zirconium

Today is crowded with overlapping possibilities. Newark Museum's virtual Carnival Celebration runs all day, with the samba/capoeira session at the same time as Iowa's English country dance gathering. Says You's Kisses and Quips show was on my calendar for a long time, but my church's cabaret for Habitat for Humanity streams at the same time. Plus, there's tomorrow's Tuupelo poem to draft, doing enough Chinese/Welsh/Spanish/French to stay in Duolingo's Diamond League, putting ten postcards to voters in the mail, doing something about the butternut squash I roasted two or three nights ago before the next Misfits Market box arrives . . .

This week had a lot of crud. I'm trying not to brood about the things I cannot change, but I am reminded of other bloggers greeting February with EVERYBODY BRACE NOW There's something about the months before the equinoxes that make them feel like a long haul, even though in my case they also feature the birthdays of some of my favorite people. And fatigue with both the pandemic and the equally unrelenting and life-threatening banality of evil is also a thing. It took me five times as long to get to things I normally enjoy dispatching with ease, and some things that would literally make me feel better (working out, dancing, ironing . . .) keep getting shafted because it's easier to stay in the rocking chair for one more Duolingo/Mimo/Earpeggio lesson.

Anyhow, I do like the Befruary take on this gloomy gray stretch of the season, and I did my metal-dawg / Taurus-with-Virgo-rising thing and herded/hauled my mental sheeps to meadow and market. New poems up at Tupelo:

Day 6: "More than a Single Bound" (prompted by a motorcycle stunt)
Day 7: "Gazing at Tennessine" (prompted by Periodic Table Day)
Day 8: "Free As . . ." (prompted by National Kite-Flying Day)
Day 9: "Sweet Spot" (prompted by the Feast of St. Apollonia, patron saint of toothache sufferers)
Day 10: "Imperfect Fragment" (prompted by Edmond Halley)
Day 11: "Gathering Up All the Fragments" (prompted by Lydia Maria Child)
Day 12: "A Foot-Long Tongue" (prompted by Charles Darwin)
Day 13 (up later today): "Through a Screen, Darkly" (prompted by Absalom Jones, a Black Episcopalian priest and essential healthcare provider during a yellow fever epidemic)

The "someday" reading list is getting new titles added to it pretty much every day. There's an orchid display at Cheekwood this month; with Darwin's Contrivance by which British and Foreign Orchids . . . now in my Google library, I'd be keen to see it, but it's indoors, so I'll have to content myself with old photos instead, like these:



Ironically, as a household, we are not hugely into holidays. My belle-mère and closest cousin are by far more into (and better at) decorating; I mailed a Valentine to the BYM last year mainly to yank his chain (it was an adorable design, but it also had glitter); there have often been professional and/or performance obligations that had me on duty instead of at gatherings. That said, I'm weak for stickers and ribbons (even though they too often leave the ironing board and cutting mat weeks or even years after the festival they were originally purchased for), and every third year or so I work up the energy to donate something related to Lunar New Year to the church auction. This year's donation wasn't directly tied to LNY, but the winners of the bao subscription were easily gracious about me wanting to skip January, so I expanded yesterday's delivery of shrimp bao to include Taiwanese tea eggs, radish cake, and pineapple-ginger bubble tea:



The photos show my second take at mixing the tea; the first batch tasted fine but looked revolting. "Failing better" is definitely a thing here. ;)

[The subject line is from a valentine by Emily Dickinson that may be the most daft thing (outside of political/medical misinformation or art historical polemics, natch) I read this week.)]

The subject line is a chant from Chicago's March for Science. This photo is from this morning's march in Nashville:



It was taken by a woman whose mother had knitted the hats; she was there with her grandson, who worked toward getting a selfie with the dog as we chatted:



I've posted a cross-section of photos to my Twitter account (@zirconium). I'll add some more later, but I actually do have a grant application deadline to meet.

1. My poem Spelling "For Worse" is up at Goblin Fruit, in both text and audio formats.

1a. I am keeping right fine company on that TOC. :-)

2. Merrie Haskell wrote a novel called Castle behind Thorns. It's about to emerge, it has earned a starred review in Publisher's Weekly, and it will be a Junior Literary Guild selection. (Her second published novel has been collecting recommendations and awards, too, including "the 2014 Schneider Family Book Award winner for middle school for its depiction of a person with a disability.")

3. The Velveteen Rabbi will be reading her poetry in Jerusalem. I am so excited for her!

4. Making manuscripts reader-friendlier. Go me!

4a. Having the chops and experience to recognize typos (especially in Spanish) I wouldn't have caught five years ago.

5. Ripe cantaloupe and canned quail eggs. For when one works flat through dinner and then needs something that doesn't require cooking (i.e., stink up the kitchen) right before bedtime.

6. The sumo tangerine I picked up at a store last week. It was an indulgence, but it was also a great conversation piece, and I am about to candy the peel.

7. Having a dog that gleefully hoovers up vegetable scraps. (I am less enamored of her fondness for snacking on potting soil, but that's because it makes her wheeze.)

8. It is sunny and 55 F here right now. I'll be spending most of the day with spreadsheets, but I think I'll first sneak out for a walk.

9. Particle Fever! (And yes, I wore my CERN jacket to the showing.)

As an indexer and copyeditor, I have a professional interest in how classification systems are maintained and how people agree on names (for each other, for categories, and for stray-items-that-aren't-easily-summarized-but-ARE-too-important-not-to-show-up-somewhere-in-the-index [she types, grinning]).

...which means I was captivated by the feature article in issue 22 of Allen Press's FrontMatter newsletter: Taxonomy Goes Digital: Nomenclatural Codes Embrace Online-Only Publication. It discusses some of the ways taxonomic names can be established -- that is, how plants, animals, algae, bacteria, fungi, viruses, and other organisms are formally labeled. (Put another way: if you want your name for a newly discovered or discussable critter to be recognized officially -- the better to talk about it with everyone else -- you have to publish and register the name properly [i.e., blogs and Facebook don't count, and until last year, neither did online-only journals]. Until I read this article, I hadn't given much thought to how the process was regulated, even though I'm excavating terminology wormholes all the time in my line of work. [You say vernacular, I say jargon, let's play rochambeau...])

It mentions the Global Names Architecture project, which it describes as "an attempt to compile information about names and help reconcile two major problems: some species have more than one name, and some names are applied to more than one species." (The GNA website looks fascinating. I am charmed by the parenthetical "the strings that serve as" in the second sentence. Some other week...)

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Also on names: over at her blog, Mary lists the women mentioned in 100 Diagrams that Changed the World.

Joanne tells the audience about polar bears.

Mary, Joanne, and I presented some of our poems at the downtown branch of the Nashville Public Library yesterday morning, in the beautiful West Reading Room. The room is also where the monthly Shakespeare Allowed gatherings take place, so between that and March Madness, it would have been foolish to start with anything other than "Practicing Jump Shots with Shakespeare."

The rest of my set (all from Measured Extravagance):

Playing Duets with Heisenberg's Ghost
Schrodinger's Top Hat
The Language of Waiting
Devotion
Deep and Crisp and Even
Hymn

I'm now kind of kicking myself for not including "Proportions" and "Shehechianu," but truth be told, I found myself powering through an (atypical) attack of nerves, so ending the set at ten minutes (instead of fifteen) seemed the more prudent course of action while I was at the podium.

I'm enormously grateful to the friends who attended the event -- thank you all so much for making time for it, amid so many other choices! It was also thrilling to discover that we'd caught the interest of strangers: we were a Critics' Pick in this week's Nashville Scene, and Liz mentioned being asked about the reading while riding the bus.

Joanne's posted some photos and notes as well.



Mary read primarily from The Scientific Method, and offered "My Mother Was a Mad Scientist" cards:



Other pleasures of the weekend have included:

* Time with Mary and her sister. We walked to Little Hollywood and back, tried a vanilla marshmallow at Provence (said mallows are huge -- one was sufficient for three people), admired the felt vines at Retropolitan ...

* A Friday night gathering with Joanne's household. She brought potato salad and spinach salad; the BYM picked up pork shoulder and cornbread from Jack's; I made two pitchers of sangria, a plate of devilled eggs, and a bowl of blue cheese slaw. Good eats and good times.

* A note from Houseboat -- they'll be publishing two of poems this week.

...and, there's more to share, but it's time to head to church. Here's wishing each of you a happy start to your week.

From things that make me happy

Chemistry Kitty!

There's a competition through April 2 for answers to "What is a flame?", seeking descriptions that "an 11-year-old will find intelligible and maybe even fun." It's also canvassing for 11-year-olds to act as judges.

http://www.flamechallenge.org/

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ysabetwordsmith, who will be featured on this blog on April 20, has opinions and observation about publishing models for you to ponder.

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I am far from a purist when it comes to prosody, but Lehman's prediction + clarification on why Obama and not Santorum will carry the electoral college -- let's hear it for the true double trochees!