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Year: 2010

The Information Hike-and-Bike Trail

October 4, 2010 • • 9 Comments

I’ve been thinking about blogging and the web lately. It seems quieter out here in blogland. Many of the blogs I read a long time ago have gone silent, just floating on the web like so much dotsam and netsam.

It sometimes seems there are fewer people just hanging around, clicking through from somewhere else or just exploring. Maybe we know this civilized web too well. The blogosphere isn’t the hip corner of the net it once was. It’s starting to feel more like a village after many of its inhabitants have urbanized and moved to the city.

I’m told that the web is moving to apps. That Twitter and Facebook won since they’re so phone friendly. I’ve experimented with Twitter and Facebook and Identi.ca over the past year. Of the three, Identi.ca was the most interesting. I suspect that has to do with its user base: creative types and tech-oriented people. Less of a feeling that you were being watched by corporations trying to figure out how to synergize e-business web-readiness (or even synergize backward overflow) and take over the whole thing.

Twitter is too much. Too much signal. Too much noise. I’m a teacher. I don’t have the kind of job where I can watch a fast-changing Twitter feed stream by, jumping in to offer my two cents and a hashtag before it all disappears. Perhaps I would like it if I had a cubicle job, but it’s just not something I’m able to keep up with. I feel like the guy in Shawshank Redemption who says the world just got itself in a big damn hurry.

Facebook is a little more interesting. I know that most of the people I know in the real world don’t come around my site much anymore, but I send the feed to Facebook and those who are interested read it there but as with Twitter, Facebook is something I’m not able to do at work (which is where I would bet most people do their social media thing). When I get home, I’m usually not interested as I’d rather spend my time writing something with a little more substance for my blog. A good blog post makes me feel good. Twitter and Facebook make me feel empty, like I’m faking my way through friendship and social interaction.

I’ve considered killing off my Facebook and Twitter accounts, but then there’s a voice in my head. It’s an old guy and he lived early in the twentieth century. He says, “Telephones! I hate them damn things. I’m getting rid of mine. It’s just a fad anyway.”

I don’t want to be the guy without a phone wondering why no one calls.

Still, I find the whole thing a little sad. What does it say about us as a culture when we so easily and willingly reject longer-form writing and leave the free open space of the wild internet to hunker down in Facebook and other walled gardens? I guess it’s the same thing Huck Finn was running from, those civilized faux Edens where Aunt Polly kept things orderly, decent and boring.

Keeping a blog these days makes me feel I’ve ridden out on the information superhighway but got off early and headed for the hills, jumped on the information hike-and-bike trail as it were.

I’m watching a train pull away, speeding ever faster toward short bursts of superficial contact. “I’ll call or text or tweet you,” the passengers say as they wave goodbye to the old curmudgeon still hanging out in the sticks. “Stay in touch.”

“Don’t worry,” I yell back. “I’ll write.”

—

If you’re interested, I am still on Twitter and Identi.ca. I’m on Facebook too, but I only accept friend requests from people I know or e-know.

Another Grey Left

October 4, 2010 • • 2 Comments

I never met Greyhound Nigel, but I’ve been following his exploits and adventures on George’s blog for almost 5 years. I guess you could say I was a fan. He died last weekend. Maybe it’s weird to be so bummed out about the death of a dog I never met, but it’s easy to care about the people and pups on the other side of these screens.

The hardest fact of having dogs is that they just don’t live very long and yet they become such a big and important part of our lives. They are the friends who blaze through our hearts, gone almost as soon as we think they’ll always be there. Sometimes they go too soon.

So long, Nigel. The internet seems a slower place today.

Digging Joey’s Hole

October 1, 2010 • • Leave a comment

I sometimes wonder if gnawing on a bone is for dogs more akin to whittling or smoking for us. Basically, is it a hobby or a need? Either way, it seems pleasurable and passes the time, and Joey has found a great way to pass his time.

Going out back has been very exciting for Joey lately. He’ll pop wheelies and throw himself at the back door to demonstrate what an emergency it is. Lately, though, it’s not about “doing his business,” as we dog owners say, but rather a new piece of business he’s gotten into. A sideline, if you will.

Joey has a hole. It’s not just any hole, though. I do believe the dog is digging himself a gold mine. Or perhaps searching for oil. I don’t have the heart to tell him that we don’t own the mineral rights to our yard, which is probably just as well since we all need our projects. I have this blog. Joey has his hole.

Sometimes, he moonlights. I’ll look out and see his dark form hunched over in his corner of the yard, his front paws excavating ever so carefully. He’s a meticulous digger, unlike some dogs who just tear at the soil. Joey has this focus when he digs. Perhaps he likes the feel of the soft black soil and the way it rains out across the grass and onto the patio.

Dogs are so like us in their emotions and interests, but I never really thought of them as being hobbyists, and it seems Joey really is. There is nothing there to unearth, nothing dead and delicious underneath the soil, yet he clearly thinks about digging and can’t wait to get back to work on it. If Joey could gnaw bones (he can’t because of what that poisoned dog food did to his kidneys) I suspect it would fall into the hobby category, like whittling. So now, unable to gnaw, he whittles the earth.

Dog needs a hobby, right?

[saveagrey]

Ragweed Time

October 1, 2010 • • 1 Comment

As much as I love fall in Austin, there’s still one part I never look forward to: the ragweed/fall elm gauntlet that gets me every year. Just as the weather turns nice and I’m ready to get outside and enjoy it a little, the autumn allergies have me running for the indoors. Some years it’s not so bad, but this year has seen especially high counts. According to the Statesman, yesterday’s count was the highest it’s been since they started keeping records in 1997.

It was back in the late ‘90’s that the Austin allergies finally got me. They get most everyone eventually, but for most people it’s the December/January cedar that gets their noses running and their eyes itching. I typically don’t feel the cedar unless it’s especially high. Still, live here long enough and you’ll develop allergies to something.

I visited an allergist about 10 years ago and got the full battery of tests. I asked, “What would be the most effective thing for me to do?”

He pulled down a map and pointed to Alaska. “Move,” he said. “Your allergies won’t give you problems in Alaska or…” He considered it a moment and then pointed to Florida. “Key West.”

I’m still in Austin, obviously. It’s only a month. Mid-September to late October and then just as fall really hits, my nose will clear, my eyes will dry and all will be good. I can’t win these battles with Mother Nature and so I just hibernate, limiting my outdoor time to short walks with the pups. And, of course, ACL Fest for which I will pay a hefty price next weekend when the ragweed gods will claim their pound of snot.

Dear Old Stockholm

September 24, 2010 • • 16 Comments

We communicated in images. Flickering moments on dueling monitors. Shoes on cobbled pavement. Clothes rustle in the wind. Wind? We both understand this thing, wind. The colors are suddenly blinding. I can’t even name them. The view of open parkland and a blue pond widens to almost 360 degrees. My stomach drops as the ground falls away, earth tumbling into a pit of sky, images bleeding off the monitors now. We’re flying again. It’s all she thinks about, the only thing she’ll show. I rip the cables from my temples. She flaps them from her wings. We stare at one another across the sterile distance of the research lab. Going nowhere. Again. A white feather floats on the air-conditioned current. We’re as alien and far apart as ever. Three feet away yet separated by species and the awkwardness of the now-severed connection with its illusion of understanding and love. Can she feel it too? She doesn’t blink, her avian eyes as incomprehensible as the machines humming in this lab. I glance at the security cameras and lean in. Please, I whisper, please. Don’t make me leave. I’ll show you everything. Outside, I hear engines and the wind of ten thousand wings beginning to flap.

A flight of egrets
glides toward the setting sun—
the moon rises.

—

This is for Big Tent Poetry’s challenge to write a haibun about travel and an encounter with an imaginary creature. I love haibun, though my approach has been intentionally nontraditional. I’d like to learn more, but I also like the notion of feeling my way into something new and playing with it a little bit like the way I’ll fiddle with a new instrument before attempting to learn how to play it.

I suppose this is why my haibun tend to read more like prose poems. Most of them actually start with the haiku, which tend to be pretty straightforward and traditional. I then write a prose poem piece that goes in a completely different direction. I often think of the prose piece as fictional process notes.

Sometimes I think I might just revise the haiku out completely and let the prose stand alone, but for now I like the way the haiku contrasts with the prose and grounds the charge, bringing things back to Earth. This Earth anyway.

Autumn Falling (Or So They Say)

September 22, 2010 • • 2 Comments

Fall begins tonight, at least that’s what They say. We’ve got some summer days ahead (though not everyday), but I’m excited even if it is like Christmas without snow or cold. There are many reasons to love fall in central Texas even if the leaves don’t change colors like they do up north.

Maybe it’s the light and the way it changes in the fall as the sun follows those migrating birds south. There is too much light here five months of the year. Everything seems blasted, washed out and flat. Photographs with white skies. The autumn light throws things into sharper relief so everything around jumps out, though it was all there all along, hidden in the haze of light that melts everything it touches into flatness. There are discoveries to make this time of year now that the heat no longer blinds.

Maybe it’s the southbound migrants passing through and the winter residents arriving. The orange-crowned and yellow-rumped warblers, the chipping sparrows and kinglets coming back. Fall and winter are great times for birding here since as many species are coming as going. So long, scissor-tails, swallows and kingbirds. Hello, ducks.

Maybe it’s the simple fact that being outside is enjoyable again. Now that fall is upon us, the weather is finally beginning to change just ever so slightly. It’s still humid but the heat behind that humidity is down, and I can once again enjoy creeping out of my air-conditioned cave to enjoy the world.

Most days, I take a walk at lunch. It’s an even mile around the facility where I work and, and I like to walk that mile. It’s good to see the weather and hear the birds, to feel sun and wind in the middle of a day spent in a windowless classroom. It recharges me for the afternoon and lets me unwind as well. When the planet begins to skirt close to the sun as it does in late April, my walks stop and usually don’t resume until mid-September since I can’t stand returning to class sweaty and smelly. I took my first lunch walk of the new school year yesterday, enjoying the calls of the killdeer that live in the fields around the building.

Those walks are the source of many of the micro-poems I post at (the new and improved) a gnarled oak so the micro-poems, like many of our plants, dry up a little in the summertime. So does a lot of my writing. I don’t know why, but it’s better to write when the world is cooler and darker. It seems there’s more to say, more of a need to say it. A fall bloom, if you will.

When I was in high school in New England, spring was such a joy. An annual awakening that seemed to lift everyone from the darkness. Here in Texas things are turned around. Here, it is autumn that awakens as I find myself celebrating the release from the blazing light and heat. Excited again by the opportunity to reconnect with the outdoors.

Or maybe it’s just football.

Whichever way, it’s fall. Time to get outside again.

—

This post was inspired by Lorianne and Heather whose posts about fall got me looking forward to fall here even though it doesn’t feel that fall-like most days.

Ground Wire

September 16, 2010 • • 24 Comments

Do you remember the playground
where children swarmed, climbing
the backbones of ancient leviathans?

A man sold half-eaten legends
from the debris of empire,
rusted machine guns in the basement.

(sign me up)

Indian bones and arrowheads
poke through packed earth,
fingers straining against thin cloth.

I suppose we all duck the evidence
in search of answers,
making our own sense from symbols
on scientific calculators.

(here is where we solved for x)

Upstairs, old men and women
chant themselves to sleep each night,
embellishing with cadenced recall
skirts and toys and sunny Saturdays.

I am full of red wires now,
redundant circuits, ticking louder.

(everything temporary sounds like forever)

Forged bank notes blow down an empty highway.
The first blue norther rolls down the plains.

Now comes the thunder.

—

This started from the wordle list at Big Tent Poetry.

Unthinkable Skies by Juliet Wilson

September 15, 2010 • • 4 Comments

Juliet Wilson’s chapbook Unthinkable Skies (Calder Wood Press, 2010) sat atop the to-read stack for a long time, but I regularly picked it up and flipped to a random poem whenever I passed or when I had a spare moment or two. I don’t know why I read it this way except that after a while, I started to like the slow process of reading one poem and then putting the book down, letting the poem settle into me as I watched the dogs eat their dinner.

When I finally decided to sit down and read Unthinkable Skies all the way through, the poems I’d already read were waiting like recent acquaintances alongside the ones I had missed and the whole thing just got better and better as I progressed back and forth between the new and the familiar. Maybe that’s an odd way to read a book, but I rather enjoyed it and somehow the individual poems resonated more since this helped prevent their getting lost in the whole of a collection.

And what poems these are. Wilson displays a deep love for the natural world tinged with mourning for what has passed (“Passenger Pigeon”) though she manages this without resorting to hopelessness. Throughout, she writes eloquently about her concern not just for the loss of wild places and creatures, but how that impacts us humans, an idea powerfully described in “Lost Dances of the Cranes” in which she imagines future city dwellers watching old video and marveling at “the wonders the world once held.” It was hard not to see the great construction cranes that have dominated Austin’s skyline the past few years.

These poems are full of birds too, but one bird has been with me since I first read “Domesticated” a few weeks ago:  a pet goose, bound to earth by habit and domestication, wondering at the sound of wild geese flying overhead during migration:

Flightless and petted, you enjoy comforts
of home and hearth,

[…]

Winter air fills with honking
geese in joyful formation
high in unthinkable sky.

[…]

Later you puzzle over dreams
of endless blue and the steady beat of wings.

I feel for that goose. For my dogs that once were wolves. For all of us who every now and again might wish we could go back to swinging through the trees with our most distant ancestors. This isn’t to say that being civilized and having our modern human culture doesn’t have its perks (the internet, electric guitars), but with it we’ve disconnected from the natural world and Unthinkable Skies does a wonderful job exploring that disconnection and suggesting possibilities for reconnection.

Finally, these poems are full of space and silence. Space for a reader to enter into Wilson’s richly described world, to sit with her on a beach listening to shorebirds turn stones or reflect on the emptiness of a field after the birds have migrated. With that space, comes a reverent silence perfectly balanced between notes of mourning and wonder, a wonder that fills me as a reader with hope.  Unthinkable Skies reminds us that this Earth and all its creatures—even us apes—is beautiful and holy and in trampling it, we lose some deep and important part of ourselves.

—

Juliet Wilson blogs at Crafty Green Poet and Over Forty Shades, and she edits the wonderful online journal Bolts of Silk (where a few of my poems have appeared). You can buy Unthinkable Skies from Calder Wood Press. It’s a lovely little book and to my great surprise and delight it arrived here from Scotland only three days after I ordered it.

Here’s a video by Alastair Cook of Juliet reading her poem “Adrift” (h/t Moving Poems where I found the video).

Adrift from Alastair Cook on Vimeo.

Mowing the Lawn

September 13, 2010 • • 2 Comments

I’m one of the few people in my neighborhood who mows his own lawn. Most people seem to use lawn services or teenagers but a few of us do it ourselves.

No one else uses an unpowered mower, though, and sometimes people look at me like I must be nuts, but it doesn’t take me much longer or really any more effort to mow with such a contraption, but it does require a certain amount of presence since I can’t just roll over whatever’s in front of me. I have to pay attention to rocks and sticks and piles of dog doo.

It’s that paying attention that keeps me doing it myself. I’ve come to know our little suburban yard quite well over the years. I wonder sometimes what kind of a connection, if any, those who don’t mow their yards actually have with the flora and fauna all around. Granted my yard is not a wild place, though there is wildlife—and not just the birds that come to the feeders.

The live oaks and cedar elms are the highways of the non-winged and so they make for good observing. I see ants trailing in the bark’s grooves and places where squirrels or possibly late night rats have gnawed the wood. Sometimes there are faces in the knots of the trees depending on how the light cuts and moves across the yard. Usually there are birds in the branches: chickadees, doves, titmice.

I really appreciate those trees on our blazing summer mowing days for the shade they provide as well as how they ensure fluidity: I have to adjust my path as I approach the them, thus creating places where I miss a spot or two, where my lines are gently forced to curves. These adjustments that lead to minor imperfections really appeal to me. I love those rebellious clumps of grass for refusing to be mowed.

Getting away from the trees (but not too far—it’s a small yard) it’s not uncommon to catch sight of black-chinned hummingbirds hovering among the tiny red flowers in the tangled and overgrown flame acanthus, a plant unsure if it should be a bush or a tree, but fully invested in its effort to take over the flowerbed and tumble out over the grass.

There’s little connection with nature for most of us in our day-to-day lives, and lord knows, I know my yard isn’t some wild space, but the wild creeps in on six legs or eight or four or none (yes, sometimes snakes; fortunately none with rattles) and I love those times out cutting the grass when swallowtail butterflies flutter around the edges of the yard or when I stop to encourage a frog to be on his way or when a dragonfly seems to follow me along my spiraling path.

Mowing is a slow moving series of moments and actions, repetitive and known, and yet in that there is the awareness that there is wonder and mystery in this yard on this street where everything can seem so far removed from nature, that is until you slow down and really see. We live right on top of so much and so willingly blind ourselves to it. It’s an easy trap to fall into and sometimes a tricky one to escape.

Perhaps this is why, when I finish mowing I typically feel surprisingly refreshed.