what lies beneath illumines what's above diaphanous weight a statue baptised the bracelet a shining silver choice the depths indistinct no stones no plants she is alone and elegantly out of place ennobling what holds her her body is not at rest toes spread arms drifting maybe we're all suspended and safe, floating facing what's above listening to the depths
Green burrs grow there, dandelions & weeds I can't name. Cigarette butts & candy wrappers catch low in the chain link fence. You have to look up to see what it meant to me all those years ago. Look up to the wide dry space, for running, walking, daydreaming a life of an adult you (never this one). Look back to the line of live oak trees along the fence, thick shade for boyhood summer days and cover for stolen embraces on the thin flannel sheet you didn't know she had in her trunk. Nobody saw you that night. Nobody sees what you saw back there back then.
Okay, maybe Two Thousand Million Man-Power by Gertrude Trevelyan isn’t exactly a classic. But in the words of her most recent publisher, “If [Trevelyan] was a bloke, she’d still be in print”, some eighty years after she died.
It’s a novel that isn’t helped by its title, until you read the opening pages of Trevelyan’s novel and see how labor & human dignity, labor & human necessity are centered in the story.
Set between 1919 & 1936, Two Thousand Million Man-Power tracks the fortunes of Robert & Katherine, a chemist & a schoolteacher. Each just beginning a career or a life that could possibly be a career or a life of the mind. Every day, Robert, a recent graduate, works in a lab for ladies cosmetics, and every evening, he takes notes on a theory of time he hopes to one day complete. Kath has narrower ambitions but thinks big, mostly thanks to big dreamers around her, like Robert (and like a colleague who invites her to communist party meetings). Their courtship is slow & thoughtful–they attend weekly lectures–and it is bound by convention, which means they must sneak around in order to spend evenings together. Either due to true love or historical necessity, they get married. It is hopeful for a time.
It’s an honest love story–which includes daily pettiness & small joys, struggles over shared money & individual hopes, friendships & unavoidable comparisons with couples outside one’s relationship. It is deeply realistic about the loss of youth and the allure of materialism / comfort. It’s very nuanced & ambiguous about politics & history, cities & work, communities & countries. And it’s got a perfect ending.
Thanks to this one, I’ll definitely keep my eye on the publisher Recovered Books.
Before I grew into doubt & anger, disappointment & disgust with the church, I prayed daily to Virgin Mary. She was calm & beautiful, her pain serene, not a crown of thorns. Let it be done to me--disarming service & bodily yielding, faithful, maternal & beautiful, clothed in the stars & sky, atop the moon. Pray for me, Mary. I will be good. In some ways, I've written about this part of my life before, most evident in the Virgen de Guadalupe pendant above which I have worn since I was thirteen. but never with these parameters, where each line length is dictated by digits in my phone number.
The city restricts watering during summer, for good reason, so the man tends the brown patches daily by hand. Seven thirty and seven thirty at morning & at night. He times each session each day down to the minute. He gets to know his lawn intimately, patch by patch, the narrow band right by the sidewalk nine feet long, the yellowed oval that stretches out just behind the mailbox, the tight corners near the turns by the lawn lights. His fist around the hose, his thumb widens the spray, the mist cooling the only man outside this hot night. Sometimes cars pass him, their fingers lifted in a hello, their palms steering them down the alley to their garages. On vacation, he worries about the lawn, patch by patch. Over time all see the green return stronger than before. Over the summer, I wrote a lot of watering-the-lawn poems. This one is kind of a sonnet, but with ten words per line rather than ten syllables.
The child enters. "Knock knock" "Who's there?" The father wonders at the enduring appeal of jokes, the older we get the fewer we hear. The child grins through the setup, knowing that it's worked all day long friend to friend playground & cafeteria, a center stage moment he's rehearsed & honed. The child delivers the punch. There's more ah than ha at first before the father shifts from discovery to joy. They laugh together. Let there always be shared moments like this, an assurance for each, a luxuriating in who's there and why. May the doors to their hearts always be open to each other. This is inspired by a writing challenge that Matthew Olzmann gave my students--write a poem that begins with a joke and ends with a prayer. Photo of Diego Rivera with his child here.
May your feet be warm & dry May you hear your name said with a smile today May your nights be peaceful May your work be meaningful May someone you love think that you are smart & funny May your coffee be served just right May you see your child laughing May you enjoy the book you're reading -- and the next one May you feel the warmth of the setting sun May your children be safe & happy May they grow up to love & talk to one another May they have dogs & beloveds that love dogs May the clouds always inspire you This is inspired by a three-part writing challenge that Sarah Freligh gave my students--write blessings for all people everywhere, then blessings for someone difficult to love, then for yourself. The image is by my friend Scott Lewis, from his series God & Globalization.
For four years, I tracked my reading, and as a result, I got to the point where it’s kind of a habit that I read broadly ([ahem] at least within literary fiction), that I read as much as possible in translation, and that I am deliberate about what I read next.
It’s been a while since I read R.F. Kuang’s Babel which I recommend enthusiastically. To aim to write a smart, accessible, thoughtful, & suspenseful novel is quite a narrow target to hit, and that one definitely did. Ada Limon’s The Hurting Kind is similarly smart & accessible, with a really gentle seasonal organization that never feels like it limits the poems. I reread Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang, which is an engrossing story about a man pushed too far and the lengths he’ll go to set the story straight (even if it’s not entirely factual). But this post is about a chunk of reading that’s a little more deliberate, a set of books that I hoped would get outside of myself.
Usna Aslam Khan’s The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali is a historical novel about a place I’ve never even heard of–the Andaman Islands. Leave it to an independent press (Dallas’s Deep Vellum) to take a chance on a novel like this one, that deserves a wide readership and will challenge anyone that picks it up. Khan’s Nomi of the title is not the main character, nor is she explicitly any more of a witness or a survivor than her brother Zee (who suffers a terrible fate due to a single courageous act) or her father (bent low, literally, by his punishment for a crime he committed, which brought him to the islands) or her mother (who suffers losses that eventually become unspeakable). Khan makes the reader feel deeply about almost every character, no mean feat, given that some of the colonial administrators are complicit in, at best, cruel & unusual punishment. This might fit under historical fiction or post-colonial literature, and in ways that test the limits of each genre. It is a novel in which the bravest act of all is staying put and trying to find the beauty & the humanity around you.
I’ll update this post when I finish Rodaan Al Galidi’s light-hearted (or is that deep-heared?) refugee novel The Leash & the Ball, Melody Razak’s debut about 1947’s Partition Moth, Ingrid Rojas Monteras’s memoir about a journey into her family’s history in Colombia The Man Who Could Move Clouds
The wind was blowing most of my first day in town, and the snow flakes fell gently, slowly, cartwheeling to me with cartoonish clarity, like a confetti’d welcome for us alone. We were two blocks from a good bar, a decent diner, a video store, and an El stop. We were in love.
She had chosen our home well–not the hippest neighborhood but still one that felt like a city I’d never known, like a place where the rest of my [ahem] … where the rest of our life together would begin.
Instead it was an extended break, not quite vacation not quite holding pattern. I continued teaching but not well. She found a job at company called Oracle. My wife looked her up. (I was curious too.) Apparently, she still works there. She set down roots; I did too, somewhere else.
The wind blows there even now as strong as ever. I saw it on TV the other day. It looks just the same as it did that January.
The image is from Andrew Sullivan’s View From Your Window feature. I saved it as “ChicagoIL930pm” but cannot find the original source or photographer.
You create an account gently, and you construct a password--a nonsense mixture made memorable, letters, numbers, characters made special somehow, a song lyric, a sentence you alone know. You pull the doc from the drive, a last look at a once-inspired miracle, a polished inert version of the original spark, now rendered regular, out of your hand & into gently. Gently receives the doc, a new screen assuring you that the server worked. You forget and wait, gently. Gently managing the impersonal viewable shareable version of you at your most artful, most vulnerable, most hopeful. Three weeks later, gently a message in your inbox. No. Thank you. Sincerely, Gently. This is inspired by Sophia Terazawa, who gave my class the following writing prompt: Personify an adverb. I chose to personify the writing submission platform Submittable as the adverb "Gently". So above every time I originally referred to the platform, I substituted the word Gently.
middleagedmiddlechild. 