Holly had the bright idea to tap some of our maples. I know in theory of course that sap starts running in the spring, and that if you collect maple sap and boil it down, it makes syrup. I’ve visited sugar houses and seen the whole thing happening. But even so, when I saw sap dripping out of my own trees and bubbling into caramel on my own stove, it was the most staggering miracle.
Later today, after making this video, I went to my acupuncturist. He makes maple syrup every year and we’ve talked about how putting a tap in a tree is kind of like putting an acupuncture needle in someone.
I’m trying to get back to work after a week of travel. I was at Penn State last Thursday, and look! They have a giant Chas. Addams painting! It’s part of the Fred Waring Collection, which is part of the university library archives. Actually, the FWC was one of the many sponsors of my visit. I dimly recalled Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians as having played some kind of outmoded lawrence-welkish kind of music when I was a child Read the rest of this entry »
Last night the power was out so Holly and I had to wade through two or three feet of snow to rescue our neighbors’ snake. They were away and the snake needed to be kept warm. Isn’t she sweet?
Here I am reading the big sprawling old fashioned color comics section from the latest issue of McSweeney’s. McSweeney’s is a literary journal whose physical form morphs peculiarly from issue to issue. One number resembled a stack of junk mail held together with a rubber band. This one takes the shape of a multi-sectioned Sunday newspaper, a vast 320 page broadsheet. Which includes the above funny pages with cartoons by a whole mess of cartoonists, including me.
Here’s the piece I did for it. It’s based on The Game of Life, which I played obsessively for a while as a child, often by myself. (the colors come out really garish here…sorry)
I think if you click on that, it’ll take you to Flickr, where you can see a larger version.
Anyhow, I just wanted to put that up. Now I’m off to give a talk at the University of Chicago. If you’re in the area, come by! I’ve also updated my events page. Maybe I’ll be in your neck of the woods sometime soon. Apparently I have nothing better to do than travel around talking about myself.
Here’s another item. I went out to get the mail yesterday, and there was my Oberlin Alumni magazine. I was idly glancing at the cover as I walked back inside, and something looked oddly familiar about it. It wasn’t just the drawing of the iconic Oberlin library womb chair, or the obstreperous Richardsonian silhouette of Peters Hall visible behind it through the window…no, it was something else.
“Oberlin Writes.” Hmm. Could it be? Indeed, it was. Cartoonist David Heatley drew the cover art for this issue, which includes this very sly allusion to an image from my memoir Fun Home.
I don’t know whether anyone else will notice, but I’m very flattered. The issue is about all the various writers who’ve come out of the college, and it notes the unusually high ratio of cartoonists among them, including Heatley, me, R.O Blechman, and Josh Neufeld. (Also, though not mentioned in the article, David Rees, Barry Deutsch, and Jason Little.)
Today I spent hours creating a timeline of my life over the past ten years.
That was before I got to this passage in Hermione Lee’s biography of Virginia Woolf, which I just started yesterday. Actually, I’ve been meaning to read this bio for a while but what prompted me to finally undertake it was Joan Schenkar’s biography of Patricia Highsmith, which I’m also reading. Schenkar begins her effort to describe Highsmith’s life by referencing Hermione Lee quoting Woolf on the impossibility of writing biography. Here’s Woolf:
” Facts have their importance—But that is where the biography comes to grief. The biographer cannot extract the atom. He gives us the husk. Therefore as things are, the best method would be to separate the two kinds of truth. Let the biographer print fully completely, accurately, the known facts without comment; Then let him write the life as fiction.”
I feel very dedicated to the project of writing my own biography as nonfiction. But she’s right. Trying to convey the facts AND the true story at the same time is not for the faint of heart.
I think that I shall never see
a poem lovely as a tree.
But please give me HDTV.
We had to take these two trees down today in order to get HDTV satellite reception. Well. And also because they were too close to the house, and shaded the garden. They were indeed lovely, but so is the open space. And so, I hope, will Rachel Maddow be in 1080p.
Well I’ll be goldanged. Why am I paying for therapy when I can get analyzed here quite brilliantly for free? Thank you to Alex K who identified Diving Into The Wreck as my dream association in the last post. Right down to the “body armor of black rubber,” “the grave and awkward mask.”
Adrienne Rich figures rather prominently in the memoir I’m writing, and clearly this poem has lodged itself somewhere deep in my psyche. Here’s a site that lists comments from various writers and critics about Rich’s 1972 poem. Margaret Atwood said about it in the NYT Book Review:
“This quest–the quest for something beyond myths, for the truths about men and women, about the “I” and the “You,” the He and the She, or more generally (in the references to wars and persecutions of various kinds) about the powerless and the powerful–is presented throughout the book through a sharp, clear style and through metaphors which become their own myths. At their most successful the poems move like dreams, simultaneously revealing and alluding, disguising and concealing. The truth, it seems, is not just what you find when you open a door: it is itself a door, which the poet is always on the verge of going through.”
I won’t say any more about what I’m working on. I often feel like blogging is a kind of “spilling my seed,” a dispersal of my thoughts before they’re fully formed. Kinda like that puddle of ink in the last post.
Hey, are there any readers in the Twin Cities who might be interested in earning a few bucks to look up a Star Tribune article for me at the library on microfilm? Contact me here!
Thanks to everyone for all the discussion on the last post about Prop 8 and Haiti. I’m sorry I’ve been so absent. I’ve been lost in my own subterranean murk and it’s hard to surface.
I had this dream the other night that I was in a cave full of water. I had a wetsuit on, and I was adjusting my mask because I knew that I had to dive down into the water and swim underneath this big ledge. When I surfaced on the other side, I’d be out under the open sky. Some other people had already successfully done it. But I was really anxious. It was scary to dive down there without really being able to see the way out—I just had to trust that I’d find it. I was having a really hard time psyching myself up. Finally, I got my mask sealed tightly around my face and was about to jump when…I woke up.
I drew you this picture of it. Then I ran upstairs to get my ink wash, to shade the drawing, and on my way back into the office I dropped all five of my jars of watered down ink on the floor.
