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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 

Rush hour

Tsingtao, this name stuck in my brain from Chris Tucker saying it in the movie. Popular as the movie was a decade ago, I couldnt recall the name while watching it at a restaurant.

French toast
Understand France
Bateau Mouche
Toulouse Lautrec
Boulette D'Avesnes

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

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.

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

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.

A ladysfinger

starts from a
yellow flower
with a green cloche

Imaginary Logic

Imaginary logic

The poet being a professor, it not a surprisr that one kind of subjects - fiction, criticism, rhetoric, poetry workshop class in 'The Ante' make a frequent appearance.

..On each pencil the teeth of every child
who ever held it had gnawed deep tracks...in 'The Elementary Principles of Rhetoric'

The poet is at his best with the endings like

..they dont get it - the kind of people
who epxect real smoke from a toy tractor.. in 'Feelings, by ashley Higgins'

'Winning' is a childhood sack race poem.

'The Previous Tenants' poem with its detective angle reminded me of Ted Kooser's 'Abandoned farmhouse'.

Freshet
Infralapsarian

The apple trees at Olema
Olema

I have learnt in geography class, that we cannot use sand dunes in a desert for locating ourselves. In 'Variations on a passage in Edward Abbey', Hass begins

A dune begins with an obstacle.
.... Its thus a dune is formed
Now I know the scientific how-to followed by the dunes and the inevitable movement to another location preventing them from serving as landmarks.

Another how-to, what a body can expect when submitted to the medical examiner is followed up with a reality of the relegated funeral business.

The eucalyptus casts a feathered shadow
in 'Concerning the afterlife, the Indians of central California had only the dimmest notions'.

sokkaram by a lawyer

In songs to survive the summer, the poet calls the dog days, unvaried by accident and in Not going to New York: A letter, the letter rhymes by accident.
Paschal lamb poem
Tall windows poem
duck blind poem with an ending in motion
A story about the body poem
Ceanothus
Puerto Escondido
Cuernavaca
Kathe Kollwitz
Ponge
Athabascan
Mimulus

French food and literature

Balzac's Omelette
Omelette as a work of art reminds me of this Omelette woman painting. Looking at the old lady seated and cooking, it also reminds me of my grandmother and her kitchen. In their days, the stove occupied very little space. In a generation, the cooking space has changed so much. Imagine how different the culinary scene would have been in the times of Balzac. We are talking about 1800s. Balzac was a French Novelist and a playwright.
the author takes us two centuries into the past into the streets of Paris as well as into the books of Balzac, to take a look at the elite parties as well as meagre broth households. She takes us to a time when cheese was poor man's food and Paris saw the rise of restaurants. Lunch wasnt always an important meal(pg 58).Having Russian service from 'blood, Bones and Butter' fresh in my mind, it was insightful to contrast the French service. the author mentions that the art of decorating flowers on dining tables came from Russia.This is the strongest part of the book where the readers are grabbed in easily.
The author shows with all the examples of sketches of characters in Balzac's books, how Balzac was the first to use food in his novels as a window to a character, their class in society. The author also contrasts Balzac's style with writers like Zola, Proust and others to show how the rest treated food differently in their books. The first chapter is about Balzac's relation with food. He went great lengths to find the food he had his mind upon. While most chapters held me in curiosity, 'The misers and the food worshippers' read like a boring compilation of characters and their relationship with food.
There are really some lines about how to make 'Balzac's omelette'.
The last but one line about Proust on 'a fish whose body with its numberless vertebrae, its blue and pink veins, had been constructed by nature, but according to an architectural plan, like a polychrome cathedral of the deep' is a look at how different the world seems to a person who sees with a sense of hunger.



While Adam could have 15 dozen oysters, Balzac too could have over 100 oysters and more after finishig a novel, working at it day and night.
Balzac used restaurants to move his plots forward(pg 66).
French vs Russian service

Laclos
Pantagruelism
Olivet Cheeses
Airport novels
brace of partridge
Comice Pears
embonpoint
Craquelin
Vouvray
regrttiers - traders who buy leftovers.
Trotter
white pudding
Black pudding
Lucien Rubempre
Oysters from Ostend
totted up -sum up
Hundred days
pate from Strasbourg
hams from Mayence

Gray patridge
Blanquette
Fricandeau
a la Pluche
a la Barigoule
a la Robert
Brandade
Jabot
cutlets a la Soubise
Chicken a la Marengo
Machicolation
Poussin's landscape on Sevres ware
collation -light meal permitted on fast days
balzac never saw a great chef at work, there is a notable absence of great culinary artists in his novels(pg 87).
fashion for decorating tables with flowers came from Russia(pg 89).
serviette - napkin

au sucre
Marron glaces
orgeat
Jugged hare
sea pie
specious - having a false look of truth
Grisette

Mother sauce - I heard of it first from Robert Irvine on Restaurant Impossible
making of soy sauce
Foods named after people
Lake Leman
Garret room
Peignoir
Collops

Twentieth century Latin american poetry
percale in Sweet Land
Duenna
Halberd
Jarabe
Viaticum
Malinche
Sylph

This Vicente Huidobro poem gets electric from 'plants glances like trees'.
The Disappearance of Luisa Porto

That young black girl fulo
Looking for poetry

poem

love is so short. I like the ending too of this Neruda poem.

The Emptiness of man and 'the man from up-country talking' by Joao, both deal with the universal 'man' and are themes easy to grasp.

The Blue tower
Craquelure
some poems
Tombolo
Cendrars
Tatras
Masaccio
Diran Adebayo
El Alamein
Grapeshot
Disegno
Robert Minhinnick
Nicodemus
Johnny Weissmuller
Acqua alta
Ivo Standeker

I have found some Joseph Campbell's Primitive Mythology and Creative Mythology books. Sukhavati is available in DVD.

Yesterday afternoon, I was at a parking lot opening the pods of a tree nearby. It had double columns of seeds.

What triggers a desire for icecream?

After buying groceries, as I was waiting outside the store, I saw a mom eating her 'butter pecan or chocolate chip cookie dough' icecream in a cone followed by her kids eating chocolate icecreams. That prompted us to walk into 'Water and Ice' and down the butter pecan icecream. Now I know where an elderly person bought the cone which diminished to a tip as he entered the grocery store. While we were learning what a 'cake cone' was, which is nothing compared to a waffle cone, my eyes fell on bee pollen, an ingredient in a healthy smoothie.

Folktales

I have started reading Irish folktales. The abundance of angels must not be a folktale as I read an article by Celia Beresford - 'Angels of Ireland' in Vol no.194, Sep 2011 Java magazine.

I have my hands on Encyclopedia of Urban legends. Once my roomate told me of snake pet sizing pet owner story. When I passed it onto another friend, she told me that its an urban legend. I try to recall any that I know. As a kid, I studied in a hostel. We were always scared of ghosts in the night. As it goes with the preoccupation with ghosts, there was an antidote to this too. It seems there was a village which was haunted. One clever person wrote 'repu raa' which in Telugu means 'visit tomorrow'. Then the whole village resorted to this.

What about a mom putting her dark daughter in a washing machine so that she would turn up fair?

Aids being injected in public places by pin prick attacks

In the fiction world, a poem where a man points to himself when he is told of a kid without a face.

10.26.11

Do you remember reading of a student who wrote 'this is courage' as an answer to an essay to Harvard as personal statement? Well, what do we know. Its an urban legend.

10.28.11
Now theres a500 word limit on the college essay but nothing on the lower side.

We heard of The Graveyard wager as kids.

11.2.11
We have read this The Homemade Lie Detector legend as a story.
Today I got an email from a fellow hiker that she relocated to 'Down Under'. With a reference to Australia in the 'Urban Legends' book as Down Under, the subject line makes sense.
A while ago, my colleague talked about this The Lawnmower accident. What a law legend?
cultural logic must be what makes us believe that dentists are prone to suicide.

Shooting in the dark

Yesterday we were talking about Arjuna's skill of Shabd Bhedi. He could shoot by hearing a sound. I was then reminded how arrows could do so many things in the epic Mahabharata. You could make it rain or make a deathbed of them. It was this possibilities that made us regular watchers of the TV programme.

Mahabharatha's relevance today

Listening to the name of the country in, makes you feel like a tourist.

A womans world

Jan Haag

In the evening
ears pop

Blood, Bones and Butter

..sweet, starchy peas in their own canoe of crisp, watery and almost sugary pod - Gabrielle Hamilton

The fourth wall
close the barn doors
Plumber/utility candles
Long necks
Magret
Apple mousse
The midwestern requirement of well done meat and well done fish....
- GH
Manti
Melamine plates
Rose wine

Reading the elaborate descriptions of past happenings, I wondered how this book was written. In chapter 5 Gabrielle reveals that she 'wrote endlessly in her journals'.

What you are the main cook at a camp, and a camper's father is Mark Bittman? Bite that.

..it takes a lobster more than fifteen years to grow to three pounds. grown men die harvesting them. - GH

saganaki
Taramasalata
Skordalia

Moonwalking with Einstein
London cabbies

The Lure of Long distance

".. a longing that comes out most forcefully in the language of a cild." - Robin Harvie.

".. for the poor of the world so hungry
God only appears to them as bread"
- Stanley Moss, Clocks

Does God exist
not to a man with no desires.

Powder to stop spreading

A swirl of the
matchead
into a box of Eyetex

A blemishless dot
on an infants
temple
to ward off evil

9.11.11
***********************

She lit a match to warm the tip of her black wax pencil

************************
1.31.12
In India mothers put kohl on babies eyes to ward off blindness.
- Candia McWilliam, What to look for in winter.

Indian fusion

Vij's at home

Vij's
Monsanto