It's boring around here. I promise you I haven't just been lying on the chaise longue eating Belgian truffles and waving my polished nails around in the air to dry them. (As if, my daughters might say). In fact, it's not that I haven't just been doing those things; I haven't been doing them at all. I'm not even in the remotest danger of doing them, because for one thing, I don't own a chaise longue on which to lie, and the box of truffles I got for Christmas has long been consigned, a tomb of rustling paper cuplets, to the county dump (and please don't send me more). Plus, I hate nail polish.
So what I have I been doing, all these weeks I've been ignoring you? Well, I've been lesson planning, and also, of late, I've been meal planning. Not long ago, fed up with trying to cook for Aelred's low-carb diet, and also fed up with my own physical proportions and general state of well-being, I decided that what I needed was a new cookbook. I bought Melissa Joulwan's Well Fed (not a sponsored link, by the way, just a link), and I have to say, it's made me want to cook again. For more info on the book itself, you can read the Amazon reviews; in my view, all the raves she gets are right on the money. Anyway, I've set myself to cook my way through this cookbook this spring, adapting some recipes as I'm inspired to, but mostly putting on some more helpful cooking habits as I go. Chiefly I'm training myself to do a huge "cookup" every weekend, so that I have grilled chicken, browned ground beef, and chopped and steam-sauteed vegetables for go-to quick meals throughout the week, as well as one or two more special dishes. So, there's that going on in my life, and it's all good so far.
I've also been working on poems and on putting together a new poetry manuscript which I think -- though I'm not married to the idea right this minute -- I may self-publish sometime this year. My sense is that -- within the parameters of the already-microscopic poetry book market -- I'm simultaneously too formal and too free-verse, too religious and not religious enough, to fit any of the existing paradigms. I mean, many of the best poems I've written so far were written before I was Catholic and when I was actively struggling with faith, so there goes that devotional audience, for example. Even now, the poems I write are just -- poems. Some are a little prickly. They're not really supposed to make you love Jesus, though of course I hope you do. On the other hand, if you don't, they're not going to affirm you in that, which is something, I guess.
So I am thinking that I'll run up a limited number of small books, which I'll try to make lovely enough for Christmas presents, and see if friends won't have me to do poetry readings around town-ish, and that kind of thing. In the meantime, to amuse myself, I've been playing with a 5x8 format, arranging poems, trying on various classy-looking fonts, and trying to decide what overall narrative might tie together roughly twenty-five years' worth of poems, spanning a rather varied range of life experience.
Aside from schooling the shorter folk, reading Dickens with Amicus, and talking on the phone with Epiphany, who this week turned in the piece of paper transforming her into a red-hot Texas English major, that's what's been happening around here. Stay tuned . . .
10 comments:
I love the image of you on the chaise longue with truffles and painted nails. Oh well. Congratulations to your newly minted English major. I spent many fond hours in the UD English Dept, my home away from home. I wonder how many of the faculty there now are ones I had.
Yep, she's happy. I wish I could remember who she has for LitTrad 2 this semester -- it's a real prof, as opposed to a T.A., though her T.A. last semester turned out to be very good. But she really loves her class this time around (as who wouldn't since it's Dante and Milton). Apparently her prof likes the expression "sucks for you," so it's fortunate for him, I guess, that the Inferno provides lots and lots of opportunities to use it. Hell sucks for everyone.
She had wanted to be a classics major, but wisely took Greek right off the mark, which meant that she didn't leave it till . . . the end of next year or so . . . to discover that she dislikes Greek and struggles with learning it. Meanwhile, she's just slurping up all the literature they throw at her with two straws and looking around for more. Good to know now what's likely to make her happy for the next three years, and to get busy doing it.
I sort of envy her . . . the whole UD thing makes me want to go back to college and do it right this time.
PS: I wrote the word "cuplets," and then wondered whether it was a real word, and if so, where I might have heard it before.
Double rhyming duh.
Re: truffles: My SIL, also a homeschooler, and I call each other up and start conversations with, "So how are the bonbons today?"
I would buy your book. Probably two or three copies, if they are pretty enough to be Christmas presents, especially if you'll inscribe them!
I wanted to be a classics major too. What turned me off was the fact that at the time the full Classics department was three professors, one of whom was my advisor and we did not get along. Plus I really loved all my English classes. I put off Greek until my Sophomore year and discovered that it moved at too fast a pace for me. I think I would have liked Greek doing it more slowly in high school. Maybe someday my kids will take it and I can live vicariously through them.
I didn't much love the Dante part of my Lit Trad II because I thought the professor talked down to us too much and too often didn't share the joke as if us poor undergrads were just not sophisticated enough to get it. But I loved reading Milton aloud in the dorm lounge from my perch atop the bookcase on Saturday afternoons. And it was in Lit Trad 2 that I fell in love with Eliot's Waste Land. I do hope they haven't cut that from the syllabus.
Melanie -- I don't know whether they do it this semester or not, though it would make sense, as the epilogue of the major Western epics. What dorm were you in? E is a very happy Theresa girl.
Anne-Marie -- Ha! I worked in a bookstore once with a guy who used to twit me that that was what I was going to do with the rest of my life, once I dropped out of retail (which I did pretty quickly, even though what I was retailing was books). Nail polish, with cotton balls between my toes, and bon-bons.
And thanks -- if I do publish this book myself, I hope to make it at least passingly handsome. Maybe not the rag paper, alas, but I'm aiming for modestly stylish.
I'd heard through the grapevine that they'd changed up some of the Lit Trad sequence and I thought one of the changes was that The Waste Land had got the ax. I'd love to learn that I'd misunderstood or misremembered. I do think it's proper place is at the end of the Western epic tradition.
I was in Theresa my freshman year, though it was co-ed then. At that time it was kind of the geeky dorm. We all used to gather to watch Star Trek the Next Generation. Then I moved to Gregory for two years (less the Rome semester, of course.) My senior year I was in the student apartments.
I love that Theresa common room! E has spent many happy hours there. These days the Theresa identity seems to be "fun girl dorm," not to be confused with "party girl dorm," which is another thing entirely. They do lots of baking and movie-watching, and it's a big ol' sisterhood. Freshman guys are in Greg and Madonna.
I'll have to ask her about Waste Land. It would be a shame to have lost it out of that sequence, because it makes so much sense to have it -- all that Homer and Dante went somewhere, for sure, in the twentieth century.
Put me down for twenty copies, and tell Ron that printing the year on each page of his Advent meditations was a stroke of literary genius. You find ways to hand them out fast when you realize that they come stamped "Guaranteed Fresh Until 12-25-2011"
Ha, yes! Well, he's doing them for each year of the 3-year lectionary, so after next year, the first edition will cycle back around again into currency.
And thanks. Putting your name on the poetry-book waiting list. Which . . . pretty much begins with your name.
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