Bad Bad Bad

This useless blogger, you have no doubt been saying to yourself. She takes up the space on the bandwidth, and for what? Her same depressing poem from last week, that is what. Puhfooey on her. 

Oh, come on. You know that's what you're thinking. Denial is a river in South America or Mesopotamia or Nebraska or someplace, or so our average college freshman would like to tell us.

But I am here to tell you now:  this is for what I take up the bandwidth.

The fakey accent, meanwhile,  I cannot explain. It's just there in my soul.

(audio clip courtesy of my entertaining friend Mike Linton)

Poetry Friday: A Little Rhyme

Sometimes these tiny things just write themselves.

Poem

Gray hills, gray sky, gray rain

Stippling the river.

Gray gray gray again,

Gray gray gray forever.

November feels this way:

Drearily unshriven,

Ten miles from Christmas Day,

A hundred miles from heaven.

Too bad it's not quite cheery enough for a Christmas card. 

I suppose I should quit trying not to rhyme, because even when I don't, finding a rhyme is generally what focuses and finishes the poem.

Many thanks to Diane at Random Noodling for hosting this week's Poetry Friday gathering. And I vow to do a better job of making the rounds to read and comment on everyone else's poems. Somehow the time always seems to slip away, especially once the kids get up, but I have appreciated the visits from other PF folks no end, and I don't mean not to reciprocate.

In My House the People Are Reading . . .

. . . King Lear, The Betrothed, Citizen Soldiers, that Louis de Wohl novel about Saint Benedict, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Josefina Learns a Lesson, Missee Lee, Kristin Lavransdatter (again, and again, and again, hoping to have some thinking space so as to say something about it, instead of just making lists and taking notes and calling them blog posts . . . )

One of Those Homeschooling Moments

Crispina, rapturously, on opening her handwriting book:  "I love Ws."

Of course, what she was writing today were J words, but, you know, good to know. We'll get her a W for her birthday. 

Poetry Friday: Mary Oliver

I'm still in Kansas, and it's still raining.  And even though I don't have my face in my hands right this minute, I love this poem by Mary Oliver:

The Poet with His Face in His Hands

You want to cry aloud for your

mistakes. But to tell the truth the world

doesn't need any more of that sound.

So if you're going to do it and can't

stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can't

hold it in, at least go by yourself across 

(across what? find out . . . )

Check out the rest of this week's Poetry Friday offerings here. 

Heartland Nights

So it's 8:30, Central Standard Time. I'm in a motel room in a small town at the geographic heart of the U.S.A., listening to rain hammer at the window. The last time I spent the night in this part of the country, the only room available at the Best Western was an upstairs room, and the lady behind the desk offered it to Aelred and me -- we were moving from Memphis to Salt Lake City, with all our belongings, including, at that moment, our car keys, locked in the back of the U-Haul truck -- in a spirit of dubiousness. It was storming out;  did we really want to take our chances? We were too road-stoned just then to care whether we got blown away or not, and besides, we needed a telephone to call a locksmith. As it turned out, when Aelred called the one local listing in the yellow pages, the man had just died, so that Aelred spent some minutes apologizing profusely to the widow on the other end. I forget how we ended up getting our keys back, but we must have, because we're not still there. Or to put it another way, here I am in Kansas again.

I have had some very nice barbecue for dinner, and now I'm mulling over the offerings in the vending machine downstairs, more out of boredom than actual hunger. The best thing about this motel is that it has free wi-fi;  otherwise, there's not much on. Epiphany, who accompanied me on this junket -- or, more accurately, whom I accompanied -- is spending the night in the freshman dorms of the local liberal-arts college, having a taste of campus life after dark on a wet Thursday night. I meanwhile am having a taste of it's really too early to go to bed, but there's nothing else to do.

And that's not a bad thing. Do not think that I complain. The solitude is not unpleasant on the whole. After a day of plane changes, it's nice to sit here in the mauve-carpeted quiet with nothing before me that has to be done, except maybe get some Grandma's Cookies out of the vending machine, because calories consumed in Kansas after 8 p.m. don't count.

There's an odd noise coming from somewhere out in the hall, a noise like several people trying to swim in the ice machine.

I think I may be too tired for cookies anyway. Nothing to do but go to bed is sounding better and better to me.

Catch-Up Day

Back from the mountains in one piece (or five complete pieces, if you want to look at it that way), we've spent today catching up on schoolwork. If you're wanting some blog action, check out the latest version of last Friday's wasp poem. Otherwise, nothing to see. Move along.

But we are talking about Kristen Lavransdatter at book club tonight, so maybe I'll have something compelling to write about when I get home.

So . . .

For the last two days, I've been up in the mountains, out of bounds of any wi-fi network, with four children, two other adults, and a groveling brown dog named Rosa.

We had been to the same place, up at the top of a holler near the Tennessee-North Carolina border, two years ago, and I sort of kind of remembered how to get there. I remembered that the exit off I-40 isn't clearly indicated. I remembered that all twisty mountain roads look basically alike. I remembered that there was a rough gravel road to vanquish on the way up the holler.

What I thought I didn't remember was how steep this road was. I really thought I'd forgotten the hairpin turn at the beginning -- two years ago, did I have to stop and back the van and maneuver to get around this turn? I didn't remember the road's being so slippery and muddy, or the van's being so prone to getting mired down on what really did seem to be a remarkably difficult road, so difficult that obviously I'd put that difficulty right out of my mind . . .

"Oh," said my front-seat navigator with the map in her lap. "Uh-oh."

"Oh?" I said, as the rear wheels spun, and the back of the van fishtailed on this threadlike road on the mountainside.

"We were supposed to turn left," said my navigator. "Not go up here."

Ah. Well, we had gone up there, and now there we were:  a twelve-passenger van on a nearly-vertical road made for mules, rhododendron on our left hand, and a nice drop-off on our right.

Could we go up until we found a place to turn around? Whaaaaaaaaaaaaay, went the rear wheels in the mud. The van slipped a little towards the downside of the hill. And anyway, even if we did go up, I thought, who was to say we wouldn't get shot when we got to the top?

So I started backing the van down the mountainside. 

At this point, somebody in the back-back seat started to cry. She would have cried louder and longer, no doubt, if her tooth hadn't come out just then.

So I'm backing a twelve-passenger van down a mountain, on a road made for mules, rhododendron on our left hand, a nice drop-off on our right, and somebody in the back-back exclaiming, "My tooth! My tooth is out!"

I can't do this, I thought. I have to go forward. I shifted into drive, and the wheels went, Whaaaaaaaaaaaaay in the mud.

"My tooth!" cried the person in the back seat.

Nope, I couldn't go forward. I shifted into reverse again and began inching back down, hugging the hillside. The left-side mirror caught on a rhodedendron bush and bent back until I thought it would snap off. I glanced at the view to the right and felt a little sick. I wished my tooth would fall out, to give me something else to think about.

"I dunno about this," said some skeptic behind me.

I backed a little more, still hugging the hillside on the left, trying not to look to the right.

"I'm sorry," said the navigator in a tiny voice.

I said, "It's okay."

By this time I had backed right into the hillside. I shifted back into drive. Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaay, went the wheels, but we managed to fishtail out into more or less the middle of the road again, so that was all right.

"My tooth!" went the toothless one.

"I dunno," said the skeptic.

"I'm sorry," whispered the navigator.

"We can do this," I said. To the navigator I said again, "It's okay." And of course it was. We weren't going to roll down the hill and die, I told myself. If it transpired that I could not back the van down the mountain, we would get out and leave it there forever, and walk up the right road.

Shifting back into reverse, I eased us a few feet more down the mountain. The road was slippery underneath. In the side mirror I could see gravel  behind us, which was a good sign, but whenever I looked out the righthand windows, I felt again like losing a tooth, or getting out and walking, or throwing up, or something.

So I put the van in park, and I got out to have a look at things. From the ground, the situation was not so bad. Yes, we still had to back down a road made for mules and around a hairpin turn, but the drop-off on the right was not nearly so steep as it had appeared from the height of the van. Even if we went off the road, there were plenty of trees to stop us rolling over and dying. Of course, we'd still be hitting trees, but somehow that seemed a less daunting prospect than other things I had been imagining.

I got back in the van. "We're fine," I said.

"My tooth!"

"I dunno!"

"I'm sorry."

The fourth person, who as far as I can remember had been fairly quiet throughout this whole operation, now said, "How long until we get there?"

To make a long story short, we made it down the hill. At the hairpin turn, there was room actually for me to turn the van around, so that we exited the mountain track gracefully, head first (so to speak), as if we'd been born on that hilltop and cut our teeth (so to speak) on that road. Also, the person who asked me how much longer made it out alive.

In case you were wondering.

Oh, By the Way

It's my birthday, and I'll not blog if I want to.

Poetry Friday: Seeing Things, Saying Things: UPDATED

I've long been a lover of Elizabeth Bishop's poetry, which subjects the objects, events, and creatures of this world to quiet, intense, but often wry scrutiny. I recall, too, the sculptor Rodin's advice to his secretary, Rainer Maria Rilke, when Rilke suffered from writer's block:  Go to the zoo. Rilke did, and the result was a series of remarkable poems, including "The Panther."

When I was in graduate school, a professor of mine liked to recreate Rodin's directive to Rilke:  Go to the zoo -- and then write a poem for class, she always added. The idea, obviously, was to go and look at animals, until something about some animal had worked its way into our imaginations and taken over, and to write a poem which was essentially about seeing. Seeing isn't everything, as we all know, but for most of us, ie those of us who can see,  the eye is the open window through which the mind begins to know what's outside. Rendering what we see into language both pins it down in a particularized moment -- Rilke's panther frozen in his endless pacing -- at least for the duration of the poem;  and also, inevitably, whether we mean to or not, imposes some conclusion on it. We may see neutrally (maybe), but conclusions are embedded in our words.

Not long ago, facing ongoing writer's block, I set myself Rodin's assignment. I didn't go to the zoo;  we don't have one here in Fiat. But I did look out of the dining room window, in the frame of which a colony of wasps was busy constructing a nest, and I tried to render what I saw of that operation:

The Paper Wasps

Their flaky gray pastry

swells between the storm

glass and the dining-room window.

It crawls with scissor-wings,

prickling needle-legs.

The great work progresses:

chewing, spitting, patting

the clustered abscesses, some

fitted already with cottony

warheads. Each crisp

infant, folded inside,

waits wide-eyed.

It's not Rilke, and it's not Bishop, but the experiment's always interesting to attempt. A highly-recommended assignment, for yourself or, if you're a teacher, for students.

Meanwhile, be sure to visit Teaching Authors today for the rest of the Poetry Friday roundup.

PS:  I don't know whether anybody's still reading out there, but after looking at this poem on the blog page, I thought it got off the ground too slowly, so I messed around with it some more. Like this:

The Paper Wasps

The great work progresses,

a flaky gray pastry

swelling in the window,

crawling with scissor-wings,

innumerable needle-legs.

All day they’re at it:

chewing, spitting, patting

the clustered abscesses, some

fitted already with cottony

warheads. Each crisp

infant, folded inside,

waits wide-eyed. 

So, like the eye doctor, I could ask you:  Which is better? A or B? This way? Or this way?

Cause I sure as heck don't know.

PPS:  Which is better? This way? Or this way? Or this way:

The Paper Wasps

Inside the storm window,

the great work progresses.

The gray pastry swells.

It crawls with scissor-wings,

prickling needle-legs.

All day they’re at it:

chewing, spitting, patting

the clustered abscesses, some

fitted already with cottony

warheads. Each crisp

infant, folded inside,

waits wide-eyed.

???


PPPS:   'K, so here's the rhyming version (stay tuned for the dance remix):

October Wasps

Inside the storm

glass, their gray

pastry swells.

Kept medium-warm

in late-midday

sun, it crawls

with scissor-wings.

The work progresses:

pattings, chewings.

Some clustered abscesses

are fitted already,

each with its cottony

warhead. Inside,

the infant, folded,

waits wide-eyed.

Don't worry, I'm not throwing away any previous versions. Nor have I settled on a favorite, though your comments are tremendously helpful.

Incidentally, I cut "crisp" in the penultimate line in this version, not only for the sake of something like meter, but also because I'm not sure they are crisp at that stage. I mean, the adults are for sure. I had one in my jacket pocket yesterday in the mountains. I put my hand in, and something stung me;  my fingers closed on a small object which can only be described as "crisp" (well, also "leggy"), and when I pulled it out, it immediately flew away.

But in the pupal stage, which is what I guess those cottony warheads indicate? I'm not so sure. According to some book Lissa Wiley read, butterflies at that stage are soup. Not so sure about wasps. Maybe I can sell this to someone in my house as a research project. At any rate, while one wishes to be poetic, one also wishes to be accurate.

Geo Whiz

 
Where in the world is Lincoln, Nebraska? 

. . . asked a child in my house. 

Because the homeschooled student knows the question is the answer. 

 

Everyone Else Is Talking About the Election

But not me. I hate politics. Yes, I voted. Crispina and I trotted over to the county offices yesterday morning and got 'er done.  It was a handy little civics lesson, in which she learned, among other things, that there are such things as elections in which nobody is running for president.

Afterwards, we ate lunch, and then we got into the van and drove to Mount Airy, where we made a  little Andy Griffith pilgrimage, then stopped at a cemetery to pray a rosary for the holy souls in Purgatory, then went to a Missa Cantata in the Extraordinary Form in the tiny, lovely parish church. On the way home, we treated Amicus, my All-Souls baby, to a birthday dinner in a random O'Charley's off the interstate, and got back late.

Today, for the first time in what seems like ages of ages though it's really only been about four days, we're back on our normal school schedule. Epiphany, to her immense credit, has been plowing forward even when the rest of us . . . well, to make several long stories short, weren't. I haven't blogged much about homeschooling in the last month;  further, as I now realize, I haven't given that much blog attention to our high-school program of studies at all. That's not to say that it hasn't been going on. It has, though largely at odd, college-studenty hours. Chemistry, for example, tends to happen around 10:30 at night, after most of the household has retired and the budding chemist can read and work problems and mix things up and pour things in blissful solitude, without other people's wandering through and poking their busy noses in and asking, "What is that you're doing?"

The centerpiece of our senior-year fall semester is a course I've entitled "The History of Ideas." I've mentioned this in passing before, but as it's going very well, I thought I'd report on it in more detail. The "spine" for this course is Anthony Esolen's Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization which, despite its rather inflammatory title, offers a thorough and engaging narrative of the development of Western thought from its nascence in Greek philosophy through the end of the twentieth century. In putting this course together, I imagined it as, simultaneously, a current-events course, in the sense of understanding the pedigrees of the ideas which shape contemporary society;  and as a literature class. Alongside the Esolen text, Epiphany has been reading various primary sources:  excerpts from Livy, Machiavelli, and Castiglione,  cantos from Dante's Divine Comedy, and, at the moment, King Lear. She was reading Lear in the car yesterday, in fact, as we drove to Mt. Airy, and we had a good conversation about patterns of reversal:  what is foul seems fair, and vice versa. She's written short papers on themes of the-individual-and-society, as articulated by the ancient Greeks and Romans, and a longer essay on the role of beauty in medieval culture. A five-paragraph essay on Lear will follow on her completion of the play.

She'll finish the Esolen book and related reading by the end of the semester, at which point she'll choose a broad topic suggested by this fall's reading to research in depth in the spring, for a twenty-page "senior thesis."

For anyone who wonders how, exactly, I scheduled all this work (and I'd be wondering if I were the reader), all I did was break the Esolen book down into nine chapter-units of approximately two weeks each. In the first week of each unit, she reads the chapter itself and any related reading, then in the second week works on the writing project which inevitably accompanies each set of readings. I used a weekly lesson-plan form from Donna Young to sketch out each week's assignments, with the caveat that all written work had to be finished and inserted into her "finished-work" binder by the Friday of a given week. Typically, especially when a longer essay is due, I've started giving notice of the deadline two to three weeks in advance in the lesson plans, so that she isn't blindsided by the assignment. Overall, I find it much easier to work in weekly increments than to try breaking assignments down into daily bites. Epiphany has a settled routine of working an hour a day on each of her subjects (including chemistry late at night), and things get done pretty much on schedule.

Her whole rota of subjects this fall is as follows:

History of Ideas (which covers a lot of English territory as well as history)

grammar and composition, in which she's essentially just working her way through the two Jensen texts on these themes

chemistry, using Apologia's Exploring Creation text

Algebra II, using Teaching Textbooks:  this is her most slow-going subject, but it's going.

New-Testament Greek, via a class our parish priest is teaching

moral theology via the Didache series (also includes the occasional 5-paragraph essay)

private violin lessons and youth orchestra:  she's playing a solo in the Christmas concert!

It's funny:  I had thought, based on her inclinations in late-elementary and middle school, that high school for her would look less bookish, more experiential, hands-on, and arts-based. As it turns out, what she likes to engage with are books. So there we are. One of the most enjoyable things about having teenagers, in my ongoing experience, is watching the person emerge by degrees from the chrysalis of childhood. While in fundamentals this person is someone you have known all along, he or she is also full of surprises, so that you're constantly saying, "Oh, that's who you are." In a way, it's like being handed your newborn all over again:  the unseen person you've been imagining for nine long months, now presented to you in visible, concrete form, with hair color and eye color and features and everything. In short, it's one of those miracles . . .

Ah, my new-minted teenager has just rung me from the orthodontist's office, whence he would like to flee. Gotta provide the getaway car.

I Am This Funny In My Dreams

This is an actual flyer on an actual telephone pole in my actual neighborhood. Epiphany and Amicus discovered it one late night while they were walking the actual dog. Their nocturnal perambulations about town are frequently interesting, but I think this wins whatever prize is on offer.

An Afternoon in the Woods

We had planned to go to the zoo today with friends, but an early-morning doctor's appointment, following up on Helier's hospital stay of last week, played havoc with our schedule. So we wound up doing this instead: