I’ve been listening to a lot of Coldplay lately. It’s chill, good working music; it reflects my kind of quiet sadness at having Tim far away. Their sound has that same open windsweptness as the music of Sigur Rós and Martin Lauridsen (one of my favorite choral composers). Winter as both quiet and exciting, subdued and cozy and frightening, tormented and comfortable.

Maybe this is why I’m writing my thesis on climate.

Well, I’m back in Charlottesville now, and have apparently, since Christmas, been going through an output dry spell. Does this ever happen to anyone else? It’s not just that I’m not producing proper work (I actually have been adding pages, however dreary, to my thesis), but that I haven’t got much to say other than that. I just feel that I should put something up here to voice my continuing existence.

Instead of writing, I have been soaking in things: while I was recuperating from having the wisdom taken out of me (all four wisdom teeth! and I learned that they’re called such in many Indo-European languages), I read a few Rider Haggard novels and a Marryat novel: so lots of imperial adventure there. My mom got me a BBC Dickens collection for Christmas, so we watched a lot of those. I moved on to Christmas gifts soon and have been working through Pinker’s “The Language Instinct,” a popular scientific study of language and cognition (much in the style of “Guns, Germs, and Steel”). I’m also auditing a course on cartography this semester, and since barnesandnoble.com is slow, the first few books on my syllabus have not arrived, so I’m immersing myself in the later books, which have arrived, and which are fabulous. Who knew the theories of cartography were exactly the same as those of literature, but with visual theory added in (more like visual poetry, I suppose)? It’s dense but wonderful.

Oh, and over break Tim and I went to the Folger and drooled on their exhibit of early modern writing life after the advent of printing. One of my favorite displays was of the cryptographic methods used at the time; one was called a “casement letter.” Both parties, writer and recipient, would have a physical guide to writing, called a casement, which was essentially a piece of thick, stiff paper with little windows cut out. This would be placed over a sheet of paper and the letter would be composed in the windows. Then the casement would be removed and the rest of the sheet of paper would be filled in with random sentences, so it would be impossible, in effect, to figure out the content of the true letter. The recipient would place their copy of the casement over the letter when they received it, and voila, the original letter would appear. With the casement over the page, though, the letters are suggestive of Jess’s work in Organic Funiture Cellar. There’s a sense of lightness to the page, and also a sense of being let in to view scattered bits of something. I guess what I’m saying is that in both cases the sense of confusion is strongly accompanied by the joy of being able to see even pieces of something, of being let in just for a little bit, of a child standing on tiptoe at a high window to glance at the sky.

Anyway, the kitchen timer calls: must take pasta out. More later?

For a lot of people, at the center of Christmas are family, friends, laughter, and cookies. Call me cold and heartless, but the center of Christmas, to me, is still the religious principle, the magnum mysterium of the divine becoming earthly, the ideal becoming real (maybe I’ve been reading too much Plato). This morning’s gospel reading was the beginning of St. John, my favorite passage in the Bible–you know, the “in the beginning was the Word” one. One line particularly struck me because of our running theme in Chaucer class all semester, and in thinking about it I realized that in those lines is what I believe to be the true meaning of Christmas:

And the Word became flesh;
And made his dwelling among us.

My Chaucer professor got us all quite interested in the poetics of dwelling: what it means to dwell and how we express that meaning through language. Dwelling, we learned, originally implied a temporary state: to dwell meant to linger, but only for a while. Part of learning how to “dwell” on this earth is learning how to deal with our own temporariness. God, in theory, never needs to deal with this sense; he is the binary opposite of temporality. But in Christianity, the birth of Christ represents God allowing himself to become temporary for a time, to “dwell”–to linger–among us.

But dwelling is not just being. It’s a way of being (see Heidegger); it’s the way we interact with the space around us. Dwelling means dealing with that world, its people, its weather, its fate, its greenery. To make a dwelling means both to build a house, and to build this kind of relationship with the world. Christ, John is telling us, built his home here on earth, with all the temporality that that implies.

There’s something marvellous there, especially in the idea that it’s the “word” that’s coming to build its dwelling with us. John was so deeply aware of language that he managed to write the entire opening to his gospel writing about it and its limits–and God–all at the same time. The word become flesh indeed.

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate, and much love to everyone else.

the spring-sounding birds (you know the ones i mean) are chirping ferociously outside, as the fog is beginning to lift over newly-greened night-rain grass. the temperature’s low, but swiftly rising with the clouds, making me feel like wearing pretty bright colors and light things, struggling through with only a sweater when i really maybe should be wearing a jacket on top. there’s even a holidayish smell to the air, a twinge of stillness and excitement and worry whether i remembered everything i wanted to do for the family gathering. yes indeed, it sure feels like easter morning.

Fine, fine. I’ll give it a go.

The first poem I remember reading was…
Just with my eyes? “Where the Sidewalk Ends.” Really understanding that there’s more to poetry than rhyme and a meter? “The Waste Land,” senior year of high school. I remember writing, in green ballpoint pen, on the top of the first page, “THIS is poetry???”

I was forced to memorize numerous poems in school and…
…this statement is not as true as it should be. Kids should have to memorize far more poetry than they do. The only poetry I ever had to memorize before college was in French; to this day I can still recite “La Cigale et la Fourmi” and wow my friends in the French Department here (thank you Madame Amiry). But memorizing these poems and the Middle and Old English verses I learned by heart in college gave me something more than brilliant party conversation material. Memorization heightens awareness. Knowing each word, each pause, each punctuation mark and accent made me think about them more, makes me feel them more. On a practical level, such close attention taught me the grammar of each language better than any fill-in-the-blank quizzes or parsing assignments; I also thing that memory games like this help strengthen memory itself. But on a soulfully practical level, I feel like I could really only begin to read a poem once I’d memorized it. It’s partially the fact that you have to spend a good deal of time with a poem to memorize it (if you’re me anyway), and partially the power that comes from knowing how it all fits together and what comes before what, being able to keep the whole poem in your head simultaneously at the same time as knowing how it runs chronologically. If only I had the discipline to keep memorizing poetry now…it makes me wonder how my poetry papers would be different if I memorized each verse before I wrote.

I read poetry because…
I am looking for an expression of something I feel strongly, with or without knowing it.

A poem I’m likely to think about when asked about a favorite poem…
is Wordworth’s “Tintern Abbey.” It’s so comforting and homey and absolutely revolutionary and transgressive all at once. And probably more importantly, Wordsworth and I agree about the importance of place.

I write poetry, but…
…nobody is ever meant to see it. It’s me venting, and is very teenage-angsty. No pretensions of greatness. Line breaks occur entirely for dramatic effect and have nothing to do with meter. In her self-effacing introduction to “I Won’t Be Your Yoko Ono,” Dar Williams captures exactly the combination of fondness and contempt that I have for my poetry.

My experience with reading poetry differs from my experience with reading other types of literature…
In some ways, a lot. Intensity. It’s just so rich. I wonder if a poem could survive if it weren’t in some way like chocolate ganache. But I also like to question why we don’t call prose poetry; in children’s literature, for example, they overlap a lot. Is The Cat in the Hat a poem? Is Goodnight, Moon? Czeslaw Milosz wrote prose poetry, as did Baudelaire. How does the opening to Bleak House differ from these works? Indeed, how does it differ from the opening to “Prufrock”?

I find poetry…
…everywhere I look? on the third shelf up on my big bookcase? difficult?

The last time I heard poetry…
We read most of the poems on our syllabus aloud this semester in Late Victorian lit. It’s amazing how few of us know how to read poetry aloud (me included, definitely). One or two of the readings were okay. But we don’t know how to relish words without making it sound forced. Hence we either over- or undercompensate, with effects that leave the poet turning in his grave and the rest of us squirming in our seats. It’s a delicate and difficult and rigid balance–but somehow it feels so right and free and easy when you finally hear it.

I think poetry is like…
…similes.

Seriously, read this.

“Whatever the military force to be maintained in Iraq, it is clear that it should be local. The American military system has now had three years’ trial, and has failed in every point in which failure was prophesied. The officers, hating Iraq, and having no knowledge of native languages or customs, bring our Government into contempt among the people; recruits in the States dread enlistment for service they know not where…”

OK, fine, so I did some substitution of terms. American for English. Iraq for India. But the rest of this was written in 1868 by historian Charles Wentworth Dilke, concluding his work on the British military in India. What haven’t we learned?

“Moreover,” Dilke continues, “medding in Afghanistan [has] long since proved to be a foolish and dangerous course…”