River of Play

Time's Winged Chariot

I almost wrote "whinging chariot." Fun with fingers, eh? Though nothing compared to the daughter. Her fingers are simply the most amazing thing she sees. 

We've been busy around here in Lincoln. Houseguests and so on. We took our guests--Wendy's godparents--out to look at the last of the Sandhill cranes. Instead, we ran into snow geese. Tens of thousands of snow geese. I have pictures. And I will post them. But right now I have a narrow window for posting, so I wanted to set up a quick link to a fab/scary comic here (it's the 3/13/09 strip). If you're a PhD student, you must be reading this strip. If not...it'll give you some insight, I expect. Oh, but not this particular one. It's more of a theme link. 

Remind me to write about the new poetry project. And think loving thoughts toward Natural Bridge. 

Reading and Linking

We're into a busy season here at chez Team Libros (a sort of answer to Team Pants as well as a fairly accurate description of the contents of our apartment--an apartment which could be fully carpeted with books to a depth of at least two volumes if such a project were our intention. Which it isn't.). We will have a wealth of visitors this coming weekend, including Wendelynne's godparents. 

I have a stack of reading that waits patiently for me. John Price's Not Just Any Land is here to my left, and a stack of other material. At the top I have Agha Shahid Ali's The Veiled Suite, Nance VanWinckel's No Starling, and David Wagoner's A Map of the Night. The first and last are somewhat lengthy, so I have to gear myself up to commit to them for a time, not an attitude that usually goes with the flaky lightness of poetry collections. I hope they bear the weight well.

And if anyone has suggestions on how to keep a disparate variety of online sites wrapped tightly together, give a holler. 

Back in the Saddle--and Relaxing

AWP was last weekend, and it was...immense. I ran into Matt Buresci who told me that 8,500 people were there for the panels and the 700 tables and booths in the book fair. And this has been a goad for me to think about the Prairie Schooner brand, if you will. The good people at CLMP suggested a book to read, Buying In. So I'm reading the text. Very interesting stuff about the psychology of buying, and it raises intriguing questions about innovation v. novelty. 

The conference is a good place to meet old friends and to remind myself that there's a lot of light and smoke in literary publishing but very little that's all that interesting. I also noticed that our price point was a little steep for current economies. We'll see what the year brings. But the worst thing about the conference was my conveyance: a Jeep Compass. Nice enough on the inside, I suppose (though the cup holders were in terrible locations), but it maxed out at 20 mph on the highway. Oof. And don't get me started on the extensive blind spots. Cars around me would disappear entirely for miles at a time only to reappear when I needed to change lanes. 

Plus, did I mention the mileage? 

Which takes me off the AWP issue and onto the much more meaningful engagements of ecocriticism (oh, before we leave AWP: I did get a chance to meet up with some ASLE and Wofford folk). D handed me a rather appalling little board book when I got home. I Love You, Little One by Nancy Tafuri. In this book--firmly in the tradition of reassurance narratives--a variety of wild animals ask their mothers if their mothers in fact love them. We'll leave the talking animals aside and concentrate on their maternal responses. Yes, the mothers say, I love you like the pond/river/stars love you-- And there's the trouble. I finished each of those sentences while D was reading with "which is to say, not at all." I know for a fact that D loves Wendy more than the stars love her. The stars don't care. At all. Hell, the pond can drown you. And will, no matter how fond of it you are. I understand that we're talking about childhood treacle, but still. Not all the treacly books suggest dangerous attitudes. 

But the illustrations are nice.

A Week at a Time

Life is pretty compressed right now, as you might think. Wendy is sleeping four, five, or eight hour shifts at night, so we're doing pretty well. We are in the six week "fussiness" window, so daytime hours are trying. But, we persevere. Worse, I think, are the frequent trips to stores to pick up a this or a that. Diapers. Formula. More, different bottles. Means to warm the bottles (is it better to have a hyper-efficient electrical warmer or use natural gas?). I shudder to think of the cash passing through our wallets. Like shit through a goose. 

So much of the baby stuff is plastic, too. Dear gods, you have to work to find natural materials. Every toy and geegaw is bright, molded plastic hanging in a plastic bubble in an airless store. Still, we've managed to find rattles and toys of wood and cloth, and they just feel better.

Anybody care for a round up? Sure...

If, like me, you were a bit fretful about the "climate change is irreversible" report, fear not! Or, rather, continue to fear--or loathe powerful denialists like W for whom vocabulary is insufficient to describe their cravenness. As it says in the title, Irreversible is not Unstoppable. 

And shall we mourn for Michael Phelps? Dissenting opinions here and here. 

Time and the End of It All

I mean to update this space more often, but the living of life has gotten a bit more tricky.

First off, my parents were here this past week, which complicated everything. We expect a better routine and flow, now. Ah, and I turned in a draft of my comps. The field comps are, um, embarrassing. By which I mean way, way too long. Close to the epic scale of D's comps, but only for the field. The focus comps were mostly to scale. 

We took the youngest miss to the emergency room yesterday. Red bits had appeared in her diaper, so when we called the pediatrician's office they rushed us off to the hospital. Not to worry. A bit of constipation had her straining... Oy. I knew we'd spend a lot of time talking about that end of the girl, but it's really kind of hilarious. Color. Volume. Consistency. Of course, I'm somewhat used to this because I scoop the cats' litter (would the whole tray clump if, oh, an adult human pissed in there?), so close attention to excreta is part of my life. 

Let's see... what else? Right. With the comps now infecting my committee members, I can turn toward my diss project. So I get to read, do research, and generally not have to worry about footnotes as I write. A very nice feeling. 

The tasting of lots of stout, galacatogic beers helps with the nice feeling, too.  

Trying for an Update

Not that there are readers stopping by, but I thought I'd mention that I'm done with the first draft of the entire field list. Getting close to the end of the focus list. A couple of good pubs, including an acceptance from Isotope. Lots of ecology and science news, too. We're getting close to DNA, another blow to creationism, I'm afraid. 

Speaking of evolution, we're watching our baby ape get used to being in the world. It's an amazing process, though not without a certain level of...loudness. 

And now, I need sleep. Think slow thoughts for me.

A New Year Full of Birthday Celebrations

So Wendy will turn one this year... And I don't know how to follow that up. 

I think that most of the people I know are interested in how the toxin flush we started in November will change how we feel in mid-January. I am delighted that we'll have a leader who listens to scientists--research and climate. Will we turn back to our own infrastructure? Will we address that infrastructure in ways that look to the future instead of recapitulating the 19th century's scorched earth, build big approach? And wouldn't it be nice to have a conversation about how to assess education that doesn't straight-jacket teachers (a topic very popular here in this house)?

And we have our own transition here with its attendant questions. So far, we're trying to limit the amount of cheap plastic doodads that Wendy gets, but so many of the baby tech items (eg, monitors) are just that. We keep sending people notes about wooden toys (PlanToys, Haba, etc), but these are expensive, as are the practices that would be better...maybe. Disposable or cloth diapers? Oh, it's an ugly question, and the answer is knotted and involves questions of money, labor, water... Ah, but I hear--over the monitor--the sounds of squirming. So. Must go. But you can see scads of pix here.

Wendelynne!

She's now almost a week old, so I've been neglecting the blog. To make up for this, I'll post a few pictures.