River of Play

And Back Again

The trip to U of Northern Iowa was uncomfortable, but only as far as the driving was concerned. Rain mixed with snow. Thunderstorms. Wind hammering the car with 30 mph bursts of entirely unnecessary energy. My time with Jeremy Schraffenberger and his students (and, later, the family) was a treat.

They had been reading ecopoets and ecocritical articles the entire semester and engaging the idea of ecopoetry. They had also read my ecopoetry manifesto. The conversation we had was wide-ranging and exciting, but at some level it felt very odd to me. Who was this Engelhardt we were all talking about? Did he really write these things? Can we extend his argument? And, if so, why were they all looking at me?

Great students. It seems clear that UNI is doing a fine job attracting engaged, dedicated students. And if any of them of bouncing over to this post: hello!

I'll add a picture of the building in which we all huddled into a corner to talk about the outside world (though we had a bright green young pine tree outside one window that we used as an object lesson the entire evening).

Jeremy and I went for a very tasty dinner in the short length of Main Street that houses a cluster of neat shops, good coffee, and a clutch of good restaurants. We talked poetry, poetics, university politics, children, and on and on well into the night. If you're ever in the Cedar Falls area, look the man up.

The next morning, I rolled out of town, battled the elements, and prepped for Saturday's game day at the house. (Which games? Thanks for asking! Furstefeld, The Hobbit, and Municipium.) Later today, there's a poetry reading at the main Lincoln library. Busy weekend. And I'm still feeling good.

 

The Strangest Places

If you want to hear about how some folk respond to my strange obsession with board games, head over to the Pulp Gamer Podcast Suite, but you really only want to listen to one episode. And toward the end of that. Are board games art? No, I will say, but they are damned interesting.

And I have a piece in the most widely distributed publication in which I am likely to appear: Bookmarks. Sadly, it's a kind of sneaky way to get in. An ad. But it's on the letters to the editor page! Bottom right corner! And it starts:

Vacuuming.
We, too, dislike it.

Look for it on newsstands near you.

Green!s

So the convention has ended and we have the high-profile but politically explosive and frequently objectionable Cynthia McKinney as the Green nominee. I almost wish for Nader. I myself was pulling for this guy, in part because I'm from a DNA group called Johnson from West Virginia as well. I'm happy to see that he's been drafted for the gubernatorial race by the Mountain Party. Still, McKinney's a gadfly, and she's been able to demand attention. We'll see. I hope to warm to her. 

In other parts of life, my brother and his family came, saw, exhausted our small apartment. The oldest boy has taken a turn for the geeky, so we had some long conversations about games, gaming, sf, and so on. This is going to be interesting to watch. The others are, well, still little kids. Strangely, and this goes to a couple of issues that Richard Louv has taken up in his work, these are are indoor kids. Given a choice to visit an outdoor playground and park space or an indoor space (the local Children's Museum), they took the indoor option. Now, the museum was a great place, but they'd already been there once. Let me add, in their defense, that these are active, wiry kids. When we did a nature walk, they had no trouble running around, but they didn't step off the path, and they didn't immediately go looking for bugs, rocks, nests, whatever. It seemed very strange to me.

But really, we had a great time. Hey, That's My Fish and ElkFest were big hits. And the oldest one, as I've hinted, pored over the games collection. And my brother and I had a great evening looking at some old RPGs that we played as kids and showing them to the boy. So, yeah, it was a good visit. This time, the fireworks were simply literal.  

Great Apes in their Habitat

Sunday, late morning, early afternoon at the Meadowlark, a groovy sort of local coffeeshop, as opposed to a hipster kind of coffeeshop. I admit to not being trendy enough to be allowed into a hipster coffeehouse. Some good, churchgoing folk were in early, left, and another batch of them has drifted through. This included some sweet young’uns who seemed to want to flirt like hell but couldn’t quite figure it out. Or, they were conflicted about, you know, succeeding. Though you could tell they wanted to. Succeed, I mean. The jitteriness wasn’t just about caffeine.

Here’s what else the natives were doing: playing games. A long game of Phase 10 over by the big windows, and a lesbian couple playing online games—at least one of them kept going over to the WebKinz site. And that was strange to see.

During all of this, I was drafting and organizing poems for the diss and then working on the compfolio essay for my Field list. Nothing earth-shattering, there. A good review of the literature that sorts issues out in a mostly chronological way so I can highlight the discussions taking place. And then the essay uses these frames to look at some contemporary poetry. Pretty straightforward stuff, but the application to poetry isn’t being done much.

And now, prep for the road trip. We leave Friday morning for California to drive a friend’s car across country. He and his fiancée are getting ready to spend a year teaching English in Bulgaria, and they want to send the car to Ohio for another friend’s daughter. So. Off we go.

Life of Pod

It seems like I've settled into a twice-weekly posting pattern. So be it. Once the comps lists are finally read (getting damned close) and the MMLA paper is revised (I need to revise and resubmit in a month to have the paper I wrote for the conference included in their publication) and I'm back to actually writing poems and other bits of interest, I'll be able to do little extra posts. But since nobody's reading this anyway...

Now I have a podcast lineup that covers my interests, with their own postings coming out at intervals that keeps the pod interesting. Most recently, I found the Poetry Foundation's recordings. They have a couple of streams that just read a poem a day, but other streams have discussion. I like discussion. I already read the magazine. I have nature podcasts (from Nature, and Living on Earth), and environmental news (Grist). Culture and food (To the Best of Our Knowledge, Studio 360 and the Splendid Table) and a slew of boardgame podcasts. Which would take far too long for me to create links for. Ask me, though, and I'll send 'em your way.

Politics

It's pretty much exactly like watching a horse race. Or a major sports play-off. Or handicapping an awards show. Now is it more or less appalling that this person will become "the leader of the free world"?

On the other hand, I can't really bring myself to care about the politics of poetry. I probably shouldn't admit that I don't read poetry blogs. I attribute this at least in part to my evangelical upbringing inasmuch as there's a lot of arguing of texts and textual interpretation that's so intensely hermetic that it becomes rapidly nonsensical. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? How does the page as field force a reading, an experience, an interpretation?

I'm beginning to think that my fascination with board games has to do with a sense that games are art stripped of pretension. A bit of strategizing with a new idea. Experiments to optimize the experience. Of course, you have real people sitting across from you who call your bluff, who see your cards, who decide that "the line is the breath" is the most hopeless twaddle. The problem is that games are hopelessly lowbrow. Or middlebrow. Or just plain fucking geeky. They don't go will with berets. Or peg pants. Or pea coats.

Since My Last Confession

In a peculiar, yet reassuring, confluence of technology and the environment, our DSL service pretty much drops out during sustained rain. Take this weekend, for instance. Lots of rain. Little or no internet service. I'm trying to catch up.

So. Saturday night. Games in the basement apartment. We were five, all told, and managed to get in two games: Ticket to Ride (which went pretty well, even with two new players) and a run through the new-to-everyone High School Drama (which took a while to get going--the rules aren't very clear--and was interrupted by pizza). The basement has a low ceiling and dead bugs, but works well for quick set-up and take-down. It also allows the possibility of long games, or games that can be set up and walked away from.

Comps-wise, I'm reading Robinson Jeffers and The Elephants Teach. I like Jeffers's short lyrics and his burgeoning misanthropy is both fun and disturbing to read. Elephants has a both detailed and broad look at the history of creative writing within English studies (CW is older than you might think; English is younger). This book should be required reading for MFA instructors and grad students.

And I'll leave it at that.

Workin' That Ecology Thing

There's this intriguing little article over at Orion about the conflict between work and sustainability. The author points out--no surprises--that capital cares only for more capital. It depends on zeroing out the environment as a resource and then expanding profits. Now, to do this, you need to make sure that the market never reaches saturation for your product. So you've got two choices: find more markets, design obsolescence into the product. The Orion article notes that people get caught up in this as wage slaves driven to consume. . .and to have jobs that create markets or obsolescence or products so that they can afford market-driven products that are obsolete in six months. It's work that he really wants to focus on. And, yes, most "work" these days is dehumanizing and profoundly pointless. But our author wants us, somehow, to go back to the nineteenth century. Or, rather, he wants us to become thoughtful, engaged, community-focused humans. How that might happen. . . is left to the imagination. He also has some truly wacky points, like "a human society would never willingly harm nature." He acknowledges that he has no proof for this, and with good reason. Phrases like "the Dust Bowl" and "Easter Island" keep coming to mind. And for good measure: violence is a part of human nature. It's wonderfully lucky of us, though, to also have brains large enough to think violent choices through.

I've gotta stop. I could go on and on about that article. Go over and read it. It's very nice, and even if he claims, fairly regularly, that he's not naive, he's being naive.

Gah. I said I would stop. On to another topic: D and I are going to walk around the Near South Neighborhood today. There's a Tour of Homes going on, many of which are ones that we walk and/or bike past on a regular basis. We're keen to see inside. Today's forecast: clear, breezy, high of 90. Chance of oak paneling, one hundred percent.

Tights and Xians

I was going to throw a link about xians and environmental scientists out there, and I will, but first I wanted to hitch this Slate link to the blog, here. How much am I the geek of your worst days? Oh, so. And not the cool geek who slunk off to concerts and collected albums. No. I was of a whole other stripe. Theater. RPGs. Comix. And not hip comics, either. We didn't have them in my town. Improbably handsome and strong young people in spandex. Those comix. The Slate articles alright, but scroll down to the slideshow. Some fun stuff. Let me know if you have them. Bring 'em by. We'll talk.

And now, evangelicals, already in progress. Or not progressing at all. Well, on environmental issues, apparently, they've woken up a bit. Let's not wait for Armegeddon and the Rapture (not in that order), they seem to be saying, let's not poison ourselves now. Because, when we do this kind of not-giving-a-shit, not-paying-attention, I-should-have-two-SUVs poisoning, we poison poor people, and that behavior just ain't xian. No shit. In this article, though, it's telling that the scientists and the xians won't field questions. Ah. Don't agree on much else? Think the other side's a deluded fool out to kill you? Let's. . . just not talk, 'k?

And my first issue of Knucklebones arrived. I promise not to get the pages all sticky.

Roll With It, Baby

The group managed to get a good, solid gaming session in on Friday. The tauren was a bit ridiculously large on the table, but only a bit. I also got a chance to put my hands on a copy of Betrayal at House on the Hill (you can even play their online demo) which looks like a lot of fun. But with a these high-quality, high-component-count games, I wonder about the ecological footprint these delights leave. I admire companies like Cheapass games that strip a game down to bare essentials, but there's still plenty of stuffishness to buy. I find myself mulling over whether or not online gaming is the greener option, but there's the energy to think of. . . Maybe we should just wrestle.

I've been thinking a bit more about green/ecocrit issues after a discussion of the Robert and Shana Parkeharrison's photos at the Sheldon (click on the "view more photos" link to see, um, more photos). The Architect's Brother work feels ecologically informed without being at all preachy. It seems to me to use a sort of Jungian surrealism that I find appealing. The work up at the Sheldon has a Lumiere brother's quality to it with its sepia tones and machines made from awkward and unlikely parts. M (the Nebraska Garden M, not the Starlings M) had suggested that this would be a fine, fine show to see. She's very right. When you get a free moment, trot on down to the Sheldon and check it out. I insist.