zirconium

Today's subject line is from Jane Hirshfield's Hope and Love. It is one of the pieces I am currently rehearsing for this Sunday's services. The other one is a lively setting of Emily Dickinson's "Hope Is the Thing with Feathers":

I've also been looking at various hymns set to "Charleston" (albeit wayyy slower than the midi at Hymnary). We sang the version that begins "There's a wideness in your mercy" (words by Frederick William Faber) at church not too long ago:

There's a wideness in your mercy like the wideness of the sea;
there's a kindness in your justice which is more than liberty.

But we make your love too narrow by false limits of our own,
and we magnify your strictness with a zeal you will not own.

For the love of God is broader than the measures of our minds
and the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind.

Listening to: the USA Today stream of clips from Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer's "Child Ballads" album (link via my friend Katy). Between that and the severe weather making the sky so very grey, I'm inclined to spend the afternoon working on fairy-tale riffs (but tax prep is calling, calling).

Reading: the Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook. Pages 374-75 provide pleasingly detailed advice on buying fresh shrimp:

When buying shrimp with heads, note that they spoil quicker and that the heads constitute about 35 percent of the shrimp's weight. So if a recipe calls for 2 pounds of headless shrimp, shells on, buy almost 2 3/4 pounds whole shrimp with shells to compensate.

Keep in mind that a shrimp's shell and legs make up about 12 percent of its weight, so if you're using peeled shrimp in a recipe that calls for 2 pounds headless shrimp, shells on, you'll require only 88 percent of that weight, or about 1 3/4 pounds.

Today's lunchtime reading was a couple of sections of yesterday's New York Times. I was struck by two mentions of historians brought to tears, both within Dan Barry's article about the Jackie Clarke collection in Ireland. In the first, Barry speculates on prize artifacts that would have changed Sinead McCoole's initially low expectations of the collection:

Was it the fabric flower, called a cockade, that Wolfe Tone -- Wolfe Tone! -- wore affixed to his hat when he was captured while leading a failed rebellion against the English in 1798? When Ms. McCoole showed the cockade to a scholar friend steeped in that era, the scholar began to weep.

The other immediately reminded me of how difficult it can be to define and observe the scope of academic projects (...and, really, projects in any sphere, but as you might guess, scope comes up a lot in academic publishing):

Often, as Ms. McCoole set out to begin another wearying day of academic mining, one of the fish shop's employees, Smokey Gorman, would give her a cryptic greeting: "And you haven’t even gotten to the roof yet." For a while she thought this meant that Mr. Gorman might have spent too much time in the smokehouse, but Mrs. Clarke eventually told her that Mr. Gorman was referring to some "modern stuff" that he once helped Jackie Clarke carry to a storeroom built onto the roof.

One day, with the end of her papered tunnel in sight, Ms. McCoole went to that room on the roof, where loads of bundles were wrapped in relatively recent copies of the local newspaper. Inconsequential modern stuff, she thought. But when she opened a bundle or two, she found rare political pamphlets and newspapers dating to the 17th and 18th centuries.

"Instead of being euphoric, I cried for two days," Ms. McCoole said. “I cried and I cried and I cried. It was just more things to do. I knew the job hadn't ended."

But when she recovered Ms. McCoole realized that she was immersed in something very rare and wonderful, a feeling now validated by other scholars.

Current Mood: cold

I had a fine view at Bewley's of both my companion and some of the art on the wall...

( more photos under the cut )

"Love locks" on the Ha'penny Bridge

Current Music: Bernadette Peters/John Whelan, "Dublin Lady"

It's been a week where I removed myself from one conversation and unfollowed a half-dozen people because I cannot let myself get snarled into open-ended firefights over sexism if I'm going to meet my next deadline (and the three on its heels), and yet, and yet...

*seethes*

So this leaped out at me when I peeked over at Eileen Tabios's blog, where she talks about reading a collective autobiography whose authors include Lyn Hejinian:

Two of the male poets asked her if she'd read this other author and she'd felt the question to be a "test" .... I get this. I know this. While not proposing acrimony, I am reminded of several conversations with males and male poets, including one with an older, male poet wherein, at one point, I told him, "You do not know more than I do. I simply know different things from what you know."

In happier news: I sold a poem this week (fourth acceptance of the year; first one I'll receive cash for), my publisher sent me a royalty update a few hours ago, and I'm tickled at the company said book is currently keeping over at Amazon (it has been purchased in tandem with books by Neal Stephenson and Merrie Haskell [the latter is currently giving away copies of her new book and pretty bits of goat, by the way], and it is for the moment on a Top 10 list with Janet Wong, Cathy Park Hong, and Maxine Hong Kingston).

Also, it was 68 degrees F when I went hiking this afternoon. The turtles were out in force, and we also spotted a huge wild turkey and tiny little flowers.

Last night's bathtub reading was some of the Spring 2013 issue of UU World. I was pleased to see a feature on UU military chaplains, in part because my church ordained one of them (Azande Sosa) a year or two ago. Two excerpts:

[Rev. Sarah Lammert, on a shift in UU attitudes toward the military:] People began to understand that you could be for or against a war without being against the people who serve the country.

[Rev. Chris] Antal [a National Guard chaplain in Afghanistan] emphasizes the importance of having religiously liberal chaplains in the military. Partly it's about those soldiers who might be unchurched or hold beliefs that are out of the mainstream, including those who are pagan. "Soldiers have told me, 'You are the first chaplain who would ever pray with me,'" Antal said.

He added, "I've been able to do all kinds of meaningful ministry in the past year, especially after 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' was repealed last year. Not only does the Army need chaplains, it needs liberal chaplains to balance the overwhelming number of evangelicals within chaplaincy. When we, as a denomination, walked away from the military after Vietnam, the vacuum was filled by others."

Antal said that many soldiers are open to different approaches to religion. "When people face the actuality of war and combat and the possibility of death, they start to search their souls. They want to be prepared."

Congregations have a role too, he said. "Soldiers need to be welcomed when they come to church. Suicide rates of veterans are off the charts. Our congregations and our country as a whole share a moral responsibility to be open to the military. They are working on our behalf."

Current Mood: pensive
Current Location: dining room table
Current Music: "Come, Come Whoever You Are" (UU round)

The subject line's from Leslie C. Chang's "Animism," which is the poem that resonated with me the most in Things That No Longer Delight Me, in part because seeing "Ahquen" reminded me of the myriad Taiwanese names for "aunt" and "uncle" I sort-of learned as a kid. It portrays a woman scratching the name of a dying man onto the back of turtles:

Now, like smoke, thread
trails from a needle stuck in the candle-end
you recycled as a pincushion, nothing wasted.

I am out of rice, so I am baking cornbread. I plan to heat up black beans and andouille sausages in a bit.

I bought a can of Chinese preserved clams a while back, I think by mistake (it's the same size and color as the tins of Chinese pickled cucumbers I'm addicted to). I do like clams, so I was looking forward to trying them anyway -- but they are the most unappetizing-looking thing I've sampled in some time (think gray-green bits of rubber with fat antennae), and they don't taste enough like something worth adding to scrambled eggs or soup or salad.

My friend Lora wrote about plants and dirt earlier today. I about laughed myself sick over the part about driving around after a wedding shower, and the last paragraph is a sounder guide to living than most of the theology I've come across this week.

I am bargaining with myself over the container roses that are reportedly on sale at Kroger this week. I'm thinking if I walk to the nearest store (which is just far enough away for me to feel like blowing it off, especially with a deadline on my neck), I could treat myself...

[Since starting this entry, the BYM's come home and I've finished cooking the bread, the beans, and the sausages. Time to wrap this up, fill my plate, and get back to work.]

[I haven't forgotten about posting more about Charleston. Turns out even that was too ambitious for this fortnight. But I have a list. I'll get to it eventually.]

...of this passage in my library e-copy of Nikki Giovanni's Bicycles:

In order to properly care for things
They must be loved
And touched

- "Give It a Go?"

Giovanni, Nikki (2009-01-09). Bicycles: Love Poems (p. 35). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Current Mood: touched
Current Location: kitchen counter
Current Music: Divinyls, "I Touch Myself"

The subject line's from Nikki Giovanni's "I am Jazz," which is in Bicycles: Love Poems, which I am reading tonight because my e-book loan expires in a couple of days.

I am cooking: "Company Carrots" (recipe from Charleston Receipts Repeats), a riff on parmesan black pepper coleslaw (because both parmesan and cabbage were on sale at the supermarket), and pork chops.

I am listening to TFS's "Blackest Crow," via Nathalie. Sxip Shirley: "The girls started singing 'The Blackest Crow' and it was like a mute volume hit the party. The party went SILENT and people listened to the women sing and it felt like that...LISTENING TO THE WOMEN SING."

Back to the stove, back to the knife, back to the pen and the paring life... ;-)

Current Mood: discontent
Current Location: kitchen counter
Current Music: TFS, "Blackest Crow"

Tulip in my front yard, about a year ago

Praise, O my heart, to you, O Source of Life,
you are my tide of joy, my sea, my shore,
my field of sky with stars that never set;
now I will learn your wonders all my days,
and my vain ways in darkness be no more.

- Ridgely Torrence, lyrics to a UU hymn (#284 in SLT) set by Robert L. Sanders. Truth be told, the melody resonates with me much more than the text, but in any case, it's what I've been in the mood to play when I sit at the piano to rehearse. The chamber choir will be singing a setting of Jane Hirshfield's Hope and Love in a couple of weeks.

[The subject line is from Psalm 104 (RSV), which was the inspiration for Torrence's text.]

The subject line is from John Ashbery's "Sleepers Awake," which also contains the line "Never go out in a boat with an author -- they cannot tell when they are over water." It's in the July 1995 issue of Poetry, which I have been rereading while in the bathtub.

Back in 1995, the poem that grabbed me the most was Linda Pastan's Nocturnal (I scrawled a note on the cover -- "broadside?" -- which means that I was thinking of creating a calligraphic copy of it, and I was also smitten with Robert B. Shaw's essay on Katherine Bucknell's edition of Auden's juvenilia -- especially this statement: "Here is one major lesson this book offers apprentice poets: read widely and imitate fearlessly."

It is the first issue in which Christian Wiman's poetry appears. The back inside cover is dedicated to Jane Kenyon, who had recently passed away: "Yes, long shadows go out / from the bales; and yes, the soul / must part from the body..." Claudia Emerson was publishing as "Claudia Emerson Andrews" then.

And this time around, the poem that resonates with me the most is Ted Kooser's "New Moon": I want to be better at carrying sorrow.

In other news, I rode around ten miles today on my bike. I got lost twice, walked up parts of two hills (not strong enough yet), walked down one (it was steep, and a schoolbus had just zipped by uncomfortably close to me, so I decided that hopping off and calming the heck down with my feet on the ground was the better part of valor), smiled at various doggies (including a standard poodle and some pug puppies), and listened to the bullfrogs in the marshy patches. They are loud. Thirteen days until spring...

Current Mood: sore
Current Location: armchair
Current Music: ABBA, "Knowing Me, Knowing You"

Just received my copy of The Federalist Society: How Conservatives Took the Law Back from Liberals, a book I copyedited last year. I really like the cover.

I was insisting to the Beautiful Young Man late last night that I have a heart of stone -- specifically because I will not ride with panniers on my bike every day just in case I come across a puppy in need of rescuing (long story) -- and he was laughing at me at length, because it is true that I can be somewhat daft about doggies, especially when they happen to be a mongrel named Abby. And it is also true that I tend to pause (paws!) for business that set out water bowls on the sidewalk:

So when I saw this in front of a needlepoint shop in Charleston, I went inside, where I was greeted eagerly:

I didn't take pictures of the designs on display, but I was impressed at the plethora of canvases of dogs ready for a more experienced needlepointer to tackle. It being almost Christmas at the time, there were also plenty of holiday designs on offer at the time.

(I was crazy about needlepoint in 7th grade, to the extent of designing my own projects, but then got caught up in other obsessions. But the store had a handful of beginner-appropriate kits available, including a coin purse with a sunflower design, so I picked that up for some future holiday...)

Cabbage Row Shoppe
Note the palmettos on the sidewalk as well -- they're very much an emblem of the Holy City. (The cocktail napkins at 82 Queen have palmettos on them, and I'm sure they're in a bunch of other logos as well.)

Current Music: Nathan and the Zydeco Cha-Chas

We had too many oranges and eggs in the house, so last night I tried to make an orange soufflé. Alas, it was seriously undercooked underneath the crust. (It's edible enough for breakfast, but that wasn't the idea.) Things to try next time:

(1) Adjust the recipe. I didn't realize it was for a 2-quart dish (mine is 1.5 qt.) until I'd already put the batter in the oven.
(2) Be less cautious about blending the egg whites with the base.
(3) Plan on leaving the soufflé in the oven for 40 minutes instead of 25 (but start testing at 30).

(Then again, I don't usually inadvertently stock too many eggs, so I don't know when I'm going to feel like trying this again. Stovetop pudding is far simpler, even from scratch, and I live within walking distance of both an excellent bakery and a French bistro.)

[I will probably be posting a fair bit about Charleston here over the next two weeks, because: work will be riding my tail, which means I won't be doing much in the way of extracurriculars; I need to organize my notes and snapshots anyway; some tweeps may be heading there next month for the Family Circle Cup (women's tennis); and I hope to go back in 2014 to see some tennis (there's also a challenger-level tournament there) and visit more Revolutionary War-related sites (including getting a drink at McCrady's, which I didn't manage back in November. George Washington attended a banquet there).]

I learned two new English words while reading Madeleine Kamman's introduction to oysters in The New Making of a Cook (p. 668): midden and iodic. I also learned about the claires for French-farmed oysters: "fattening ponds watered by the regular tides and in which the oysters develop to their market size."

Anyway, I was looking this up because I was revising an old poem about oysters, and this in turn reminded me of the great meal I had at Fleet Landing back in December, on my last morning in Charleston. I'd decided that I wanted to try she-crab soup before I left town, preferably someplace where I could also treat myself to a platter of good oysters, and a local oysterman on Yelp recommended Fleet Landing.

The soup and the shellfish were both wonderful, and so was the view from my seat:

( more photos under the cut )

Current Mood: nostalgic

Jim Jean:

Not to get too deep, but East Nashville is so diverse. On one side of the street you got dudes in a penthouse with a Porsche, and then you still have your trash can stolen by your neighbor, and your neighbors are shooting each other next door. You can also drink beer in the passenger seat of a car, which is pretty rad.

From an East Nashvillian profile of the 5 Spot (January issue):

Collinsworth knew East Nashville was a good thing when he visited in the summer of 1999. He was dragged into the now-defunct Radio Café by the late Skip Litz, local soundman and East Nashville fixture. There was a couple onstage playing some cover tunes -- Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Chuck Berry -- for a handful of patrons. They had a Dylan songbook with them and would ask the audience to call out page numbers before proceeding to play the selected song. "Come to find out, that couple was Gillian Welch and David Rawlings as The Esquires," Collinsworth says. “It was then and there that I decided to move to Nashville."

Current Mood: optimistic

A page of a Dorothy L. Sayers manuscript that was on display at the Karpeles Museum in Charleston, December 2012

The Karpeles is located in what used to be a church in one of the less affluent neighborhoods of downtown Charleston; the balcony still contains the facade of an ornate organ. I visited the branch in Jacksonville as well; the displays tend to be on the amateur side (lots of exclamation points and other stylistic quirks), but photographs are allowed and it was delightful getting so close to draft pages of Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, John Adams's correspondence (including his apology for pages scribbled on by a granddaughter), and other treasures.

(This exhibit closed at the end of December, but there's now one on Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini at the Karpeles in Newburgh, NY, to the end of April.)

Back to my current manuscripts and spreadsheets...

Current Mood: busy

The author of Life of Pi is speaking in Nashville this Saturday, so there's a feature on him by Fernanda Moore at Chapter 16 that was reprinted in Monday's City Paper. I was struck by this exchange on criticism:

Chapter 16: Every artist must find a way to cope with critical opinion, but you have encountered an unusually huge range of reactions--reviews which are absolutely transcendent, as well as reviews that are scathing. How do you account for the extremes of opinion that your work seems to inspire?

Yann Martel: I mostly ignore critical opinion, good and bad. Art is a gift, the making of it, the receiving of it. So, like every artist, I create and then I give. What the world does with my gift--raise it up high or cast it down--is not my affair. For example, Beatrice and Virgil received an awful review from The New York Times' Michiko Kakutani. She positively hated the novel, as did the reviewers for The Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle

And also:

Any work of art is a co-creation between the artist and the reader/viewer/spectator. My interpretation of Pi is just one reading among many possible readings, and it should not have any more weight because I'm its author. Having said that, I don't see the point in making less of life. It’s short enough as it is, so why not see more in it? Why not make leaps of faith?

Current Location: dining room table
Current Music: Stephan Eicher, "Combien de temps?"

"Did you just send that woman to a church to get help with an abortion?"

"Yes. Yes, I did."

- Darcy Baxter, a Unitarian chaplain, writes about trying to find options for a woman living 500 miles from the nearest abortion provider

In the March 2013 issue of Vogue, Katherine Bernard writes about Saundra Pelletier and WomanCareGlobal, which is taking a "Robin Hood approach" to making contraception available in developing countries. "We make a profit in markets like Ghana and Kenya." A striking detail: "$1,000 can buy 100 women in the developing world one year's worth of contraceptives."

Current Mood: hopeful
Current Location: dining room table

It's been a week of moving things along -- I found a buyer for my stepdancing shoes, put a number of cards in the mail, shredded heaps of ancient receipts and notes, and printed out the customs form for a package to Canada.

I also finally unpacked a tote bag I'd brought home from my mother's back in 2008.

I didn't think to make a list until I was almost done, so it's not complete, but suffice it to say that the jumble stirred up all sorts of emotions. As I prepared her house for sale, I sent most of her sewing and craft supplies to a school that I thought would use them, but these were among the things that I imagined someday using:

* a postal pencil
* long knitting needles
* short pink knitting needles (the ones I used as a child)
* various buttons, hooks, and sewing needles
* thread in basic colors (and one spool of a lime-ish green)
* the leftover lace from an apron I made in one of my high school home ec classes
* a 1995 penny
* a roll of brown packing tape
* a roll of strapping tape

In my professional and volunteer circles, I have a reputation for being organized and decisive. As the long-suffering BYM can tell you, it's a different story at home. I'm slowly paring down the masses of papers and backlog of books, but it's tricky territory. Historian Me clenches her teeth as receipts and notes and photos hit the bin. Realist Me recognizes that what I save will still end up on the curb if I get hit by a bus tomorrow (even the books I've edited and the journals containing my poems -- the BYM is not sentimental in that way). I've been reading the entries at Unclutterer on inherited clutter, and I'm way more self-aware than I was even half a year ago about what I make time for, and what I won't get around to.

But it's still not easy saying farewell to those other selves. Although having company certainly brightens the present:

Current Mood: melancholy

...in the March 2013 issue of Vogue:

When they do run [for Congress], [women] enjoy the same success rate as men, and when they win, their impact is disproportionate to their numbers. It's because, says a senator, "women don't get elected by putting on a flight suit and swaggering across a flight deck. They get elected by getting things accomplished, and that carries through in how they govern." Congresswomen consistently outperform men on a practical level. When it comes to winning Federal funds and support for the district, it is much better to have a woman fighting on your behalf. Political scientists have calculated that the bonus to constituents in electing a woman legislator runs to about $88 per head in government spending.

- Amanda Foreman, "The Female Factor"

[Claims like these make me long for footnotes...]

Current Mood: curious
Current Music: Dar Williams, "As Cool As I Am"

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zirconium

NashPanache

May 2013

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Recent Entries

"Hope is the hardest love we carry"

Monday notes

Dublin (from November 2011)

"I simply know different things from what you know."

"You are the first chaplain who would ever pray with me."

"recycled as a pincushion, nothing wasted"

three people highlighted the last three words...

"salt in the pond / for your fish"

"the rocks are a refuge for badgers"

"I have other things to say, but shall not detain you much."

Avery and McLaughlin, THE FEDERALIST SOCIETY

Charleston: Cabbage Row Shoppe

soufflé

Kamman and Charleston

two takes on my neighborhood

"curiosity and mental activity"

Yann Martel

clippings: reproductive justice

finding new places for things

an intriguing item