Yard-Pal

SIP: Abalone Memory

The Light Here

The light here

The light there

Captain, resting.


Lady, waiting patiently while I work:

What's-the-Story?

Story: characters in action in a setting through time.

That's how I process everything.

Give me a poem, any poem, and I look for the story in the lines, behind the lines, and/or after the lines. Give me a photo, and where some see a static tablieau, I see dynamism, before-and-after, presence-and-absence. Give me a problem, personal or societal, and I look for the story in the same way.

On the upside, I look for motivation and context and nuance. On the downside, some people think I am wasting my--or their--time with this approach, with my concern for accuracy and understanding of plot, POV, and narrative shading.

I'll be 59 soon, but that mostly means I've had a lot of practice with stories and story-telling; I think I am (still) in tune most of the time. Yet I know I may be wrong in my emphasis in certain circumstances and with certain texts, and that encourages me to be humble, which is always good.

Still, what's the story is my favorite question.

Repose: Lady and Captain

I always feel a little more rested, a bit more at ease, when I watch my cats sleeping.  Or, as I should say, resting.  If you look closely, you can see that Lady's eyes are open and watching me take yet another picture, and Captain is resettling here atop my laptop, which I need to work . . . .

Shelf-Love: The Aquatic and the Nautical

Further Reflections Upon Connell's "Notes . . ."

Evan S. Connell's "Notes From a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel" is the strangest book I have read in 20 or so years. Epic, but in a modern or post-modern sense; fragmented, yet cohesive; deeply allusive and lateral-minded. (I felt quite at home, though I don't quite know what it adds up to or if addition is the proper sequencing. A record, an indictment, of humanity, at the least.)

Imagine if Melville's Ishmael had written Marlowe's Doctor Faustus? Imagine if Cervantes had written Pound's Personae or The Cantos? Imagine if the Archpoet of Cologne and an astrophysicist teamed up to write Eliot's The Waste Land in 243 pages? Would Joyce describe -- and delineate -- Connell as an amateur, imitator, or brother?

I felt narrative tension, a pressing forward, so much so that I don't want to quote out of context, and yet Connell gives us 243 pages of accretion undivided by parts or chapters. Amazing. Did Connell create that (my default) or am I such a perfect reader here that I imposed order and momentum upon chaos?

If chaos is the point, then how I answer that last question truly matters.

Epic Ambitions: "Notes From a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel"

Three or four times in the past, I have read around in this poetic labyrinth from Evan S. Connell, first published in 1962, and I have often enjoyed following the lines of thought a few steps or, plunging further, have gotten lost. I am going to attempt reading straight through, which may or may not be the proper path.

I first looked at the book purely because I was born in Carmel, CA, and am taken with message-bottles found on beaches and such. The poetry led me to purchase the volume--which is either a work of genius or a trickster's hoard of bits and pieces. Either may prove compelling.

I can't tell yet how many different narrative voices or personae Connell is utilizing; certainly, while some "notes" are in the first-person, many are in the third-, and the overall narrative voice is Legion.  The interwoven narratives involve multiple historical periods or moments.  Exploration, geography, history, mystery, divinity, humanity, life, death, loss--coins--philosophy, alchemy, heresy, punishment, fear, greed--coins--exhilaration, awe: these are the key words I'm noting on the endpapers as I work my way into this literary place, this world-out-of-a-bottle.

Here is one passage that caught my eye:

Some say the tuna swims around the world
searching for a better life because he is not at home
in the sea. It may be we have met, this obsessed fish
and I, somewhere beyond the Pillars of Heracles.

(I love the use of "Pillars of Heracles" for the antique feeling, like reading an L. Sprague de Camp novel about the ancient world from my youth.  Even more, I love the "obsessed fish / and I".  This is an idiosyncratic choice of quotation, but that's also one joy of not being in the classroom, of being off-duty: I can please myself--and be reminded that the individual response matters, that the social or communal or universal responses grow from the responsible, attentive individual ones.)

And here is a passage I have found particularly compelling:

We know of Saint Dionysius
that when his head had been chopped. from his body
he picked it up and carried it;
and walked to the place where he wanted to be buried.
To what prayer will you listen, if not to this?

Off-duty, as it were, I retreat to the poetic and intuitive, if only for the sustenance to shoulder the burdens of teaching once more. (But not only "if only", you know?). The power of that last line in the passage: "To what prayer will you listen, if not to this?"  How is the foregoing a prayer?  How could it not be, on reflection and assertion?  The power and movement of art and the mind of the reader, in this case.  This is a book made up of a thousand poetic fragments, possibly more, and reading these pieces requires mental ordering, assessing, connecting--requires a willingness to suspend knowledge, even comprehension, in the moment for the sake of an emerging pattern.  The process is certainly immersive; the experience can feel overwhelming, a drowning, or feel more positive, upwelling and fulfilling.

Reading the first forty or fifty pages in order so far, attuned to resonance and pattern-making, has led to a familiar reflection.  I can not-know exactly what something means and yet know that something carries meaning, is pregnant with meaning, and standing as a witness feels true and useful. Many of my students take their cues from pop culture and expect meaning to be delivered, upon demand, and to be consumed. So often, however, meaning must be discovered, must be explored, may be missed or mislaid, may be sweated out, must be uncovered--partially, gradually--and may or must be resisted.  Grist for the mill of the mind.

I don't fully know how to teach the absolute sneakiness of art, but I try, I try, I try.

Epic ambitions--Connell's, mine; writer's, reader's--afoot.

Light-Box

Yearning for Salt

Light winds --
kayaking off Van Damme State Beach
in Mendocino County.

--a shot from years ago: 2017? 2016?

Dreaming About My Father: Two Dreams, Three Years Apart

Dream: May 18, 2020:
Very early this morning, I dreamed that I was driving in an unfamiliar part of SF, couldn't find the right streets to find the on-ramp for the Bay Bridge, and so parked and found some random cafe to get coffee and study a paper map for the proper route. As I am struggling with the worn, torn, and misfolded map, I realize my father is sitting at a table in an enjoining section of the cafe and chatting with one of his old colleagues. There is a pane of glass between us, and he hasn't noticed me. I think dad must have taken mass transit to get here, and I can give him a ride home after he finishes his conversation. I wake then, and I remember after a few moments that my father has been dead for many years.

That was actually a dream that shifted from anxiety and frustration to something rather cheery.

Oddly enough, three years ago on this same day I dreamed about my deceased father, which I had forgotten, but which Facebook Memories delivered to me just now.

A very old shot of the two of us.  

In these dreams, we are both adults.

Dream: May 18, 2017
Quite early this morning I had one of those teaching dreams turn into one of those deceased-parent dreams. I was helping a student, though I didn't have the right handouts on hand, in a lovely office: old wood and sunlit glass, more spacious and less cluttered than my actual office, with French doors to a most lovely rose garden. Anyway, I am helping this student grapple with his research project when my father, many years dead but not in the dream, appears in the doorway. He is dressed in a white shirt and khakis. He gives me the barest of glances, but isn't rude, as he walks through my office to the French doors and out into the garden. I tell the student that's my dad even as I realize--in the dream itself--that my father's dead. 

I wake at that moment, looking through the French doors for my father.


2020 P.S. 
Even earlier this morning, I also had a teaching dream, a positive one about explaining how poetry works, before the deceased-parent dream -- just to increase the paralleling . . . .

Also, panes of glass appear in both 2017 and 2020.

Layering Instruction: Text Selection

ENGLISH 1A: Non-Fiction Reading and Writing
Fall 2020 Readings/Viewings:

All of the texts feature models of effective writing and present learning as a key theme. As the students are reading about rowing solo across an ocean or about octopuses and shellfish navigation, they are also reading about learning. Resilience (through preparation and practice) is another underlying theme. Four layers of instruction through text selection.

And I haven't started talking yet.

Martin Wells, Civilization and the Limpet

Tori Murden McClure, A Pearl in the Storm

Tim Severin, The Brendan Voyage

Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival

Films: Heart of the Sea and Fish People

and a collection of short essays on related topics.

Imperious

Sun-Bath

SIP: California Dreaming

Lady and Light

SIP: Captain

 Morning.

Evening.

SIP FWP

I have run out of cream.

(But I always use the fun scissors when I need to shift the filter from pot- to mug-size.)

Reading Around