM radio show on M.I.T.’s station, "WYYY 109, Largest Whole Prime On The FM Band." [Although I want to ask some radio geek whether the FM broadcast band really goes all the way up to 109?]
Albeit literally sophomoric, "Those Were the Legends…" is a useful drama-therapy-type catharsis-op — M.I.T. students tend to carry their own special psychic scars: nerd, geek, dweeb, wonk, fag, wienie, four-eyes, spazola, limp-dick, needle-dick, dickless, dick-nose, pencil neck; getting your violin or laptop TP or entomologist’s kill-jar broken over your large head by thick-necked kids on the playground — and the show pulls down solid FM ratings, though a lot of that’s due to reverse-inertia, a Newton’s-II-like backward shove from the rabidly popular Madame Psychosis Hour, M-F 0000h.-0100h., which it precedes. (p. 182)
And a juicy tidbit from the almost 100 pages of end notes:
57. Ingesters’ accounts of the temporal-perception consequences of DMZ in the literature are, as far as Pemulis is concerned, vague and inelegant and more like mystical in the Tibetan-Dead-Book vein than rigorous or referentially clear; one account Pemulis doesn’t completely get but can at least get the neuro-titillating gist of is one monograph’s toss-off quote from an Italian lithographer who’d ingested DMZ once and made a lithograph comparing himself on DMZ to a piece of like Futurist sculpture, plowing at high knottage through time itself, kinetic even in stasis, plowing temporally ahead, with time coming off him like water in sprays and wakes. (p. 996)
And a small jewel of a sentence: "He had never been so anxious for the arrival of a woman he did not want to see." (p. 23)
And let’s not forget the herds of feral hamsters rampaging through the desert outside of Tucson (p. 93, and likely more to come since I’m only on page 198). This struck a personal chord with me because one of my numerous and varied types of childhood rodents was a mouse named Farrell; named both as a play on "feral" and as an homage to Suzanne Farrell, prima ballerina of the New York City Ballet and Balanchine muse. I like lemmings and capybara and pika and appreciate a writer who has the good sense to include hamsters in his sometime-in-the-alarmingly-near-future world.
Some of the things that other people say about Infinite Jest and one of his other books, Oblivion, and what he says himself corroborates my sense that he’s asking readers to dig deep and engage, and I’m happy to do so. I’m going to keep reading along — only 800 more pages to go..
Today’s New York Times Arts section has a fascinating article about women musicians achieving parity in orchestras, especially when they’re judged on musical ability alone. And another fascinating article about the male violinist who is filing a reverse discrimination suit against the New York Philmarmonic. The down and dirty world of classical music..
Instead of just reading junk/beach books during the summer (which I certainly also do), I like to tackle some big books, too. Last summer I read A Suitable Boy, by Vikram Seth, which was the longest book I had ever read at 1474 pages in a small font and narrow margins. Several kind commentors / bloggers have mentioned Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace in the same company as Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which is currently #1 on Amy’s Top Ten Books of 2005 List. My bulky copy (1079 pages including end notes) of Infinite Jest with its bright orange binding cover has been waiting patiently on the Read Me shelves here in Alaska for at least a year. I haven’t been able to start Everything is Illuminated for some reason — afraid I’ll be disappointed if it’s not as good as Loud/Close, maybe, or still letting that wonderful book seep into the aquifer of my memory.
I’ve been reading my Theravada Vipassana Buddhism books, too, which is the type of formal meditation I do, when I do it. Seeking the Heart of Wisdom: the Path of Insight Meditation is a classic, and Dharma Punx and Buddhism without Beliefs are all favorites. All of the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh do me good, too. An End to Suffering: the Buddha in the World keeps sitting at the bottom of my Current Reading pile, but I imagine that I’ll get to it before the Summer is over.
I’ll keep you posted on my progress as I read my way through Infinite Jest.
Thoughts In Random Patterns 