Peg Duthie's Blog, page 3

say now, Tennessee

[The subject line's from Prince's "Alphabet City," which also has "Put the right letters together and make a bettеr day"...]

Look, even Spanish Duolingo's nudging me to find my pobiz (or at least po-blog) groove again:

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My big brother and bro-in-law participated in #LexPoMo last month. You can see their pieces at these links:

https://lexpomo.com/poet/2022/eric-willis-lexpomo-2022/
(I especially love the start of TWW #2)

https://lexpomo.com/poet/2022/steve-meadows-2022/
("Summer Job Resume" FTW)


Tabula Rasa's publishing three of my poems soon-ish.

Going to write and read tonight after I get through garden chores and service prep (and probably some jamming with Monteverdi and Josquin). On my table: Joelle Taylor's C+nto & Othered Poems and Andrea Gibson's Take Me With You

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sic transit gloria

This won't be news to most readers, but in my corner of the world, one can simultaneously rejoice in how well the roses are doing whilst slogging through a slough of despond and frustration over one's mistakes, the malice of others, etc.

Perspective helps. A few years ago, I picked up a battered copy of Loren Eiseley's The Star Thrower at a library bag sale. The chap was a much-honored anthropologist and writer in his day, with an endowed chair at Penn. Auden wrote the intro to this book. There are more than two dozen honorary degrees listed in an appendix . . .

. . . and I skimmed the book here and there, and decided it was not for me, and not even to put in the mail to another friend. Into one of the neighborhood's Little Free Library boxes it will go. A couple of lines just caught my eye -- "the thin blue bones / Of a hare picked clean by ants. A man can attach / Meanings enough to the wind when his luck is out" -- but the full poem ("Winter Sign") isn't tight enough for my taste (even though I agree with the overall sentiment), and that sums up the book as a whole for me: there are so many more poems and essays waiting for me that will hit me harder, closer, thrilling-er, and life is so damned short as it is.'

And full (although going to bed before 1 a.m. instead of trying to power through an assignment was definitely the right call). The weekend includes paddleboarding and a wedding and a birthday dinner, along with a story to beta and music to practice and clutter to dispel, etc. Onward!


The kids are all right: this show of irises at a local Methodist church included handmade signs in support of LGBTQ rights.

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the crooked and the sweet

Over the past 2+ years, the wires in some of my masks broke outright, from all the fiddling, washing, etc. I'd held off extracting the ones that had become uncomfortable but were still intact, but two days ago finally reached for the ripper. (Is this perhaps a metaphor for other things I should be getting on with? Yes. Might I have a tendency to view my life through a Free Will Astrology filter? Yes.)



Contending with the ever-swarming legions of private brain weasels and public sphere / pundit weasels has been tiresome, to say the least. But there have also been compliments from colleagues and clients, lively chats with friends, and some sublime dancing:





In the yard, the hyacinths are waning, and the overcup white oak looks dead as the proverbial doornail (but apparently it's a really late bloomer), but there are swathes of violets and patches of star of bethlehem, and I have been harvesting wild chives and snacking on fresh mint. Also in bloom: buttercups, ferns (tiny purple flowerets), tomatoes. The six rosebushes all survived the winter, and I planted two white azalea bushes (a farewell gift from a museum colleague) last week. Indoors, the flower show includes cacti, white roses, shamrocks, and cyclamen.

Last night's cooking experiment wound up as phyllo-almond-walnut "cake." It started out as an attempt at Tunisian almond cigars but the phyllo sheets had been languishing in my fridge too long. So the stale bits went into the compost bowl, and the rest were layered with the filling, and I'm happy with the result.



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from deep despair and perished things

[Subject line's from A Promise through the Ages Rings]



I have been bloody-minded today, you could say: there are old dark brown spots on a comforter defying soap and enzyme, and the Kentucky rosebush scratched and stabbed at me as I weeded around it. But at least I wasn't the babysitter across the street yelling "Tomato! It's a good sweater! Don't eat it!" at her black dog.



I'm feeling good about spreading the last of a pine straw bale around the bush, along with the remains of the Christmas fir wreath. I also untrunked another comforter and blanket, so they will be aired out by the time my houseguest arrives.

Today's messages included a poetry rejection, so I'm still batting .000 for the year. I'm okay about it. There's much to do, and I'll write more compelling work someday. (And my track record's solid enough for that to be a declaration of fact rather than wishfulness.)



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Hey, I'm still alive

*looks around*
God, what an unholy mess.
*redacts rest of commentary*

The subject line's from "Monday," by The Regrettes. An upside to having a dental appointment this morning was catching mid-morning tunes at WNXP, ranging from ELO's "Showdown" and Prince doing "When You Were Mine" to Rex Orange County's "Keep It Up" and some bangers not on the playlist.

Recent reading included the 2021 Rattle Young Poets Anthology. I particularly liked Natalia Chepel's "Semantics," and her bio.

A friend sent me Alexander McCall Smith's What W.H. Auden Can Do for You a few eons ago, and this passage stood out to me a few weeks ago:

I find Auden's life absorbing because it is very unlike the life of those poets who appear to have done nothing but frequent academia. How can one write convincingly of life if one has seen only so small a slice of it? Hemingway asked that question and went off to preclude its application to him by hunting and deep-sea fishing, all fueled by copious quantities of whisky. Auden spoke in his earlier poems of the truly strong man but well understood that one did not become truly strong by doing the sort of things recommended by Hemingway. Rather, he traveled; first to Berlin, where he spent a great deal of time catching up on sexual opportunities harder to encounter in the more prudish climate of England. Berlin was all about sexual freedom, but it was also about politicization, and by the time he returned to England, his previously proclaimed views on the separation of poetry and politics had changed. Then there was the trip to Iceland he did with Louis MacNeice, the trip to Spain during the Civil War, and the journey to China to investigate the conflict with Japan. These were not the actions of a man who intended to live his life in a literary ivory tower; these were the actions of a man who was struggling with a central moral question that most of us face: to what extent should we seek private peace or follow public duty? The world is a vale of tears and always has been. We may withdraw from it and cultivate a private garden of civility and the arts--a temptation that is often strong; or we may face up to uncomfortable realities and work to bring about justice in society. Auden's life and example illustrates the struggle between these two options; significantly, it offers comfort for us whichever way our choice may lead us.

Another thing I liked about this morning's outing was being behind a car with a microscope decal and the plate "GUTGIRL."

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fashion it into a thing that carries itself

[The subject line's from an Anne Carson passage about history and elegy that Amanda Gorman uses as the epigraph to Call Us What We Carry, which happened to be in my library's Lucky Day Collection when I picked up AJ Hall's For Real last week.]

As forecast, the snow is pelting down, and the foot traffic downtown is the lightest I've seen since spring 2020. The main library branch and the Frist Art Museum both issued "closed Sunday" emails.

Instead of dismantling the wreath, I harvested parsley and mint, and spread pine straw under one of the rosebushes. I also yanked out a quartet of mottled hollyhocks. Maybe I'll scatter some old seeds around after the current snowdump melts.

One of my morning errands was putting some books in the Little Free Library outside the nearby elementary school. A car with the license plate "HFLPUFF" was parked in front of a car with a homemade white supremacy decal.

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buggy beauty

Tu b'shevat arrives tomorrow, and Middle Tennessee is supposed to get whumped by snow by then. Coincidentally, a crepe myrtle the Beautiful Young Man had ordered at the start of November was delivered this week, so he's planting it as I type.



The miniature rose bush I bought at the supermarket a year ago put out some glorious blooms. They were also havens for dozens of tiny bugs, though, so I chucked them into compost sooner than later. The Christmas cacti also put on a good show throughout December.

I'm going to chop up a fir wreath for mulch after I post this. I usually deal with it the day after Epiphany, but I'm still ill (!@#@!#@ lungs), though I'm managing a walk across the neighborhood most evenings. Many of my neighbors still have Christmas/fairy lights up, and I'm enjoying them as I stride through the gloom. There's also a new-to-me greenhouse in one of the alleys I tend to cut through, that may or may not be a commercial venture.

There's sorrow: relationships foundering, people dying. There's hilarity: recent reading has included K.J. Charles's Band Sinister ("You've been waiting your whole life for someone to write a Gothic novel about you, haven't you?"), Flight of Magpies, and A Gentleman's Position ("If you're obliged to cross a man at all, nail him to one while you're at it"), and I may confine my Instagram posts this winter to #CatsInPictureBooks. There's the annual gorgeous Lunar New Year card from a cousin in Kaohsiung. There are the tomatoes I canned and froze over the past two summers that I've been using now in soups and sauces. There's being terrified for the future of my city (those FUCKERS in the legislature . . .) and country and doing what I can anyway. There's pushing through paperwork and code, and trying to keep the pitcher plants alive, and adding smatterings of sparkle and substance to ongoing conversations when I can, and holding my peace and keeping my own counsel plenty of other times, and all this adds up to life being a lot even though the coughing + Omicron means I've been sidelined from singing since November, and I haven't seen anyone socially since December 18. (I do like plenty of time alone, but I object to my style being cramped. Grrrr.)

But! Neighbors brought by smoked cream cheese and Texas caviar, and friends sent galaxies and other goodies, and I made ginger tea with homegrown ginger root earlier this week and fixed a keyboard lag issue this morning. On to weeding and wreaths and mailings and daube marseillaise.

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Middlemarch; RIP Michael Murrin; muddling towards merry

Some KJ Charles fans were chatting on Discord about Cat Sebastian's Hither, Page, which is set right before Christmas and proved to be what I wanted for a cozy reread at 5 a.m. for Reasons. I really have got to get around to reading Middlemarch some day, because it keeps turning up -- in this book, in Marissa's recs, in a beautiful English country dance by Orly Krasner:



(This is a dance I've myself taught. The local group is proceeding with plans to resume hosting Playfords this spring . . .)



Today's mail brought the latest issue of my college alumni magazine, which is how I learned about the death of Michael Murrin, who was my BA thesis advisor. He was ruthless with me, and I earned honors.

Coincidentally, last month I happened to reread some of my notes from the Arthurian Romance seminar he had led during my third year at U of C. (The reread was admittedly prompted in large part by a sudden deep dive back into The Dark Is Rising fandom.) They were more entertaining than I'd expected -- Murrin was hella smart, and funny as hell -- and now I want to curl up with his books. Someday . . .

Bronchitis is once again kicking my ass, but I am dogged and inventive, and the things that must get addressed are getting addressed. One of the more successful recent concoctions: pecan-apricot macarons. Onward!

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Norwegian and Peg post

First, the Norwegians, via KJ Charles and PinkNews UK:



Second: holiday greetings! If you would like to receive one in the mail from me, please put your address in a comment or email mechaieh[at]gmail[dot]com. (Comments are screened, if I've managed to tweak that setting correctly for this post, which is not a given these days. [/pandemic brain]

(If we more or less regularly exchange mail, you're already on the list, but I'm sure some of the cards I sent last year are still taking the scenic route around Juneau or Cheboygan, so if you want to ensure that something at least gets put in the mail on my end, please send me your details.) If you have preferences re shiny vs.-and-or Christmas vs. Lunar New Year vs. general rambling sometime in 2022, feel free to indicate those as well.)

(Regarding KJ Charles: as detailed over in the fandom journal, I became entranced with her England series during August, resulting in 16,000+ words of fic so far, as well as inordinate quantities of Edward Elgar and Gustav Holst being played on the sunroom speakers.)

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no matter what people say

Mark Miller's "Child of God," performed by my church choir (including me). Miller wrote the song during Methodist church battles over LGBT inclusion. The clip begins at 20:16.

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