Peg Duthie's Blog, page 2

recent-ish reading (poetry)

Giles Andreae and Guy Parker-Rees, Giraffes Can't Dance (Orchard, 1999). A rhyming picture book about Gerald, a giraffe who's mocked mercilessly for poor dancing, but finds the right music with the help of a kind cricket. (This hits a very personal note for me, as someone who was made fun of in junior high for not knowing how to dance. Which, as noted elsewhere, is no longer the case.)

Arthur Russell, At the Car Wash (Rattle, 2023). A chapbook by a New Jersey attorney and landlord, about his youth and family in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. The poems that stood out to me were "New Year's Eve," about his mother ("'You guys' was an actual color of light in her eyes"); "The Heavier Stone," which begins with "My dad died eight years ago. / Our relationship has improved a lot since then"; and "Unencumbered," a long poem about what we carry:

... I've learned that emotion conducts
some memories to the left and others to the right;
that feelings brand events for keeps
and segregate archival stuff from what
is only "by the way." The more that you remember,
the more there is of life, the more of time there is;
but time gathers in the past and drags you
back by the belt;
and when I think of how much trouble
I have had with emotion, I remind myself
of a stop sign in a hurricane...

Coincidentally, Russell wrote today's "Poets Respond" feature - "Gravity in Jerusalem."

(Coincident because I'm typing this while waiting for my phone to finish recharging so I can venture out to Novelette and the book shop in hopes of wrapping up [so to speak] this year's Christmas shopping. That was the plan yesterday, but tornado sirens woke me from my nap, so.)

In Rattle's Fall 2023 issue, José A. Alcántara's "To a Friend Who Does Not Believe in God" bears witness both to unbelief and faith.

comments

The WORLD KEEPS... / QUEEN OF PHYSICS / INK

A poem punched me in the face earlier tonight. I stopped by Novelette in search of a birthday gift for a friend. On opening Franny Choi's The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (Ecco, 2022), these lines in "I Have Bad News and Bad News, Which Do You Want First" hit me:

One week ago, my mother had two COVID patients.
Now, she has thirty. What? I say. When did that happen?
though when's not the question I mean.

COVID has been around long enough to show up in printed books of poetry distributed by mainstream publishers. Goddamn.



The library is about to reclaim its copy of Queen of Physics: How Wu Chien Shiung Helped Unlock the Secrets of the Atom (Union Square, 2019), a picture book with text by Teresa Robeson and illustrations by Rebecca Huang. Robeson is Chinese-Canadian-American and a mentee of Jane Yolen, none of which I knew while reading the book. I had encountered Wu's face and name via the 2021 Forever stamp in her honor, but hadn't remembered anything else about her before now. The book is well done.



The back pain and foot injury are still significantly (and literally) cramping my style, but I did venture out, masked, to a dance presentation last Saturday that included an in-progress version of Ink, choreographed by Jen-Jen Lin. I spent much of the evening pondering how I might draw the dance -- cobalt blue and yellow light stands, dancers in black and red on a black surface, the swooping white ribbon of Jen-Jen's solo -- and while I have not put pencil or marker to paper since leaving the studio, dwelling on the lines did engrave them a shade deeper in my memory.

comments

Richard Brautigan, ROMMEL DRIVES ON DEEP INTO EGYPT

This book was published in 1970 by Delacorte (Seymour Lawrence imprint). The woman on the cover reminds me of tennis player Kim Clijsters, and the photo is my favorite part of the book.

Poems I bookmarked while getting ready to return the book, in their entirety:

Critical Can Opener

There is something wrong
with this poem. Can you
          find it?


Lions Are Growing like Yellow Roses on the Wind

Lions are growing like yellow roses on the wind
and we turn gracefully in the medieval garden
        of their roaring blossoms.
              Oh, I want to turn.
              Oh, I am turning.
              Oh, I have turned.
                    Thank you.


April 7, 1969

I feel so bad today
that I want to write a poem.
I don't care: any poem, this
          poem.


All Secrets of Past Tense Have Just Come My Way

All secrets of past tense have just come my way,
but I still don't know what I'm going to do
        next.

comments

a current brainworm

Different takes on the tarantella del Gargano:

With dancers:


With zest:


I dig this band:


On a sofa:


With castanets:


The late Owain Phyfe (our Renfaire and caroling gigs coincided for a few seasons):



Lyrics

comments

2 recent videos I'm in

New London Assembly, in two demos, plus the close of "Halfe-Hannekin":



(There's a longer clip of us practicing "Elspeth" on Flickr.)

Stay at Home Choir Polyphony Project (singing soprano throughout, on-screen very briefly):






Between deadlines, back issues being a literal pain in the gluteus medius, and feeling utterly fed up with people acting like COVID's no big deal, I am more my own society, my own fever and pain, etc., these days. Will this help tame the ever-burgeoning TBR pile? To be continued ...

comments

meandering to Mastodon and other mayhem

While I'm keeping "zirconium" at Twitter for the foreseeable future, I've set up http://mastodon.sdf.org/@zirconium (AKA "zirconium@mastodon.sdf.org") to get familiar with the landscape in case #ScienceTwitter and other key circles head on over. As with this blog, updates will be irregular and I don't -- can't -- read every item in my feeds, but establishing and keeping open lines of access is part of the battle.



I actually spent the bulk of my morning on handwritten correspondence, including this season's first holiday card, which is going to a Scandosotan friend I was reminded of when another friend (based in Stockholm) recommended Sallyswag, describing them as "the queer folk soul brass dancehall hip hop band":



(Yes, it's rather early to be sending December holiday cards, but this one is an Advent calendar, and given reports from other friends about letters taking scenic routes to, say, North Carolina, I am not sanguine about this one even arriving before Trinity term. Now that I've said it, watch it arrive before the GOTV postcards I put in yesterday's mail to Georgia...)

In the Department of Plus Ça Change, still feeling crummy but functional. Full-blown respiratory woe has sidelined me from work gatherings and choral commitments (and heavy-duty cough syrups now give me splitting headaches, great). But my sunroom remains a gorgeous sanctuary, I have lamb and Taiwanese spinach stew on my stove, Aaron Tveit is covering "Take Me Home Tonight" on the YouTube jukebox, and being home means other things get tended to, including the sorting of tomatoes (this year's harvest was entirely from volunteer plants, descended from seedlings Miel gave out last year). I'm planning on making green tomato-cheddar hand pies later today or tomorrow.



comments

extended expiration dates for kits

It took some digging, but I've ascertained that our COVID-19 testing kits (two via the university, two via the government) have extended expiration dates. Because they come from different manufacturers and lots, the ones originally good through mid-August now expire in February, and the ones with a June 2022 date now expire at the end of March.

Potentially helpful links:
https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/coronavirus-covid-19-and-medical-devices/home-otc-covid-19-diagnostic-tests

https://diagnostics.roche.com/us/en/products/params/sars-cov-2-pilot-covid-19-at-home-test.html#expiration

https://accessbio.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/CareStart-COVID-19-Ag-Home-Test_Exp-Date-Extension-Notification_05_15M_V2.pdf

(The second and third links reflect the further digging required because neither lot number showed up on the FDA round-up.)

I am feeling a bit crummy at the moment, so I'm extra glad about holding firm on not signing up for things for a while.

In other news, the Poppea deal mentioned in the previous post turned out to be too good to be true -- what I received was not a score, but a small book of French essays and the libretto. But the vendor promptly gave me a refund, and IMSLP has a Russian edition, from which I've put Acts 1 and 2 on an iPad. My first playing-from-a-tablet! All sorts of milestones this year, I tell you.

And on that note, so to speak, it's back to the last batch of GOTV postcards. I've been listening to a lot of Merula, Handel, and Purcell while I work and write, and while this arrangement of "Would You Gain the Tender Creature" wouldn't be an audio-only favorite with me, I love how expressive the fellas are -- even with masks on, they're a joy to watch:



comments

our heart's joy reclineth

The budget-minding gods have smiled on me lately. A pair of eight-pound hand weights at a yard sale for $2. The Bärenreiter score of L'incoronazione di Poppea for $4.50.

And, a playable-enough harpsichord for $500:



This has been good fortune in several respects: I had planned a trip to Virginia in November to attend a ball and try out two other instruments (if they were still available by then), but the timing hadn't been ideal and got borked entirely by some other obligations. I am way less jittery about learning how to maintain and repair an "entry-level" instrument than I would be with something costing thousands of dollars. Collecting it made for a lovely road trip with the BYM, who was a very good sport about all the driving and hauling and has been both entertainingly curious and notably entertained (so to speak) by our new acquisition (Why is this piece in 6/2? What you just played isn't on the page, what the heck? [Adventures in figured bass!]). And Frank Hubbard's Three Centuries of Harpsichord Making is quite entertaining. I read the beginning of Ralph Kirkpatrick's foreword aloud to the BYM; he's a motorcycle mechanic, and it definitely resonated with him:

At some time in the late 1940s, on the occasion of a concert in Cambridge, I was told of two graduate students in English at Harvard who had built what I believe was a clavichord. Such reports usually arrive with an invitation to inspect a cherished and totally unplayable instrument. Having contrived politely to dodge the invitation, I never found out what the qualities of this instrument might have been.

In other news, three of my poems appear in the new issue of Tabula Rasa, with "Learning Curve" as an Editor's Choice.

comments

conversation

The BYM: Are those murder peppers?

Me: Some are habaneros and some are the ones we grow every year.

The BYM: So yes. Murder peppers.

Me: They're pretty!

The BYM: Yes! But murderous!

Me: Oh, like me?

The BYM: Yes.

comments

warm, real, and keen

[The subject line's from Thomas Hardy's "The Phantom Horsewoman."]

Shuffling to my study at 2:30 am to get a poem out of my head hasn't happened in a good long while. I'm not thrilled about the timing, but I should be able to sneak in a disco nap before I have to drive anywhere, and there are worse fates than communing with Thomas Hardy (while looking up rondeaux and triolets) and the indoor rose over a mug of valerian-camomile tea.



I do not need a Maestro Wu knife, but I am glad to know about it. (Via Grub Street's profile of Yun Hai Taiwanese Pantry, in Brooklyn. The blades are "forged from scrap metal and bombshells that mainland China fired on Taiwan.")

A new word to me, via Joelle Taylor: lemniscate. She highlights it as one of the six words that summarise her.

Dwelling on this a bit: the first six words that come to mind for myself form a portrait of whom I want to be, not an accurate resume of me as I am. So I shall make myself another mug of tea and then snatch some sleep, with an eye towards the former. (Not that I'm inclined to write specifically about me in my poems these days, but amused, buff, calm, dangerous, elegant, glorious lend themselves to better arrangements of words, and sleep is a means...

In peering at the news: I am laughing immoderately at Russ Jones's characterisation of Jacob Rees-Mogg as "the harrowing outcome of a bout of hate-sex between a Dalek and a bassoon" (and, predictably, someone in the replies has already protested that that's unfair to bassoons; h/t aunty_marion ).

I have not been paying attention to Wimbledon. I do miss some of the craic, but my current headspace would rather dwell on transplanting tomato and pepper seedlings and spreading pine straw, so that's what's happening between coding, corresponding, and tumbling into lakes.

[image error] comments