Monthly Archives: July 2012

Cleaning Up, Cleaning Up

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When you are used to having at least one person around having most of 5 days and 4 nights to yourself is jut plain odd. I managed to draft some poems, work more on revisions, clean up the house (big monthly clean up), clean out the refrigerator, and I cleaned out my Netflix Q. I don’t know why it drives me so crazy just having things sitting there that I either haven’t read or watched. Makes me antsy. Some of the cleaning out involved me watching things so I thought I’d mention a few I enjoyed. I didn’t watch all of these over the last 5 days, but I did watch quite a few!

For the gamers out there I have two documentaries for you: Game Over (about chess champions versus computer chess games, surprisingly controversial events!) and Under the Boardwalk: The Monopoly Story.

And then to transition from games to something more serious (not that we often take gaming WAY seriously): Triage which is about the work of a humanitarian doctor. He is admirable, but also very honest about what it is like to work in places like Rwanda. Not always easy to watch, but important. As is the documentary Can Mr. Smith Still Go to Washington (very timely) because how far have we gotten from the average Joe really having the chance to go into government. Finally on that social issues side I watched The Listening Project. A really interesting look into what people in other countries really say about America.

Thrown in with all of this I had to have a few guilty pleasures and they were very different. 1st up The Lincoln Lawyer. Decent albeit a bit predictable/cliche. The Shunning. Also predictable, but I’m sort of Amish obsessed. And the cheeky Wink and a Smile about modern burlesque dancers. I was slightly disappointed in the last because I wanted to feel this power that the woman (and some men) who try burlesque feel, but I didn’t quite get there. Hmm. Not sure why. Still interesting.

Oh, and I’m also finished watching season 7 of Supernatural. It’s been such a fun show to watch. Season 6 was a bit odd, but I did a little reading about it, and interesting to note that the first five seasons were pretty carefully plotted out by the show’s creator so when he transitioned out perhaps you can think of it as a slightly bumpy ride. It’s just big dumb fun.

And sometimes, that’s all we want :)

 

Monday Measure Up

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July has been an extremely odd month. I thought it would be my month to really get a hold of my healthy habits even with vacation, but each week has just felt a bit off. I just haven’t felt like myself.

I’ve stepped on the scale a few times recently, contemplated a variety of diets even though I know they just make me crazy (can we say a cookie cake that I ate part of this weekend, and ice cream which would be fine if I wasn’t feeling like I was in GORGE mode). I was supposed to be out of town at my once a year, end of July, writer get together, but I didn’t feel up to the trip. Feel like I’m coming back around some now, and I even attempted a run yesterday OUTSIDE (what was I thinking?), but I did it before I had any food in me (and in the heat) so it was mostly a brisk walk.

Instead of being out of town with writers I was all by myself while my husband went with his brother to his yearly anime convention up in Baltimore. So things here were quiet, but I wasn’t letting my brain really rest. I think last night and this morning I’ve finally let my brain quiet down a bit. I want to try and hold onto that; I want to carry that into this last week before I have to report back to campus. (Next week are lots of meetings, and then classes start on the 15th).

I will say one thing for contemplating this weekend – I think I’ve come to the conclusion that I want to get a treadmill for the house. Hubs and I have been going pretty solid to the gym for over a month, and we always gravitate to the treadmills. The really nice ones have come down in price, and if we get a fold-up one we have the space for it. It would streamline things for sure. As will having an office on the campus where I teach which might have a fridge in it – a place where I could keep my healthier snacks and/or possibly even lunch instead of going off campus.

Could it be that I can step into August with convenience at my fingertips? We all measure ease a bit different, but with ease comes comfort. Perhaps with comfort comes lasting change?

Serendipity or Saturday Blogging

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Maybe it is a happy accident that I was wide awake at about 5am because I’ve had time, already, to putter around. That’s what I’m trying to convince myself of anyway.

I do want to write about coincidences for a moment. I didn’t plan it, but for some reason a good bit of my reading/watching has circled around Native Americans recently.

For example, I finished a terrific novel that I picked up at a used bookstore Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver. I love Kingsolver’s writing. Which I only picked up because I knew the author’s name, not realizing that it connected to the very first Kingsolver book I ever read “The Bean Trees.”

My having read “The Bean Trees” forever ago was its own kind of happy accident because I had this strange idea one year (when I was about 13) to just pick out books to read alphabetically, and just based off covers/descriptions. I guess when I came to the K’s, Kingsolver stood out, and I’ve been reading her books ever since.

I also didn’t realize that the book would deal with some of the issues surrounding modern Native American families. I love that it did; I enjoyed the variety of people that were presented in white and Native culture. The other book I finished recently Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer had been on my list for a while because I’ve read most of Krakauer’s books, but also because I am obsessed with Mormons, but I didn’t realize it would also deal with Native Americans. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised given that it is a book dealing with Mormons who are primarily in the West.

Native Americans aren’t a huge topic in Krakauer’s book (non-fiction rather than fiction), but they do appear. They are outside characters, so to speak, but having both of these books recently read had me thinking more about my own supposed ties to the Cherokee. As if these books weren’t enough to push me forward I also watched the movie The Missing. So last night I found myself pulling out my old genealogy notebook to see if I could make any new headway.

I didn’t get very far. Researching my mother’s family has always been pretty easy. The Mennonites kept good records and I can go far back to those who originally came over from Switzerland in the 1700′s, but my father’s family has always been difficult. I always work on his maternal line because he doesn’t actually know who his biological father was. Even so I get stuck pretty quickly. I have my great-grandfather’s death certificate, and I am pretty certain about the names of my great-great-grandfather and grandmother, but finding anything about who their parents were (so going pre-civil war it seems) hasn’t really worked for me. I even went to the South Carolina archives once to do some research, but I felt daunted by the task.

It was fun to look at it again. Some new things I think I discovered while working

  • my great-great-grandfather’s may have been a Jr so that would make his father also a Daniel Driggers (or I saw a listing for Daul) with possible wife of Celie
  • Finding Daul Driggers as a possible name was intriguing because my father (and brother) have the middle name of Dahls (which I may be spelling wrong) which was always said to be a family name. Perhaps lots of off spellings?
  • the Driggers last name, when I originally did research years ago, always seemed to come back to possibly Portugal as a change from Rodriquez, but now I see indications of a possible German derivation and also Melungeon which is controversial, but would make a lot of sense.
  • DNA tests run about $100-$200.

So what will I do with this information? On the books and the movie I’d recommend with the novel being my favorite of the three, and the movie my least favorite of the three. With the genealogy research? I am going to save up and have the genetic test done I think. I just think it would be fascinating :)

Make Friday Write

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Sorry I missed out on posting last week guys! We actually drove back from vacation last Friday instead of Saturday so I just didn’t quite make it. I have updated the post from two weeks ago so your work in progress is down :) I’m posting a newish poem below to get your feedback on. Feel free to post your work in progress (and/or links to your work in progress) in comments, and I’ll take my work and yours down a week from today.

–and now I’ll go work on da poem!!

This has been a bit of an odd week as I got back into the swing of being at home. I was also feeling a little under the weather which means I’ve cancelled my attendance at the NCWC this year. It is starting today and is five hours away. I just didn’t think I could handle that drive by myself this weekend since I’m feeling a little blah (for lack of a medical diagnosis) so instead I’m staying in to write, read, reflect etc.

I did submit some poems this week, and they were accepted! Yay! More details when they come out, but I also received a rejection which prompted me to pull a poem from the next full length manuscript I’m working on. Always plucking away at a new project.Actually that manuscript has over 50% of the individual poems already accepted for publication somewhere, and I’m just organizing the poems right now before I do another read-through. I need to decide if I want to continue sending the individual poems out. I usually stop sending them after the manuscript has been accepted somewhere so maybe I shouldn’t be premature . . . hmmm

I’ve already reported in on some reading and watching, but I am finishing up Loria Taylor’s poetry collection SOB from Sibling Rivalry Press, and before my husband headed off to his anime convention (yearly adventure with his brother the weekend I’m normally at the above mentioned writer’s conference) we finished up Sasuke 26 and 27 which meant hours and hours of watching people try to complete an obstacle course. Just simply fun to watch :)

This all has me almost up to date although I finished two books last night, a movie, and I’m starting a new pile of books. Nothing like having a bit of time to yourself to give you the time to do whatever ya want. I’ll celebrate that as I head into my extended weekend. Hope you have a good one as well!

A Year of Teaching with Book Reviews Sprinkled In

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Had two different posts I wanted to do today, but perhaps I can weave them together? One was that I wanted to talk about my first year teaching full-time and the second was that I had a few books on my finished list that I had not yet reviewed.

One of the books I want to mention kind of merges my two words of teaching and writing. Writing Doesn’t Have to Be Lonely by Lawrence Weinstein is an inexpensive tool about exactly what the title says. This is a great resource for students taking college courses (and that is to whom it is geared), but I think it would also be a great little book to have around if you are introducing anyone to how to politely work in a workshop/critique setting. That being said I can’t put it on my syllabus, sadly, because we’ve gone to standardized textbooks for our classes. They are voted on by committee and last about two years. Hopefully the next time around maybe I could suggest this as a resource that could be bundled in.

But, before all of that above, about a year and a half a go I tried to write an essay about my first semester working as an adjunct professor, but I ended up publishing it as a blog post instead. I was a busy, but pretty happy beaver after my first semester of teaching. Granted, I only had two classes. The spring of 2011 would bring me 5 classes and my first glimpses of committee work, but even with the new responsibilities I still really wanted to get a full-time spot.

Why? For many reasons but they narrow down to focus. Having a more specific office and a specific course load are definitely gifts. Now that my office has moved I’ll even be a bit happier (I think) because I’ll have less to haul around. The course load, however, is still large. 6 classes a semester so that is 12 a year since I have opted out of teaching for the summer (at least for now). With that you get a much better paycheck, committee work, advising work, the said office (I’m sharing which works fine for me), a 30 hour a year professional development requirement, and a better name-tag. I’m serious about that last one :)

It has been daunting and, at times, I still think about how nice it would be to teach at a university for the lower work-load (and also for the possibility of teaching graduate students creative writing), but that is more of a dream. Even if I had the opportunity it would be difficult to take it because I feel that my students need me. Maybe I’m just thinking too highly of myself, but when I see students I taught in comp 1 showing up in my comp 2 classes I feel like maybe I’m doing something right.

Now on to the other two books I want to mention, and how they might fit into this discussion. The first is News of the World by Philip Levine and the second is Drop Dead Healthy by AJ Jacob which I read on my e-reader.   The poetry book wasn’t the one I actually wanted to read, but it was the one in the stores. I have had it so long that Levine is no longer our poet laureate already! I bought it when he started. He is, no surprise, a gifted writer, and this is a solid collection, but it isn’t a book I’d see myself coming back to. I particularly enjoyed the more surreal prose type poems towards the end of the book.

The second book is from an author I’ve been stalking for a while. I enjoyed his “Year of Living Biblically” as well as the other two most recent (“Life as an Experiment” and “Know-it-All”), and while I enjoyed this current book it definitely doesn’t come down as my favorite. You still get a lot of Jacobs’ humor as he tries out fitness and diet regimens, but I think he tried a little too hard to do the “whole body” thing as the later shorter chapters on things like hands weren’t quite as amusing as reading about him trying a paleo diet and workout.

I did enjoy that as he tried to diet he’d find himself, at times, obsessing about food. Yep, that’s what happens with diets! I’d like to have seen him spend more time on what it was like to diet, but this book focused more on the whole body. Fun read though.

And now perhaps I should finish up the other two print books that are oh so close to being finished, but wait I also need to do some serious prep work. Classes start on August 15th! And the balancing act begins again.

Too Much to See?

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Everyone once and a while I start to feel overwhelmed by the stacks of books and number of items in my Netflix Q. When this happens I start to re-examine how I organize all of my reading, watching etc…I find myself, this week, asking: Is there just too much to see?

Well, of course the answer is Yes. I still like to believe I’ll get EVERYTHING done, but I want to re-shape my expectations a bit and not say I HAVE to read for x number of hours or watch y episodes of a show just to keep up with some internal clock on entertainment/learning.

Maybe thinking about this is a bit of a hold over from vacation where we spent each night from about 8 or so until we were ready to sleep just watching cable since we don’t have it at home anymore. All those channels and yet we ended up mostly with the history channel. We stumbled across the quite good: Auction Kings, Barter Kings. The mediocre: Storage Wars, Property Wars. And the awful: American Colony: Meet the Hutterites.

I don’t know that this will necessarily mean I’ll watch less (or that I even want to), but I want to be more present with everything I do lately so instead of 5 minutes here and 5 minutes there I’m gonna try to dig in to everything I’m watching, reading, working on.

Here are some of the other items I’ve watched recently.

  • Ken picked this one out Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles. I had no idea what this was about, but it was fascinating. It also raises a good question about being inquisitive: do you always want to know the final answer?
  • I’ve had Smoke Signals on my list for a while because I’m very interesting in Sherman Alexie and Native American culture. Really enjoyed the film, and I’d highly recommend it. And, as always seems to happen, I seem to be reading quite a few things (that I’ll recap in a later post) that also touch on different representations of Native American society. I didn’t plan it that way. Just happens!
  • I’m not sure why Everything Is Illuminated was not on my list since it deals with an author, and someone researching their ancestry – specifically Jewish ancestry. Glad Ken added this one to the Q. Another good watch.
  • Then for me there was Brutal Beauty: Tales of the Rose City Rollers. I’m intrigued by the resurgence of roller derby, and strong representations of women in film or documentaries so this was a good one for me. Again, as serendipity works, I found out there is a Charlotte Roller Derby league. No I’m not trying out, but I think I’d like to go watch a bout. And they play like really close to my house!
  • Perhaps last for this week is the fact that we did go see The Dark Knight Rises. So terrible to hear what happened in Colorado, but like 911, I never want a tragedy to keep the rest of the world from fighting back. I’m not scared to go to the movies; I’m not afraid to fly. I am saddened by people who are so so terribly broken that they take others down :(

Sorry to end on kind of a sad note, but isn’t that the way? The balance of life with comedy and tragedy; good and bad. Ultimately I believe in spending as much time in joy without forgetting those who – at least for a time – can’t.

Review: The Branches, the Axe, the Missing

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There are two situations I don’t want to be in when I have plans to do a book review. Situation 1 – strongly disliking a book, which IS NOT the case here and Situation 2 – loving a book which IS the case here. When a book works really, really well how can I add to the conversation about said book? Well, I can at least tell you a bit about it, and encourage you to pick up your own copy so here goes.

Charlotte Pence’s chapbook The Branches, the Axe, the Missing is a prize-winning collection released by Black Lawrence Press. The individual poems are untitled like branches off of a poetic chapbook tree. And like a good functioning piece of plant life, the individual poems connect well to each other throughout the collection.

Also physically this is simply a nice book to look at: slim, terrific cover art, and elegantly designed.

Not to belabor the point about branches, but Pence does an excellent job of playing off the different root meanings of words because this is a book that is – to me – about reaching into the primal space of language as the speaker of the poems tries to reconcile the reality of wood and yet the ever presence of fire as well as the axe.

Does that sound complex? I hope it does and it doesn’t because these poems are layered (ringed like an old tree), but in a fulfilling way. They ask you to re-read them for their beautiful language, but also for the extended metaphors and meanings below the initial bark. Here is one example from page 26: “Her father is a loss . Is the wood being / cut down and the cutter of that wood.” I found myself talking back to these poems which is yet another way I know I truly love something I’m reading. I want to join in a conversation with the poet.

I have so many short notes to myself on individual poems from this collection that it is difficult for me to pinpoint a “favorite.” It may be the one I quoted above or it might be the very last one, but I won’t quote that one because I want you to pick up this collection and disappear for a while in Pence’s poetic forest.