Blunders and Duties

Reader (if anyone should stray here from their blogging path for whatever reason), I have married, I have become a teacher (sort of like a governess but I have to pay my rent myself).

I got sucked into the abyss of pedagogical duties just around that last post in June. The abyss is technically supposed to look back at you when you look into it, but mine just spat out student essays.

As luck would have it, the recession has hit the cheerful land of graduate study, where kiddies venture when they're too scared to face the job market. The sharply reduced number of free photocopies was, I think, just enough for me to copy the syllabus; my so-called office doesn't have a window (curious savings) but it does have one of those locks that let you lock yourself in easily; I get to teach on the American Labor Day, while all the cafeterias on campus are closed (because it's Labor Day). Oh joy! And the (censored) publishing house *forgot* to send me desk copies. Twice. Now I can only eat bread and water until the next paycheck comes.

On the whole it's fine, I guess. If only I didn't have a big fat exam hanging over my head...

Meanwhile, I still have my secret imaginary life in Berlin, where I have imaginary kids, say, in Prenzlauer Berg and am able to afford eating out, and where I take long walks like someone out of Baudelaire and I don't have to submit 25 pages about it by the end of the semester.


PS: I don't even know how to reference this gem.

Stuck Writing

One more term paper to go, not to mention the exam I'm preparing. Online, I spend the majority of my time on google books and library pages. Awful overdose. Meanwhile, the weather outside reminds me of this song:

For May Dreaminess

May 3rd: Sernik Day

We celebrated Polish Constitution Day by baking our first sernik/cheesecake ever. The "/" captures our concentrated attempts to combine Polish and American recipes, which are very different, having wildly divergent conceptions of what cheese is.

My first confrontation with the gaping culinary wound caused by the lack of twaróg (yes, it's like the German Quark, only different) was with pierogi(es). The genuine pierogi z serem have white cheese (i.e. twaróg) filling. With cheddar they are just ridiculous.

I gave up hopes of making my own twaróg after I noticed that milk was good to drink after a month -- it didn't go sour. This explains several other oddities, like why kefir costs a fortune here and why you can only get it at the co-op. I dread to think what possible complications, chemical tricks, and replacement strategies go into the production of sour cream and yogurt.

And what cottage cheese really is. It was the closest to twaróg that I could get, but senselessly salty. The only reason I can think of that would justify putting crazy amounts of salt into butter and cottage cheese (as they do here) is to then effectively advertise other, "low- or non-sodium" products as a remedy for impending death.

You know, salt shakers aren't that heavy to lift and they have the fantastic option of letting you decide how much salt you want, so why sabotage that? The grocery logic here is mostly beyond me.

Of course, in spite of the generally successful hybridization of recipes, the cheesecake came out oddly salty. And yet, I can't post a picture, because I've devoured most of it already.

Once I'm done with my papers, I think I'll take G. on a mission to get some raw milk. I hope it doesn't entail stealing a cow, but there always are things you can't foresee...

The Cardinal

Cardinal with Bokeh, originally uploaded by Uncle Phooey.

I'm having coffee with the Northern Cardinal. He (I know for a fact that it's a boy, because he's red from beak to toe [toe?]) is sitting outside on a branch and not singing for me but for the cardinal ladies in the area. I am almost trying to work on an essay. But it's hard, because there are no cardinals in it, not even a feather.

So sitzen Sie richtig

Sigmar Polke, This Is How You Sit Correctly (After Goya)

This is one of my favorite paintings (and poems). Back in the day, before April turned from Poetry Month into tax month, I would linger over my favorite art and read poems waiting for something (or nothing) to happen.

Not to make it sound too idyllic, I was often bored.

There is a picture of me, though, leafing through an Egon Schiele album, some seven years ago. It was taken in a darkish pub on a hot August day, one of the most surprisingly surprising days when my sandals fell apart and I walked barefoot through the main streets of Poznań.

For years I remembered that a couple of pictures were taken on that occasion but had never seen them. Until Gryzmak dug them up in a box last Christmas. Between the summer we first met and our meeting six years later they had been waiting among other photographs and papers. Objects can be patient like I never can.

I envy that kind of poise as I fill out my forms and wait for magnolias to kick into full bloom. Now they are teasing me, on the verge of opening but still keeping to themselves.

What's admitted by the door can be kept
by the mind. Can be trapped
in a list. Can be lifted

by the tail and tenderly placed
where it will no longer be
in the way. It was never easy.

(from Mary Jo Bang, "This Is How You Sit Correctly (After Goya)")

Sometimes it's hard to make connections and the concluding sentence chooses to imitate the spring.

"Is This a Fashion Statement?"

A coffee shop in Manhattan (I beg you, don't ask if it wasn't "S" because it unfortunately was). I'm waiting for my latte.

Curious Woman: "I like your pin. Did you get it somewhere here, in Manhattan?"

Misiula: "No, actually, I bought it upstate. In a tiny vintage clothes and jewelery store."

Curious Woman: "Oh... And this ring? I noticed you're wearing it on a chain.Whose ring is it?"

(Whose ring? I'm trying to guess what she might mean. What do I say? St. Sebastian's? Vishnu's? Or maybe: I stole it from a woman in Central Park? Or maybe she meant the jeweler? Tiffany's?)
Needless to say, it's neither of the above and since it's all the thinking is happening within a second I just say--

"It's my engagement ring."

The End of March

Away--off to New York for three frantic days that seem very distantly related to the construction of a crypto-dream-house, but, nevertheless, believe me, the path to it leads through Manhattan flower shops, and bureacrapcy, and requires nerves of steel.

Please send us positive thoughts through the land and over oceans.

Liepāja beach, originally uploaded by la-la-laine.

Elizabeth Bishop
"The End of March"

It was cold and windy, scarcely the day
to take a walk on that long beach
Everything was withdrawn as far as possible,
indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken,
seabirds in ones or twos.
The rackety, icy, offshore wind
numbed our faces on one side;
disrupted the formation
of a lone flight of Canada geese;
and blew back the low, inaudible rollers
in upright, steely mist.

The sky was darker than the water
--it was the color of mutton-fat jade.
Along the wet sand, in rubber boots, we followed
a track of big dog-prints (so big
they were more like lion-prints). Then we came on
lengths and lengths, endless, of wet white string,
looping up to the tide-line, down to the water,
over and over. Finally, they did end:
a thick white snarl, man-size, awash,
rising on every wave, a sodden ghost,
falling back, sodden, giving up the ghost...
A kite string?--But no kite.

I wanted to get as far as my proto-dream-house,
my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box
set up on pilings, shingled green,
a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener
(boiled with bicarbonate of soda?),
protected from spring tides by a palisade
of--are they railroad ties?
(Many things about this place are dubious.)
I'd like to retire there and do nothing,
or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms:
look through binoculars, read boring books,
old, long, long books, and write down useless notes,
talk to myself, and, foggy days,
watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light.
At night, a grog a l'américaine.
I'd blaze it with a kitchen match
and lovely diaphanous blue flame
would waver, doubled in the window.
There must be a stove; there is a chimney,
askew, but braced with wires,
and electricity, possibly
--at least, at the back another wire
limply leashes the whole affair
to something off behind the dunes.
A light to read by--perfect! But--impossible.
And that day the wind was much too cold
even to get that far,
and of course the house was boarded up.

On the way back our faces froze on the other side.
The sun came out for just a minute.
For just a minute, set in their bezels of sand,
the drab, damp, scattered stones
were multi-colored,
and all those high enough threw out long shadows,
individual shadows, then pulled them in again.
They could have been teasing the lion sun,
except that now he was behind them
--a sun who'd walked the beach the last low tide,
making those big, majestic paw-prints,
who perhaps had batted a kite out of the sky to play with.

(This one time, as you see, I didn't stop myself and posted one of my favorite poems.)

Sunday Confessions

It's Sunday evening and after a week filled with 19th-century sentimental fiction, I feel whimsical.

The downside of studying literature is that though you do get to fill your life with reading interesting things, it's not necessarily that the assigned reading is what interests you at that particular moment...

So I started drawing up a list of what I'd really feel like reading now (but can't because I'm reading lots of other things). On top of the list is Stevie Smith. I only ever get to read her poems online, without the drawings, and read essays that mention the drawings but never reprint them. I need to change that. (And why did I ever give up drawing? At least I'd have another way to vent...) She's fun, brief, morbid, and didn't waste her time writing lofty manifestos. (Although I don't think planning and going about your suicide is a better way to spend your time.)

I'd also like to read Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado (since reading this post; yes, I know I didn't exactly run to get the book asap).

And Mary Jo Bang's last (i.e. most recent) book of poems. It took me shamefully long to get it.

This children's book, which I read at least three times as a child.

Since I already got in this oddly confessional mode (because I'm drafting a paper on the confessional poetry), I might as well say that I'm pushing away reading a batch of essays on New Criticism and its impact on contemporary literary criticism (snoring already?) by contemplating whether I should make myself another mug of tea with soymilk. Soymilk is fat and so New Criticism has better dietary effects.

(Snoring already?) Off, then, from the realm of unread to the realm of reading assignments...

PS: Tea in the US deserves a separate post.

Documenting Another Attempt to Wake Up and Stop Daydreaming

and get to work.

Somehow, that's not really happening...



As Mr. G. says, well, it's really July and we're in a meadow. Lazy.
(That last detail is true for this Monday morning in February.)