so much hassle on the blog...

they're trying to get me to switch to something they're calling "your new BLOGGER account," that involves "cookies," google, and java. coffee and treats? i doubt it. but it hampers my ability to log in when i've got a few peaceful snowy moments at home and restricts me to my office computer here at work. i've got genet on the brain, immersed in Miracle of the Rose over the weekend and throughout the previous week, having assigned in for a class...wonder how they'll respond, i'm curious. and watched "Un Chant D'Amour" on ubuweb (thank you Kenny Goldsmith!!!), which is beautiful, beautiful but sometimes laughably melodramatic or romantic; the two men frolicking in the verdant woods together, the one chasing the other...it moves me the way adolescent excess, especially my own, moves me. today i got some great clothes from my sister and from Lisa Arrastia, and i feel like a million buckeroonies getting ready to teach my 2nd class. life floats by dreamlike, veering strangely between feelings of overwhelming business and melancholic or happy torpor...sometimes within moments of each other. The sky looks like wallpaper scrolling by framed by my office window, identical thin-shaved clouds, as if big fat cumuli were sliced on a mandoline and placed like tiles across the sky, which, fortunately, is blue and gold after a few days of snowy blankness. These moments of self/nature reflection are supposed to be anathema to what they call "post-modern" poets, but i can't deny the feeling of peace that a few moments of objective correlating and breathing do a lot to ground me. ok that's it; i can't go on i'll go on. that sentence will be on the cake for our next year's Samuel Beckett 101 celebration...

finally and new year...

finally a real minnesota winter's daynight, with windchills in the negative digits and 30 below up north. i like to cook on days like today, to create a little extra heat in the house and stimulate my senses with smells and textures. I made a greek leek/spinach/feta pie, very lowfat except for the cheese, with only a dusting of cornmeal for the upper and lower "crusts." there's a lot of poetry in the world right now, streaming through the air like radio frequencies, sometimes you can catch it, especially when the cold air makes everything so super-crisp. Eric and Kelly, the Raintaxi folks, live kitty-corner across the back alley from me, and as i got out of my car after a nice session at the gym i heard their windchimes in the dark...an exquisite sound, it sounded like angels we have heard on high, or the music of the spheres; highpitched but sweet, piercing but blending harmoniously with all the other chimes... I've been living here for 2 and a half years or so and i never even noticed that sound. That's poetry for you. It reminds me of the month i spent in dathun at Karme Choling in Vermont, and walking the half-mile or so from the dormitory to the meditation hall in the early morning before dark, and hearing the telephone poles singing furiously in the cold silence. My practice is deepening...i never even understood what people meant when they said that, i would listen with envy and slight impatience, a bit of shame at my lack of diligence ... but that's the past. Now, for the last several weeks, I've had wonderful rushes of feeling/insight/trains of thought while sitting, and though i know better than to make a superbig deal out of each instance, i can't deny that it's rewarding and feels special during and after it happens. I've been having delightful workouts at the gym as well, this january break, a real gift to do these daily trips unworried and unhurried about time and pressing obligations. Last night enjoyed Uzbeki pizza in North Mpls with Mark Nowak and Lisa Arrastia, we laughed and yakked. We were just about the first folks in there at six, and they were inverting the chairs on the tables when we left. The guy who took our orders and served us was, i think the son of the owners, an Afghan and his Minnesotan wife, and he was reading Rumi. Very sweet. That's it for now. I've been blogging for a year now, off and on, mostly off, but it's been a soothing space where i can recommit to the expansion of spirit that writing accomplishes for me, unambitious writing in its way, ambitious in its other way as well.

tabnabbed!

so, like, i've been "tagged" by Rodney Koeneke so i will list 5 little-known facts about myself. What does "little-known" mean? What is "myself?" I will try to do this in a way that still makes me "viable" in case potential employers cruise my blog; i have heard that this happens. Fortunately I like my job right now.
1. my father went to boston latin school w/ leonard bernstein.
2. my mother rode her bike to school w/ asger jorn.
3. i never met a dairy product i didn't like.
4. i used to be but now i am.
5. for my high school graduation present, my folks paid for the printing of a self-published ms of poetry called "Waiting: A View from the Earth;" it was a green spiral-bound booklet done by a commercial printer my mother used; several copies were at Grolier's Poetry Bookshop for years until i bought them back in a blush of self-consciousness. And I never let my folks read it.