Here is the email I just sent out. I'm posting it as a time-capsule piece.~~
Dear Dana, Darcy & Em,
We are leaving for New York late Friday night and getting back late Sunday night. All transportation and lodgings are taken care of. All you need to do is pay me $75 (preferably cash and by the weekend so I can spend it on books and clothes . . . just kidding!).
I've included the trip itinerary and a few packing tips (including the weather forecast), just because I love you girls (order of priority goes from oldest to youngest). I know you girls know how to pack, I'm just doing this so you can be at ease that you have everything you need, which allows you to stay loose and have a great time.
MOST IMPORTANTLY: bring ID, Money, and fit everything into One Bag. If someone can find us a ride to West Falls Church late Friday night, that would be awesome. If someone could bring a good map of NYC, too, that would be helpful. And if you have anyplace you want to go particularly, bring the address and directions for that too.
The WEATHER: the high will be 90 and low will be 70 both Saturday and Sunday in both DC and NYC. Thus, obviously, dress for hot weather. 30% chance of rain on Sunday, but it's scattered, so we can avoid it if it comes.
PACKING:
The most imporatant thing to realize is that YOU WILL BE CARRYING EVERYTHING YOU BRING FOR MOST OF THE TRIP. This is a garuntee until we check into the hostile and after we check out on Sunday morning. So think about what you are packing. Bring everything you have in ONE bag, preferably something you can bear comfortably on your back for walking, such as a backpack. Don't even take a purse, if you can avoid it. (they don't call in backpacking for nothing) The lighter the better.
Other Tips:
--wear the same pants/shorts both days, but bring extra undergarments/shirt.
--Don't bring any extra footwear. Wear the most comfortable closed-toe walking shoes you own.
--Sunglasses are advisable. Waterbottle optional, probably better option is to buy a bottle and throw it away when done.
--Shirts and shorts are FINE and advisable, the city is full of very casually dressed people.
--Dana, I would advise a light, compact sweater for the play Saturday night, because you can get cold at slight breeze.
--Bring ONE book (okay, maybe 2). Someone with a tiny Bible should volunteer to bring theirs and everyone can share. Bring a camera, of course, and cell phone/charger.
--Bring a truncated toiletry kit. I think the hostile provides towels and shampoo/soap. If not we'll handle it then. Pack assuming they are. If need be, I'll make a run to the CVS. I'll bring toothpaste and shaving cream and sunblock for all to share--seriously.
--Scenario: From my past experience I would suggest one extra (total of 2) shirt and one extra (total of 2) set of undergarments (including socks) because it is nice to have this if your clothes get soaked from perspiration or precipitation. Most likely, we'll break a sweat and it would be nice to change into dry things before the bus ride back.
--Don't bring raingear, we'll have to use the gothic architecture as a shield if it rains.
The less you bring, the more shopping you can do!
ITINERARY:
1. The only kink yet to be worked out is getting someone to drive us to the Falls Church Metro station Friday night, preferably after 10pm. They can use my car if trustworthy, so if you know anyone . . . pass it on.
2. We can take metro station to ChinaTown, but we don't HAVE to be in ChinaTown until 1:30. Before then we are free to roam, and depending on how early we get dropped off, we could maybe get something to eat, chill out at a bar, booze up . . . you know.
3. At 1:30 we will need to be at 513 H ST NW Washington, DC 20001, which I'll get directions for. We'll load the bus. It's a nice bus, air conditioned and fairly comfortable chairs. Whether or not you'll be able to sleep in them is a toss up, but it can be done--especially if you have a significant other with shoulder to lean on. Don't bring pillows unless they are inflatable or you want to throw them away or carry them the entire weekend. THere is also a very small restroom which consists of a toilet with no sink and usually no paper-you get the idea.
4. We should be pulling to ChinaTown around 6am, we'll go to Central Park using the subway (which will cost you a total of $14 for both days), and we'll wait . . . and you girls can go off by yourselves if you ask nicely.
5. One we get the tickets we are free. The only other idea I had was to see either the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Modern Museum of Art. The rest is up to you three to figure out, whether you want to plan ahead or act intuitively is up to you (both work fine in this city).
6. Our hostile should be very easy to get to and we could probably drop off our bags there after noon, IF they are giving us a key and the door locks.
7. We are free all day Sunday, just have to be at 88 E. Broadway by 5:30pm to get on the bus and head back.
8. Once we get back we'll get back on the Metro and go to Falls Church. Steve Rybicki will pick us up and take us home.
-Brooks
Thursday, June 23, 2005
Saturday, June 18, 2005
Leaking 'em out
Dear Folks,
Here are a few prose poems from my practicum project. I've included the first piece, a the final draft of a piece that Brooks posted on his blog, and a piece about Eldorado, where I spent many of my childhood years. I did twelve of these. Each tried to explore a specific scene or an association of scenes. I wouldn't mind expanding these in number and tone (to included more irony and more secnes about myself for instance). I notice I tend to observe and explore from the perspective of myself as a passive eye. It's just the way they came out, I swear I don't have any complexes!
I.
Mum sits, hunched over a light table. She wears goggles. The box’s top glows yellow. Mum moves slender tools in her hands. She is slicing glass. I hear sizzling and a submerged guttural hum. A sautering iron smokes. These are mum’s glass tools. Peering through a doorknob hole, I watch mum with concern. I shuffle to the left. My knees meet carpet. They burn. My little sister screams from the crib. Her rhythmic protest rocks the wooden cage. A glowing halo of reddish fuzz crowns her head. Her hands are white lumps around the bars. A cloth diaper clings to her loins. Her mouth is a black hole surrounded by red flush and her eyes are wrinkled around the clenched slits. The room is cold grey. The bridges of my feet ache. I peer again and hear sizzling and humming between sister’s screams. Sister wants out of the crib. I put my hands on the cool white surface of the door for balance. This is the memory speaking in my head. It is framed in inky, embryonic blackness. I see myself crouched in front of the white door, peering through the doorknob hole. Dad has not put the doorknob back in. Sister screams, mum cuts. Soon I realize I am allowed to watch myself. The detachment of self-consciousness blooms. I experience dualism. I watch the world; I watch myself. Other, self, consciousness. My first memory. A vocation of observance.
V.
When the thunder spoke it precluded a downpour. Run inside. Run inside now. Between cloud and mountain a black swath rushes toward us. The earth becomes dimpled, then dappled. The chickenpox of the monsoon covers the sickly terrestrial skin every afternoon for a few months. I was born in the summer, the time of desert monsoons. My birthday partakes in the rhythm and ebb of sloshing rain drops. You know in Pecos two men died in the lightning, on a softball field. Before the thunder speaks, the sky must be vast, so vast you could swear space shuttles passed discretely just beyond the places where the blue faded and your eyes gave out in the profusion above. The vampire has been at work sucking desert life. The air sizzles. The servant said, there is a cloud, as small as a man’s hand. We saw a hand over the desert, over the Jemez, over us every bone-revealing, flesh-sucking afternoon. The sky became black with clouds and wind, and there was a heavy rain. The hand becomes plural, became a congregation, soon becoming an apparition. The vampire slouches back to the cholla cacti. The dust quivers. A bilious warhead emerges, erect and strong from the cumulus apparition. It clarifies, defines, columnifies itself. They have said that it is an irony the first nuclear warhead was sparked in the deserts of New Mexico. A massive natural warhead with a sloped anvil top loomed over the desert floor every monsoon afternoon. The ovoid grey drops plash in the junipers, becoming muffled in the fine dust. We ran outside thrusting ours hands toward a cloud, aching for comparison. The earth is quenched. It settles down. The vampire creeps back out. I sleep. Next morning my feet tamp the earth. The desert dew swirls in minute clouds around my ankle. The sky slumbers.
IX.
Eldorado in three scenes. Coyotes spill like a fluid current, split like knifed foam, pass around in desert ripples, and spread out in a wake. Coyotes scramble over folds of buffalo grass and around the junipers, break off into kinetic couples, slink smoothly around the house, and lope out into open dirt fusing with the road. Oreo howls. We breathe gossamer clouds on the window pane. The coyotes stammer. It is some rabid and profane litany, cursing the dead adobe walls. Oreo barks. Oreo whines. This is the spirit of the place. Biking every summer night with my sisters. An amusement park of high desert hills and carpets of yellow, rattling buffalo grasses. Golden air swirling with dust, dust, dust. My loin flutters, my bike dips down, my bike dips around. The path snakes. I do not brake. Sister swears she will beat me tonight. A chilly pocket of air. I remember to breathe in deeply. Our heads trail each other, poking out in the gold dust air. This is the name of the place. The azure sky swallows us from the Sangre de Christos to the Jemez, those ancient and silent volcanoes. Next to a dirt road my sisters and I peer at the depths of a mud puddle shaped like Manhattan. Grotesque amphibious heads peer back at us. Frilly tails flash in and out of the coffee water. We stare harder with more solemnity. I clutch a pea-green aquarium net. Sister pinches a mason jar by its neck. The tadpoles elude our net. A breeze rattles the chamisas crowding around the road edge. I dip the net, I am the quick one. It reemerges, quivering. A bit of flesh gyrates within the mesh. We cannot breathe. Eldorado, this is the life of the place.
Here are a few prose poems from my practicum project. I've included the first piece, a the final draft of a piece that Brooks posted on his blog, and a piece about Eldorado, where I spent many of my childhood years. I did twelve of these. Each tried to explore a specific scene or an association of scenes. I wouldn't mind expanding these in number and tone (to included more irony and more secnes about myself for instance). I notice I tend to observe and explore from the perspective of myself as a passive eye. It's just the way they came out, I swear I don't have any complexes!
I.
Mum sits, hunched over a light table. She wears goggles. The box’s top glows yellow. Mum moves slender tools in her hands. She is slicing glass. I hear sizzling and a submerged guttural hum. A sautering iron smokes. These are mum’s glass tools. Peering through a doorknob hole, I watch mum with concern. I shuffle to the left. My knees meet carpet. They burn. My little sister screams from the crib. Her rhythmic protest rocks the wooden cage. A glowing halo of reddish fuzz crowns her head. Her hands are white lumps around the bars. A cloth diaper clings to her loins. Her mouth is a black hole surrounded by red flush and her eyes are wrinkled around the clenched slits. The room is cold grey. The bridges of my feet ache. I peer again and hear sizzling and humming between sister’s screams. Sister wants out of the crib. I put my hands on the cool white surface of the door for balance. This is the memory speaking in my head. It is framed in inky, embryonic blackness. I see myself crouched in front of the white door, peering through the doorknob hole. Dad has not put the doorknob back in. Sister screams, mum cuts. Soon I realize I am allowed to watch myself. The detachment of self-consciousness blooms. I experience dualism. I watch the world; I watch myself. Other, self, consciousness. My first memory. A vocation of observance.
V.
When the thunder spoke it precluded a downpour. Run inside. Run inside now. Between cloud and mountain a black swath rushes toward us. The earth becomes dimpled, then dappled. The chickenpox of the monsoon covers the sickly terrestrial skin every afternoon for a few months. I was born in the summer, the time of desert monsoons. My birthday partakes in the rhythm and ebb of sloshing rain drops. You know in Pecos two men died in the lightning, on a softball field. Before the thunder speaks, the sky must be vast, so vast you could swear space shuttles passed discretely just beyond the places where the blue faded and your eyes gave out in the profusion above. The vampire has been at work sucking desert life. The air sizzles. The servant said, there is a cloud, as small as a man’s hand. We saw a hand over the desert, over the Jemez, over us every bone-revealing, flesh-sucking afternoon. The sky became black with clouds and wind, and there was a heavy rain. The hand becomes plural, became a congregation, soon becoming an apparition. The vampire slouches back to the cholla cacti. The dust quivers. A bilious warhead emerges, erect and strong from the cumulus apparition. It clarifies, defines, columnifies itself. They have said that it is an irony the first nuclear warhead was sparked in the deserts of New Mexico. A massive natural warhead with a sloped anvil top loomed over the desert floor every monsoon afternoon. The ovoid grey drops plash in the junipers, becoming muffled in the fine dust. We ran outside thrusting ours hands toward a cloud, aching for comparison. The earth is quenched. It settles down. The vampire creeps back out. I sleep. Next morning my feet tamp the earth. The desert dew swirls in minute clouds around my ankle. The sky slumbers.
IX.
Eldorado in three scenes. Coyotes spill like a fluid current, split like knifed foam, pass around in desert ripples, and spread out in a wake. Coyotes scramble over folds of buffalo grass and around the junipers, break off into kinetic couples, slink smoothly around the house, and lope out into open dirt fusing with the road. Oreo howls. We breathe gossamer clouds on the window pane. The coyotes stammer. It is some rabid and profane litany, cursing the dead adobe walls. Oreo barks. Oreo whines. This is the spirit of the place. Biking every summer night with my sisters. An amusement park of high desert hills and carpets of yellow, rattling buffalo grasses. Golden air swirling with dust, dust, dust. My loin flutters, my bike dips down, my bike dips around. The path snakes. I do not brake. Sister swears she will beat me tonight. A chilly pocket of air. I remember to breathe in deeply. Our heads trail each other, poking out in the gold dust air. This is the name of the place. The azure sky swallows us from the Sangre de Christos to the Jemez, those ancient and silent volcanoes. Next to a dirt road my sisters and I peer at the depths of a mud puddle shaped like Manhattan. Grotesque amphibious heads peer back at us. Frilly tails flash in and out of the coffee water. We stare harder with more solemnity. I clutch a pea-green aquarium net. Sister pinches a mason jar by its neck. The tadpoles elude our net. A breeze rattles the chamisas crowding around the road edge. I dip the net, I am the quick one. It reemerges, quivering. A bit of flesh gyrates within the mesh. We cannot breathe. Eldorado, this is the life of the place.
Thursday, June 16, 2005
Saturday, June 11, 2005
Darcy's Top Ten
Alexander Pope's Eloisa to Abelard for its humanity.
Percy Byshshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound--the fact that it was rebellion and not reform, as he said, "Didactic poetry is my abhorrence."
The Nonsense Poets--they where the only happy poets in the 20th century.
Langston Hughes.
William Butler Yeats--because he managed to be passionate about faeries and political causes.
D.H.Lawrence--for his leaping conclusions about life that left you breathless and smug about despair; not because they were necessarily valid, but because they were beautiful.
e. e. cummings--trite, I know.
Katherine Anne Porter's Flowering Judas.
Eudora Welty--local color as universal as it gets.
Edna St. Vincent Millay--her lyricism.
Percy Byshshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound--the fact that it was rebellion and not reform, as he said, "Didactic poetry is my abhorrence."
The Nonsense Poets--they where the only happy poets in the 20th century.
Langston Hughes.
William Butler Yeats--because he managed to be passionate about faeries and political causes.
D.H.Lawrence--for his leaping conclusions about life that left you breathless and smug about despair; not because they were necessarily valid, but because they were beautiful.
e. e. cummings--trite, I know.
Katherine Anne Porter's Flowering Judas.
Eudora Welty--local color as universal as it gets.
Edna St. Vincent Millay--her lyricism.
Friday, June 10, 2005
My First Postgraduation Poem
It's a silly and lighthearted attempt. I wanted to tryout half and slant rhyme, like Pinsky and Dylan Thomas (who I'm finding out uses it a lot).
Prescription for a Depressed Poet:
Instructions to the Wife
If your poet is stewing in spells of misery
and his mind rebels in bouts and spasms,
an empty stomach and a bellyful of coffee
should give pizzazz to imagination’s whims.
It has worked too well if you spot your spouse
hang-gliding in a jeopardizing pose.
If this is the case, he believes he is a genius:
ask him gently, between his bursts of bliss,
to spend a few days a week in the cold halls
of cooperate America, earning some money
and so forth. Tell him, between his thrills,
that one can’t assume God sendeth manna
to the offspring of artists. If that doesn’t work,
reduce coffee intake or don’t brew it so dark.
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
Tom Wolfe
and disappointment...
I started reading A Man in Full hoping to find that the somewhat mediocre I Am Charlotte Simmons (which was also very long) was a sort of fluke--a well-written miss by a too old man trying to describe college now.
Well, A Man in Full reads almost like the exact same book. (Semi-saving face for Mr. Wolfe: I've only read three chapters so far.) The charming dialogue sections that I enjoyed most in Charlotte Simmons are reproduced here (or first produced). They are alike not only in spirit, but almost in substance as well.
Sigh. There goes my attempt to be relevent to contemporary literary culture. Any other suggestions?
I started reading A Man in Full hoping to find that the somewhat mediocre I Am Charlotte Simmons (which was also very long) was a sort of fluke--a well-written miss by a too old man trying to describe college now.
Well, A Man in Full reads almost like the exact same book. (Semi-saving face for Mr. Wolfe: I've only read three chapters so far.) The charming dialogue sections that I enjoyed most in Charlotte Simmons are reproduced here (or first produced). They are alike not only in spirit, but almost in substance as well.
Sigh. There goes my attempt to be relevent to contemporary literary culture. Any other suggestions?
Thursday, June 02, 2005
Literary Headlines
Read this article on the poet W.S. Graham: we might have the next great British poet on our hands.
A HUGE 6-Month Long Shakespeare Festival is going to be hosted in D.C. in 2007. If all goes well at Catholic University for me, I'll be here for that. :-)
National Poetry Month (which is in April--far over now), is bad for poetry?
Invaluable Fact of the Day: A baby in Florida was named Truewilllaughinglifebuckyboomermanifestdestiny. His middle name is George James.
Michael Cunningham has published his first novel since The Hours called Specimen Days. He will be at Chapters bookstore in D.C. on June 8 to read selections.
Moby isn't a literary figure, but it's interesting to note (thanks to Dana for bringing this to my attention) that my favorite vegan, electronic artist has started a vegetarian teahouse in New York City. Why? All tearooms are English or Japanese--Moby wanted something for the rest of us. And no, he does not play his music in the bistro because electronic music does not go well with drinking tea.
A HUGE 6-Month Long Shakespeare Festival is going to be hosted in D.C. in 2007. If all goes well at Catholic University for me, I'll be here for that. :-)
National Poetry Month (which is in April--far over now), is bad for poetry?
Invaluable Fact of the Day: A baby in Florida was named Truewilllaughinglifebuckyboomermanifestdestiny. His middle name is George James.
Michael Cunningham has published his first novel since The Hours called Specimen Days. He will be at Chapters bookstore in D.C. on June 8 to read selections.
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