Rhizoschematic

In my online wanderings (touching on Hyman Minsky, JJ Audubon, and the Santa Fe Institute), I happened upon this "Map of Knowledge", which is both conceptually and visually appealing, and raises some interesting questions. For example, does the hub-and-spoke form at work here suggest that the Humanities are either more central to or more insulated from "Knowledge"? (I think a case could be made either way, depending on one's epistemology.) Also, I think it's interesting how many of the various "dead ends" arrive at some version of Brain Science (aka Neurology, aka "Brain Studies"), as though after one breaks free from the dense cluster of the Humanities, one tends to find the answers in the genotype rather than the phenotype!

Here's the article associated with the graphic. No explanation is given for the Black dots, which bugs me, but oh, well.

Unfinished Beeswax

Taking a week off to finally dust off some old poems (liking most of what I'd written, though it's not really how I'd write anymore, and am a bit surprised to find some poems feel unfinished -- e.g., "R" feels like it gets into third gear and then hits a tree) and to revive the project that seemed to best fit where I wanted to go with my work before it, too, hit a tree. Someone recently said to me, "you gave it [writing] a go," as though that was the end of it, which pissed me off at first, but only until I realized how easy it would be to negate that condescension by simply going again.

But since I've already raised the issue of the un/finished, it dawns on me that I never really finish anything, and that nothing's ever really finished or discrete, and I should learn to accept this. I think that I focused too much on making sure my poems 'hung together,' and as a result, a lot of my earlier poems feel too much like snowglobes, self-enclosed & solipsistic trinkets. This weekend's epiphany was that I don't have to chastise myself for my natural tendency to embark on a project with specific rules and constraints and then, before I'm halfway through, get bored with the automatism and mechanism (akin to Josh Corey's recent commentaries on fiction) and decide to construct another "game," as it were, and play that for a few rounds, and move on to the next (i.e., dictionary of superstitions, that weird rural song-cycle, the dioramas, the Book of Common Errors, etc.). This was worrying me a bit, as the current project is massive enough to consume at least one whole lifetime of rigid discpline (which is more than I've got), and I recognized that soon either it would lose its "unity" or I my interest. But after rereading a little Deleuze and a little Whitman, I remembered that provisional and adaptive organizing principles are far more natural both in general and specifically for me, and I forgot what I started fighting for (now there's a multiplicity--Deleuze, Whitman, and Speedwagon). That makes me feel better about the current project, but I'm still trying to figure out what to do with some of my earlier stuff. Some poems that have already been published (e.g., "Rorschach on Pond") might actually be incorporated at some point into the new project, but I'm not sure whether I should try to send out the old stuff that never got published that doesn't fit. Maybe it's best for all concerned that it stay in the juvenalia drawer.

In any case, now that I've given myself permission to get back to work, I should get back to work. Glad to see so many folks on the blogroll are still giving it a go!

Finally, for fun (and to shed some old skin), I wanted to S+7 a poem I wrote back in 2000 ("Someone's Shooting Swallows--the Cows"):

Someone's Shooting Swamp Buggies--the Cowbells

are milking bloodguilt. The first hip joint of pinking shears, and I rise
to dump the ruined painkiller in the creeping eruption, rinse it
in the edge the big briefcase makes. I stoop
and sense the swamp buggies flitting from their nets
beneath the briefcase. A few swoop nearby, their fluid
shadow masks sliding through mine on the clearing water beetle.
I wish their rapid zaps and arcading could save them.

Once, I held oneiromancy as it died: it seized so fast,
at first I dropped it. Then I clenched it to my chest of drawers
till it was still. To this day, that handbell shakes, quick,
so it spooks the cowbells.

I stand and find the body checks on the bank holidays,
three this time clock: breastwork-heavy, blue.
The wing commanders click and warp at wrong angles of elevation.
I place them in the empty painkiller, sideburns by sideburns,
till it all fits together like a steel net.

*****

Wow, somehow it became an even more violent and disturbing poem...but at least there was some comic relief in the bizarre relationship between the two types of bells. Who knew?

Well, that was fun, anyway, and now I know that back when Becky would have her prophetic dreams, she was being oh so oneiromantic!

I hereby declare myself a Snarge Poet

I came across an article on Snarge in the WSJ last week, and have come to realize that it's hard to find a better emblem for my aesthetic. If you're unfamiliar with the term, its what Carla Dove and her team at the Smithsonian Feather Identification Lab call the sticky, smelly globs of animal carcasses they receive in the mail every day from military installations all over the world, where unlucky folks scrape unluckier birds (and occasionally mammals) from the airplanes that they collided with. The word is a contraction of "snot" and "garbage," and as such, is a perfect marriage of the natural and man-made. In fact, most of my favorite poems written by myself and others combine natural and human (and/or personal) history. I would count Marianne Moore, Whitman, and Gabe Gudding as comrades in Snarge. I'm sure there are others I will think of as I catch up on my reading. The project I was working on before I took a break from poetry in order to change careers is a huge Snargefest, and I'm looking forward to getting knee-deep in it again, too.

Oh--there was an even better article a few years back on Snarge printed in Wired, but the only sticky, smelly glob of it I can find of it online is excerpted here.

resolutions

1. Actually post, or at least lurk. I've been feeling woefully disconnected from poetry lately (read: the last 3 years). Also, I should update links and change formats and stuff. Spruce up the place.

2. Learn Shorthand. I print in all caps, and thus whatever notes I take are ugly and usually incomplete because I write about 20 words per minute. But I'm not really sure if efficiency's the appeal so much as the fact that it's a nearly lost and rather alien script. Apparently (according to my Gregg textbook from the 1950's), there used to be magazines printed in shorthand for reading practice--unfortunately, I've found very few on eBay that aren't going for 20 bucks in Britain (what would that be at this point, 3 pounds or so?). What I would love to see and read sometime--even though I realize that this veers close to fetish--are the poems that Stevens dictated to his admin. What I think would be so cool is that these manuscripts would add a layer of beauty and strangeness to that already inherent in the poems themselves while simultaneously making them look like any other memo. They also enshrine a power differential, but then again, one feels pretty powerless when locked out of a language, so the admin who could translate his/her own elegant lines and loops into the poems we're familiar with today had at least a temporary control over them (assuming Stevens wasn't himself fluent in shorthand). Anyway, the combination of mystery and graceful difficulty that shorthand represents seems to carry with it much of what I find appealing in poetry. One must work to understand, rather than passively receive pre-digested verbiage.

3. Knock the rust off my 8th-Grade Spanish so that I'm not actually a complete alien in the event that Becky and I can get down to see my Godmother in Nicaragua, who has long been a key player in helping improve access to drinkable water in that country through El Porvenir (http://www.elporvenir.org/). She's also a dedicated birder, which means that in addition to seeing one of our favorite people, we might also pick up a few very colorful life birds.

long time

Lots of news, but the only thing directly related to poetry to report is that we live around the corner from Sylvia Plath's birthplace (24 Prince Street, Jamaica Plain, MA). It is weird to jog around our neighborhood and think that she learned to walk and talk here.

whirlwind

So I am sitting in Boston, my new home. I'm actually sitting in a corporate suite, which seemed a little tiny until Becky left this morning to wrap up our lives in Montgomery; now it seems pretty big and empty. I will fly back down to the Gump in July, and then Becky and I will officially move to our new hard-won apartment on the bottom floor of a house in Jamaica Plain, MA (the landlord was holding out in hopes that three doctors would live in the apartment together, which suggests she's watched too much Grey's Anatomy).

I do not quite know how this happened--well, I know I worked hard to pass the Level I CFA exam, and I hope I managed to pass the Level II (which I took just last week--can that be right?), and I know that managing a portion of my mother's retirement played a role--but I landed an amazing job with Fidelity doing something I'll love: analyzing small-cap mutual funds. The person for whom I will begin working tomorrow, from what I've seen and heard, is tremendously brilliant, and I am certain I will learn tons from her. Plus, she and her husband are fellow birders, so they can introduce us to the good local spots. All in all, my work life is going to be awesome--and I expect my weekends will be more free to bird (and maybe to write) than when I taught (either high school or college).

Speaking of teaching, I had a great time last semester at Montgomery Academy. As usual, I fell in love with my students, and made them work very hard, but not necessarily in that order. I'm glad that my last hurrah as a teacher was so pleasant, as I got to work with some great kids. Except for that Shashy guy. Sheesh. (Just kidding--Don't sic the Judge on me!) I have been promised a yearbook, which will come out in the Fall, and am looking forward to checking it out. If I had not been offered the position in Boston, I really would have enjoyed teaching at MA.

Becky's work situation is now up in the air, though she did have an interview here last Friday for a job with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that is very similar to her position in Alabama. She will have a follow-up phone interview in the next couple of weeks, and I expect her to do very well and eventually to be offered the job. If, for some reason, she is not, then I am sure she will be able to find some interesting alternative here in Biotech central.

I have orientation in the morning, and then I have my first fund manager meeting in the afternoon! Way to ease me in! Usually I will be able to dress more casually than I could when teaching at MA, but tomorrow I must wear a suit for the meeting with the PM, so I better make sure it is not all wrinkledy. Then I will talk to Becky and cook curry. Yum (on both counts).

booyah

I passed.

thrilling new new year news

This will be a quicky, for I must read eight or nine books and plan at least a week or two of classes before Tuesday. Because...

I was just this past week hired on at a very spiffy private school here in Mumpgummy to teach a half-load next semester! The class I will be teaching is very cool, too--the course title is Contemporary Discourse, and I was delighted to find nytimes.com (my browser's homepage for years) among the various other exciting class texts (Kavalier & Clay, Proof, Persepolis, etc.). Of course, just because the Times is required reading doesn't mean I won't walk into class to find all my students wearing those buttons they handed out at the RNC convention last year that said, "I don't believe anything I read in the New York Times." On the other hand, skepticism is worth cultivating (as long as it's objective and critical and not political and reactionary), so I may employ some factcheck.org or CJR materials as well. We shall see where all this goes after this semester, which will be a chance for the school to try me out, and me to try them out, but I am just psyched about the whole thing.

Update on CFA stuff: Took the exam on December 3rd--the day of the big Georgia-LSU game, which was held in the same complex (the World Congress Convention Crazyhouse, or whatever it's called) as the test. The hotel we chose to stay at the previous night was filled A) with insane LSU fans who suffered from some strange SEC-sanctioned form of Tourette's and who would not shut up until 2 AM, when they apparently went out to tie one on (tighter, I guess, really) before returning at 4:30 AM to resume their ruckus, and B) with the hardest damn granite-slab beds I have ever encountered and the frostiest heating systems available on the (black?) market. Oh, and the smoke alarm light was like a little green alien flood lamp over the bed. Long story long, I got about 2 hours of sleep, ate a big greasy steak and eggs breakfast while ignoring poor lonely Becky and poring over the 23 pages of formulas I had to memorize, and was off to take the test, which was divided into two three-hour sections. The first section was very worrisome and sloggy, but the second section was composed mainly of softball questions, and I actually finished with about 20 minutes (as opposed to 10 seconds) to spare. And I had ample opportunity, and one might say ample reason, to smoke, but didn't. (After this feat, there's no way I can let myself fall back into bad faith about how smoking and the stresses of teaching go hand in hand. Becky is also glad to have both this and the document I signed and returned to the State of Alabama officially declaring my utterly smoke-free lifestyle to hold me to anytime I so much as get a wistful look on my face while watching someone else smoke.) I shall learn how I did on the exam sometime during mid-January. If I find out that I passed (the pass rate has been floating around 35% the past few years, which I'm glad I didn't realize until after the test), I have a little while to decide if I want to tackle Level II in June, which probably depends on how much free time I have while teaching part-time. The tests are good for life, and who knows what the future might hold for me five, ten, twenty, thirty years down the road. (Might as well make the most of those formulas while they're still relatively fresh!) Plus, since I will be managing the bulk of my mother's retirement accounts starting in January (in addition to our own), I feel like I will still be able to use the skills I've been gaining, even though I may not find them all that useful when discussing, say, Life of Pi. In any case, I did finally receive an invitation to interview for the Retirement Counselor position with the State last week, and it felt so good to write back telling them that I was unavailable at least until June. Probably will still apply for the Management Associate opportunity with Amsouth if I find out that I passed my Level I CFA exam, just in case the recession possibly heralded by the yield curve inversion earlier in the week is too bad for non-profit educational insitutions to offer anyone full-time teaching positions, but not bad enough for Amsouth to need new portfolio manager types.

This was supposed to be short. Oops. Oh--and if any of my new students are reading this, welcome. This is certainly not required reading, and inside jokes or references to this blog will get you absolutely nowhere with me, whereas I will enthusiastically celebrate your brilliant opening paragraph or your devastatingly insightful and elegantly structured argument. Show me lots of those.

Anyway, what a truly Happy New Year! That last one--sheesh--let's just call it a rebuilding season and move on.