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Friday, October 28, 2011

Shaping

At a 1yr old's birthday
party, an expecting lady
in maternity clothes is
greeted with
'you look symmetrical'from A
'when would you not look symmetrical' from B

when you wear only a
lower body fat suit
like Amy sedaris.

***********
Shiner like a Diamond, David Sedaris - also included in 'Scoot iver skinny'.

Motherhood and childbirth

women are born twice - Anne Sexton

But its like childbirth. The results erase
the process and you cant remember a before.
- Marge Piercy, The diminishing addition.

Another poems book by Marge Piercy

Mars and her Children

In Applesauce for Eve, Runt Vigor, Core memory, the fruit apple, tree and its core are the connecting images.

'Cast skins' poem begins with an indifferent snake casting its skin and then going about with its new bright skin. Worn out gloves recall the mos absent hands. The poet progresses onto clothes at thrift stores and the invisible but present voices of the erstwhile wearers of the clothes.

'Up and Out', '1. The foot gnawed off', what you cant leave even when you think you are leaving your place of past for good.

'3. when I was a caddy'
Mehitzah

'4.Toward a good rooting Medium' -
'I've known families who farmed their soil
and gave their bones to it .'
Lenni Lenape


author's article

In 'The ex in the supermarket',
I cannot walk the dog of the past at my
convenience.


At a two year old's birthday party, during dinner one young lady was trying to figure which dishes had onion in them, so she could relinquish them. She was trying to follow Sattvic diet. Another lady swore by onions and garlics in the dishes. Bite into the onion is a homage to the onion.

Tin House

Volume 12, Number 1. 'Class in America' is an uninteresting theme like politics. But Peasants by Geoff Nicholson, deals with food of different classes and how fast food is flooding away those boundaries.

Thursday, October 27, 2011

In 'A typical Japanese Woman' essay, Cathy N Davidson says that she read of one hour bath having the same physiological effect as four hours of sleep.
Sento

Alaska Quarterly review, Fall & Winter 2007

Hemicorporectomy

Peter Selgin,
trying to decipher those mysterious blue shapes floating way out there in 'Playing It Out'.
when we are in a new place, we take a moment, silent, watch whats around, sort the clouds, mountains and then we speak.

I found further reading difficult. No poems.
Conversations with artists

Mark Tobey
A Blizzard under the blue sky, Pam Houston.

One of the things I love most about the natural world is the way it gives you whats good for you even if you dont know it at the time. Talking about winter camping, author Pam Houston sums best the role of nature in resetting our human system. all those visits to the national parks or even the local lake that tidy up the cup with tea dripping on the sides.

With sentences like 'clarity and precision of fresh snow and blue sky', she makes the reader appreciate the immutability of certain things, the so called universal truths which fix our dithering daily boats.

Out of Habit, I start apologizing, also included in Scoot over Skinny.

Culture

One of the basic functions of culture: to lay out a predictable world in which the individual is firmly oriented. - LaRay M Barna.

A westerner I know, appreciates the eastern culture of parents arranging marriage for kids and the respect elders get. She has a 1D disapproval for the higher divorce rates.

house owner should welcome visitor - international student.

Social time: heartbeat of a culture. When the authors found that language wasnt lending itself to pose questions like they wanted to in surveys, they looked at definite durations of certain activities for comaprision.
The analog time in the house clock with no numbers, subject to approximation is behind the precise one in the car.

Guidelines A Cross Cultural Reading/Writing Text.



Guidelines, A Cross Cultural Reading/Writing Text.
Stumbling blocks in Intercultural communication
In some cultures, also, it is polite to refuse the first or second offer of refreshment. - LaRay M Barna
We had a story in our nondetail in which an elder sister takes her brother along for a birthday party only if he promises to behave. He is supposed to refuse offer for any food atleast three times before accepting. The mischievous kid says no three times to the first offer, so he can enjoy the food.
In high school, my sister and I were at a dinner reception. They had egg curry being served. We were asked to eat. Being the elder sister I answered that we were not hungry. I felt highbrow refusing. My sister would have liked to eat. Now I remember to leave the onus of accepting/refusing a food offer to whoever is with me. Sometimes, even after I have made my mind that I will not find myself having anything to do with cake at birthday party after having had the first serving, I will say 'no' to taking cake for the road. I will say 'maybe my husband will like that'. After all these internal dramas, as soon as we get home, we finished up the cake in few seconds. A vanilla banana, strawberry cake. Its USP was its softness of the cake layers as well as the filling. The cake was mistakenly made girly with pink lettering and pink flowers. Not a hit with parents, but with all the little girls who attended the party, who also happened to be the majority. All the girls were asking was if they could have a flower. Must be the first time that a cake was trumped at the birthday party by kids. Well, a little boy too asked for a flower for his sister. I have seen at yet another birthday party where a kid asked for a balloon for his younger sister.Kids can be distracted with the auxiliaries on the cake but adults have their focus on it. I managed to have a serving of the cake and didnt go for more, although I was reminded of the baby shower cake which I had enjoyed then except for the minor unequally thawed filling the cake. I had seconds with that one. This cake was better and cost half less. The baker of the cake that cost half more is no longer in business.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

I chose this book Leaning into the wood over Eudora welty's short story collection. I wanted to listen to new voices. The pieces are very short and hook you with their lack of fabrication and the directedness of their life choices for place to associate with.

*******

This time at the library, imagine my horror when I found my sacred shelves of poetry and non-fiction littered with trashy books. Somebody got an idea to compress the books from different sections into one. It must be that the funding has dwindled and so the new books can now do with less shelf space.

**************

Winter song by Mary Kathryn Stillwell.
Planting trees - Twyla Hansen

Response to Sally Tisdale's 'Letting Myself Go'

It doesnt matter that whole human epochs have celebrated big men and women, because the breif period in which I live does not;.....
The author is looking to the society for the kind of person she has to be to be accepted. When you are on the block, you could be accepted or not. In a society like America, not 'fitting in' has never stopped people from self assertion.

In trying always to lose weight, we've lost hope of simply being seen for ourselves.
Can our fat self and thin self reconcile? How do we know that the fat version is our true self. Does body have the lesson of 'balance' inbuilt?

For ages humans believed that the body helped create the personality..... The modern culture of dieting is based on the idea that the personality creates the body.
What unsettles the author is how the world thinks now. If one accepts the general thoughts from ages, one should feel more at ease with current day norms.

Now, I try to imagine a world where we eat only food we need, and it seems inhuman.
What animal on this planet eats for pleasure other than satisfying hunger? Why are we shying away from accepting that our indulgences can have consequences?

I felt no joy in being thin - it was just work, something I had to do.... I hated the very idea of maintenance.. but at the same time the author 'used to be attracted to the sharp angles of the chronic dieter' and 'dreamed of having a boy's body, smooth, hipless,lean'. Maintaining weight takes effort. If it were easy would the talk on how fat people are viewed in the society be different? I cannot imagine how much more accusatory the glances would be.

By letting go of dieting, I free up mental and emotional room. By letting myself go, I go places.
On the contrary, having an unhealthy relationship with food will limit movement in no time.

I felt truly reduced then, reduced to being just a body and nothing more. Yet we want to revel in our bodies, not all too perfect. Its our idea of beauty and perfectness that needs fixing.

Books say that

women follow their mothers in birthing
the mother had seen the baby's lung spring
into action even if to stop after a day
the daughter had fears of what might happen
of wanting a girl and not having enough
to know even if it was a girl or a boy
She is still a mother cause she cared
about the baby.

"Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist." Michael Levine

Saturday, October 22, 2011

After reading 'Letting myself go' by Sally Tisdale Scoot over skinny, I wished she had a different viewpoint about losing weight.
A shorter version of that article.
Sympathetic pregnancies
Couvade
The man who could not stop overeating
response to fat like him essay
In the Fat lady essay, countertransference, process and content in therapy,not to keep news of a parent's illness from kids, sympathy fast, 'pounds flowed off in rivulets'.
Dagwood sandwich
I couldnt go on reading Big game hunters and Big time. For some reason I thought the latter was by a woman even after reading the line about the author's difficulty with women.
In 'Fatland' Stephen Kuusisto says that 'no one who visits that country ever forgets it' and that he 'was only a tourist in the world of fat'. A reflection on how a body's existence is transitory in the fat land. With his newly attained fat by choice, people start noticing him. This popularity contrasts the oblivion faced by Natalie Kusz in 'on Being Invisible'. Being the designer of fat, he has the same cockiness as Stephen Shaw in Fat guys kick ass.
In 'Hunger', from Anne Lamott's therapist..'If I(AL) was feeling very other, sad and....'
The other sounds less like unknown more like the avoided.
Queen of the gym

***************
Force field of fat in This is why I am fat
Fat acceptance movement

Jungle activity

Reading Fires by Rick Bass in The Big Sky reader, the initial description of the hare activity takes me back to the sunday mornings we watched Mowgli, especially the water sounds, the birds, hops of the animals.

Friday, October 21, 2011

In Sparrow, I couldnt connect to the poems initially. Towards the later half, the subjects of people and birds became more relatable.
The child had
to believe
the father was
righteous
to build virtue on own

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Immersion



Running Away to Home: Our Family's Journey to Croatia in Search of Who We Are, Where We Came From, and What Really Matters 


In running away to home, author Jennifer Wilson 'hungry for connections with land and food and family' sets in search of her ancestral family in a Croatian village with her own family. Although the writing was good, I was straying off the reader path and had to push myself to finish the book. In the end, knowing the history of her ancestors and what she was saved from by her family's immigration she returns with a great sense of gratitude. During her travel, she faces many moments where she is glad for having taken this unthinkable step of moving to an unfamiliar place with its new language but a place where the residents make her feel at home.
With a search specific for her ancestors, the author shows the reader, the history of the region. While that is something a writing maestro might appreciate, it is in this generalization that the story of the search lost its appeal. I am also biased from a reading of  The foremost good fortune  by Susan Conley, where we see a country through the struggles the author goes through in adjusting to a different culture. It could be the rural, low profile culture of Croatia which didnt lend itself to any major revelation.



The Foremost Good Fortune: A Memoir by Susan Conley

Monday, October 17, 2011

Reading TriQuarterly99, Spring/Summer 1997 issue, Kanai Mieko's short story 'When treading on soft earth' I cant help but wonder that I have never read this much description in fiction.
Another Mieko short story - The Rose Tango

Sunday, October 16, 2011

I remember reading of Operating instructions by Anne Lamott and picked it up when I found it at used books sale in the library.

Lamott talks about a Sam with one arm. I wonder if this is that wonderful kid, embracing the tennis racquet all out.

Sandtray therapy
lomilomi massage
Bouvier puppy
odie dall
plastic Beatrix Potter bath book

Childhood

If we could write as children, how much of the world we could store.

Stories

Why we love them as kids?
Watching The Ballad of Josie, I am reminded of a story similar to How much land does a man need but in an Arabic setting.
We know of the world through them.

In Words, not swords the author introduces us to yeki bud yeki nabud. The jacket art with clad women on the shore reminds me of a colony of shorebirds.

The Forbidden stitch

Sujata Bhatt Muliebrity
Autumn Gardening is a great story which fills survivors with a sense of purpose. It is interesting to see how the sentences work too, with the physical actuations of the character punctuated by the happenings in the emotional landscape.
Compare Khalil's lines in To rise above with Blake's Chminey Sweeper. I came across this Blake poem in Morning,Noon and Night by Arnold Weinstein
picture bride

Carol Bly

I came across Carol Bly's 'My Dear Republican Mother' essay in 'From Daughters to Mothers book.
Reading it I felt thatthis is the kind of work, editors are talking of when they talk about work with layers in it. While she is writing about the mother she knew for the first 12 years of her life, its also about the times then, the presence or lack of psychological attitudes. At the language level, she translates the behavior of people then into the terms of psychology that we use now to recognise them.

Saturday, October 15, 2011

Gloria Gervitz
Milagro in from From Shejarit.

Totems fusing together
on poetry

Tarahumara
Chicha
pinole
peyote
Baldachin
Sudarium
Monstrance
Crepitation
Bambina - girl
Bambino -little boy

The tricks pictures play

When I saw a thumbnail of this picture, I recognised the figure of a man and when itwent with the words..'In this novel an assimilated Australian Jew chooses a vicious, and symbolic, husband.' then I corrected myself of the main character and a close look reveals the larger figure of a woman.

Friday, October 14, 2011

I am looking for the saddest thing, which once found
will never be lost again, because it will follow me
- Seductive sadness winks at me

In I called, called to the lashing waves, the end ties with the beginning.

Oscar Hahn's poem 'Places are neither here no there' on wishing hard. In 'The center of the bedroom', 'something' that takes a form but has been present even before identified as something - 'the sad snow this year's dirty snow'.

Antidote against medicine

As the water boils with bitter pink tonic
on a kerosene wick stove
dad cuts the apple
so the sweet apple
can leave a good taste

I direct a pill into my
mouth followed by a waterfall
A friend says its easier
for the pill to go down
after you store some water
in the mouth

Dissolved

A Mom puts a
disk shaped tablet
in a spoon of milk

the bitter medicine
is now
ready to be evaded
by an unwilling baby
oscillating the mouth
from side to side

Leapboard:
Lihn began to break it up with a spoon
Because I wrote by Enrique Lihn
Archilocus

Handy kerchief

A Handkerchief dropped
from a window onto
the seat can
hold your place
A handkerchief can
be knotted to hold
apples that you
didnt plan on buying
until your eyes fell
on them or tomatoes
that zing up your
curry

on a day other than
sunday when you are
out without a grocery bag.

Leapboard:
My whole sea is white scarves/kerchiefs

Handkerchiefs of air are slowly being spun
Jaime Sabines, With Nerves trailing poem

My first rainbow cloud

Driving west in the evening
a cloud has two colors of a
rainbow

May be its the sun light
But the sun is on the left

When I rushed home to take a picture
it was no longer there

In the morning I woke
up thinking its rain
it must be the sprinklers

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Antigone poem by Claribel Alegria
Creon and Polyneices.

Blinding mirror

Venetian mirrors made of plate glass date back to 16th century.

Not so complex Bell jar

He lives in a bell jar called Art
or Pleasure or Science
The Tunnel

In the days of childhood
cream colored cotton candy
was sold in a bell jar

As I enter

through the gate
for lunch
a yellow butterfly
wades
through the air
of afternoon

courtesy:
"It will be", they said, " a sad,sad time
in which butterflies will be gathered" from The Calabash tree

Amen to butterflies

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

A crib

on layaway
at a Baby Depot.

The Foremost Good Fortune



The Foremost Good Fortune by Susan Conley


The foremost good fortune
Laowai
pole position

Anish Kapoor in China.

I am reading running away to home where author Jennifer Wilson with her family goes to her Croatian ancestral village to find her roots. I picked this 'The Foremost Good Fortune' book by Susan so I could compare.

Language is a big impediment in the new country in communicating yourself. Both families get care packages from grandparents back home for the displaced grandkids.



Puer tea

The author dines at local restaurants and involves herself in activities - sweater party, bag purchasing, that get her to interact more with the adopted country. From the people she meets everyday - a maid at house, a chaffeur, gym trainer, yoga teacher she learns much about the Chinese culture. As a family, she travels to different places and learns about the regions.

By making us see how her kids process her having cancer, she shows us a filigree of emotions around the cancer victims and family.

The author is not clueless in China as her husband has been there before and can speak the language. The children assimilate faster into the new culture with their father making it fun for them to learn the language. In distress when a child has to dissuade the maid from catching a pigeon outside their window, he says 'bu yao'.. not wanted.

The author compares her cancer to all situations she cant get a handle on.



Running Away to Home: Our Family's Journey to Croatia in Search of Who We Are, Where We Came From, and What Really Matters 

Monday, October 10, 2011

Thursday, October 6, 2011

1996 Fall

Hayden's Ferry Review Tenth anniversary has Laura Lee washburn's poem 'The story of Snow white and Rose Red'.

..
The sisters had no use for other stories..

From Valencia street poem,

..The street is a ribbon
on a gift you've never opened...

Turandot in George Looney's Libretto for an opera about gold and lust. His 'Under the sad weight of the moon' is a labrynth with a horse, moon at the dead ends. I was reminded of 'red chair in a beige room' by Carol smith only for the similarity of repetitive treatment of fixed subjects.

A chapter 11 from Valerie Miner's Range of light novel
D and C

In 'Paper Boy' by Cathrine Ryan Hyde(author of Pay It forward), I guessed part of the story.
From Daughters to Mothers

latilla - poles used in ceiling
Epergne
Reading Winter 2010 issue of The Missouri review, I came across Brian Brodeur's poems and his How a poem happens blog. His poem 'On Suffering' is gut wrenching.
Nancy Cunard
Samuel Beckett's - Whoroscope

I had read about Slum tourism a while ago. So when an Adam Krause story began with Slum Tours, I was very taken to read it even though it was fiction.

Maria Hummel's poem and her work on the myth of changeling

Monday, October 3, 2011

Importance of fluid intake

Yesterday I read this Pregnancy journal from week 23. I was fascinated to learn of the amount of amniotic fluid in the uterus, the time in which it is replaced everyday after few weeks, the 55 pound pressure that is involved during contractions. And who thunk that breastfeeding is a ~500calorie effort.
I should read the first part and know more stuff.

Sunday, October 2, 2011

The book of (Even more) Awesome
Authors website

Worst sleep ever?
when I was trying to increase my pile of experiences, I spent the night at a company. I wasnt scared. Its tough sleeping on a desk when there are mosquitoes.
Once my roomate locked me out by latching from inside. I had to spend the night at computing center and wait for it to be 6 in the moring when it was ok to loiter.

One to many

Has your expression ever been misunderstood? If you are like Keats muse, then a blush or sigh of yours has a very little chance of being understood.

Anthologized in She walks in beauty

Saturday, October 1, 2011

Book list

Today I wanted to get rid of a post-it which had names of 3 books. You keep compiling these books that you like from reviews and lose track of them. I had the first title wrong. I wrote down the article title instead of the book.
Fire season : Field notes from a wilderness outlook. I wanted to read this book to know more about Gila.
Far from shore - birdwatching
Man with a Pan

I realised that I read Man with a Pan.

The Life of a Deli

My Korean Deli

I remember this book from a review either from NPR or NYTimes. In the beginning while the search is on for a deli, I had doubts if I would finish the book.But once he donned the 'deli owner' role, I was hooked to the book.

It must have been from where he starts to include his WASP history. Another moment was when a peek ino the refrigerator of the otherwise incommercible prospective store changed his mind.

The chapters traverse his dual lives of an editor at Paris Review and a deli owner maintaining a continuity. What it takes to keep a tobacco license, what happens to a deli in the times of power cut? These are the things we learn of and all the mayhem that surrounds these situations.