Peg Duthie's Blog, page 6

calls for entries

Due by noon EDT on Monday 5 April: NPR is collaging a poem about anti-Asian racism, with lines from submitted list poems: https://www.npr.org/2021/03/31/981147280/poetry-challenge-create-a-list-poem-that-grapples-with-rise-of-anti-asian-racism?mc_cid=11f49db1e3&mc_eid=2302726d91

(A short poem mentioned in the call is Emily Jungmin Moon's "Between Autumn Equinox and Winter Solstice, Today," which is worth your time.)


Due by Saturday 10 April: short poems (20 lines max) or prose inspired by Untitled (Brooklyn), a painting by Meghan Keene: https://broadsidedpress.org/2021switcheroo/
There is a $3 fee.


Easter lunch with the in-laws featured ham with raisin sauce, brie on jalapeno cheese crackers, and other goodies. I brought two sparkling wines. I admit to picking up the Carolina Gatti Ratatuja mainly because the label amused me (see https://www.wine-searcher.com/find/carolina+gatti+ratatuja+pet+nat+veneto+italy), but it also turned out to be interesting, in a less filtered, more flavor way.

My plans for the afternoon had included a virtual dance party and some soil prep, but I instead sacked out for four hours, and in a minute I'm going to heed my body's call for yet more sleep instead of staying up with proofs and spreadsheets. But I did fit in a bit of twirling on my own before my tomato salad and tulsi tea:


Why yes, trying to remember combinations is like patting one's head and belly at the same time . . .


Whee!

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yearning upon yearning

One year in, I dance with imaginary partners and corners maybe once every 1.5 weeks. There are virtual contra and English country dances, concerts, classes, and presentations pretty much every day of the week, along with offerings from my early music and editing and public health circles. There isn't time for even a tenth of what I'd like to sample, never mind dive deeper into. (In other news, it's a day ending in "y" . . .)

Dancing alone also triggers unhappy memories of being a wallflower, and an envy of people whose partners enjoy waltzing and pousette-ing. It balances out: I literally doze off on motorcycles, which makes me less fun than our friends who are into them. I wouldn't want anyone else as my housemate, but my fantasy wishlist does include a dance spouse (along with a double manual harpsichord, a Citroen, an all-expenses-paid month in Barcelona, and the Bottega Veneta shearling coat I petted in San Francisco back in 2017).

On the flip side, drilling waltz steps was on my at-home list anyhow, practicing waltz holds tones the arms, and going through the figures revives happy memories as well, such as teaching "Volpony" during a Monday night class, being perfectly in sync with partners (and in demand) at past balls, and improvising a dance with another actor during last year's photo shoot for Grand Magnolia. ("Ah, Theater!" he declaimed afterward. "Where you gaze with all your heart into another person's soul -- and then move on . . .")

Anyway, one of the dances on tonight's NCD program was "Volpony." I felt an urge to double-check the source while Cathy was teaching (having mentally misfiled it under Molière instead of Jonson) and found it opposite "Wa Is Me, What Mun I Do":



These are two of the achingly loveliest tunes in the ECD canon. Some I get tired of, and some I have never liked (I'm with the minority that cannot abide "Softly Good Tummas"), but my heart lifts when I see these on a program:

(this recording doesn't quite capture the yearning I hear in Purcell's music, but will at least give you a glimpse of real social dancing, with elegance and errors in abundance)





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as radiant as a bridge

The subject line is from Abbie Huston Evans's "To E.D. in July," which Mary featured at Vary the Line a couple of years ago. I posted a new entry there a few days ago, about a 16th-century Chinese poet responding to a bitter 11th-century quatrain about idiocracy.

What is radiant, and available to you until 6 p.m. CDT on March 30: the Ailey All-Access video (10 minutes long) of Judith Jamison's A Case of You. So good. So gorgeous . . .



And then, if you're in the mood to dwell with the song a while longer, there's Leanne Shapton's Joni Mitchell grocery list . . .

And when I meant to blog the Shapton piece, a season or two ago, this was on my mental turntable as well:



And, as long as I'm missing Live from Here, here's what came to mind when WNXP played the original "Waltz #2" yesterday afternoon:



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New leaves are like eyebrows

The subject line's from a Willow Branch Song by Ch'ien Ch'ien-yi (1582 - 1664; translated by Irving Yucheng Lo). The full verse:

A crescent moon hangs on the tip of the willows,
New leaves are like eyebrows, the moon's like a hook.
Wait till the moon is round and reflected in a mirror
To lift from my eyebrows ten thousand layers of grief.

I generally try not to be around people the week of St. Patrick's Day. It's the anniversary of my mother's death, and today is the anniversary of Mama Nancy's death, plus even years outside of pandemics it's mid-term and not-quite-close-enough-to-the-end-of-the-quarter and almost everyone is so tired of winter and more than a little frayed.

Taking the whole week off wasn't feasible this year; to stay logged off on Wednesday, I worked until 4 a.m. that morning, and I'll be marking 40+ pages of proofs this weekend as well. But it did feel good and right to do some deep cleaning that afternoon, which included tossing out scraps of paper with topics I'd meant to blog about, but the moment(um) had faded (George Clooney's love of writing/receiving letters, contemporary songs about dementia/memory loss, the Megan Rapinoe/Sue Bird feature in GQ . . .).

Nashville journalist Natasha Senjanovic has an invitation for y'all:

It's been ages since a Diary Collective update, but I'm starting back up again, and want to know what people are proudest of about themselves in this incredibly difficult year. But @tedtoons turned the tables, like the emotional ninja that he is. https://t.co/fvQTpQraAn

— Natasha Senjanovic (@nsenjanovic) March 14, 2021

You can hear me talking about bao and Duolingo and reading "Climb" at https://www.bestofpossibleworlds.com/audio.

Also recently published: "Truth and Dare," at Autumn Sky.

Finally - written ten years ago, and published the following spring:



Measured Extravagance is out of print, but if you'd like a copy, send me proof of a donation ($6 or more) to NAPAWF, Tupelo Pres, or Postcards to Voters, and I'll beam a PDF to you.

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prints tantalize my soap

[The subject line is from June Jordan's It's Hard to Keep a Clean Shirt Clean.]

It's a sunny Saturday morning, the sky is a beautiful blue, and the forecast for this afternoon is in the 50s, with the wind below 10 knots per hour. But I have seven chapters and a fifty-page bibliography to finetune for a volume editor and image manager before the end of the day, and a dozen-plus other files to power through before the start of Monday.

Younger Me would mutter "Tae hell wi' y'all!" and hop on the paddleboard and string the kite anyway, and then grind through the lot overnight. Current Me is cranking up Rameau, Monteverdi, and Anderson .Paak and getting on with it -- after I placate my peasant brain by dealing with a bundle of limp carrots. I combined some of the greens with asparagus this morning to go with scrambled eggs . . .



. . . and the roots are in the slow cooker with other ingredients for beef stew. It feels good to have the wherewithal to make things happen, even when they weren't in our plans when we got out of bed a few hours ago.

This week I also baked a chocolate soufflé (because this past Sunday was National Chocolate Soufflé Day, which I used as my prompt for Day 28 at the Tupelo 30/30 challenage) and two loaves of cranberry bread (because I'd ordered a bag from Misfits Market with a vague idea of making relish, but then hadn't followed through with picking up related ingredients when I went to the store). I picked up our monthly Chinese feast from Lucky Bamboo on Monday, and dumped cheese (blue, American, pizza blend . . .) on various leftovers and vegetables for lunch, dinner, and snacks. The BYM resorts to frozen meals when I don't feel up to cooking, and one night brought home a mushroom pizza from Smith & Lentz that rated an awww yeah when he reheated what was left the next day.

In other happenings, our larger hellebore is blooming beautifully (the smaller one probably needs another year or two . . .), and indoors some of the Christmas cacti and cyclamen are still producing buds and flowers. The aloe plant I'd brought home from Downtown Pres in 2019 was again in need of repotting, so that happened as well:





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birds and flowers bringing

So, between allergies and scratches and figurative kicks in the teeth and waking up hung over (which seemed profoundly unfair because it was one flute of prosecco during a retirement-party Zoom and one flute of vermouth after dinner, but apparently that's one digestif too many for my metabolism these days) and nearly putting antibiotic ointment instead of toothpaste on my brush -- well. Hello, dregs of February.

But I slogged through this, that, and more, so some deliverables got delivered, some reportables got reported, the house is cleaner, and I pulled together a lemon-rosemary-olive-panko-parmesan-macaroni thing for dinner. It was mild enough today to walk to the Little Free Library in sandals. There have also been three rabbit holes: One was the lore surrounding St. Matthias, in the course of pulling together twelve lines for tomorrow's Tupelo poem; I was also intrigued by the why and wherefore of coppices, but that didn't make it into the draft. (Today's contribution was 14 lines of dog-gerel, so to speak . . .)

The second was triggered by Sam's Tumblr post on Sargent's depiction of Robert Louis and Fanny Stevenson. What an intricate household that was. I did not know that Fanny and her daughter Isobel were both cougars (with the same writer-illustrator).

I have not watched this video of "Let Beauty Awake" in full yet, but even a few seconds . . .

The last is a current memory-melody worm: there's a Swedish cradle song in a 1957 textbook called Singing in Harmony that one of my elementary schools discarded when I was a kid. (The Commonwealth of Kentucky Public Instruction stamp inside the front cover has a line where one was supposed to indicate "White" or "Colored" . . .) The setting is similar to some Beethoven art-songs I'm fond of; the next-to-last measure particularly gets me, and I've played it several times today:



Last night I looked up the composer and lyricist. There doesn't seem to be much online about W. Th. Söderberg (though the song got around enough to merit sheet music for mandolin and guitar -- published in Seattle . . .), but the author of the English words, one "Auber Forestier," turns out to have been the formidable Aubertine Woodward Moore, whose many roles included serving as music director of the First Unitarian Society of Madison, Wisconsin. (For some other day: she apparently gave Whitman season tickets she couldn't use and may have been on a first-name basis with Alcotts and Emersons and fiddlin' Bulls . . .)

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inventory

Some things I miss:
dancing, including waltzing and being dipped
locking in tight harmonies with other singers
trying new-to-me bars and eavesdropping on / chatting with whomever at them
spur-of-the-moment visits to Cheekwood
hell, unplanned all-the-things
printing proofs without having to assess whether putting my personal printer through it is worth the expense/time/wear-and-tear
swimming
striding around downtown in tailored dresses and heels
Asheville, Philadelphia, and the Triangle
buying just enough meat and produce for a few days
ocean kayaking being a near prospect
same with the show I was cast in more than a year ago

Some things I have been enjoying:
working through the winter in pj bottoms and sheep slippers instead of tights and boots
making cards to send to voters and others
nattering with the BYM about horse categorization, Trixie Belden, and other nonsense
getting a better handle on passé composé (and becoming legendary in the process, ha!)
trying new-to-me recipes, including Fannie Farmer's Swedish bread



needing less than one tank of gas per month
the Vagabond Tabby's Mother of Crows soap
the Christmas cacti and cyclamen, which are still producing blooms
shiny Innovation stamps

Some recent poems, at the 30/30 project:

"Tilting at Mushrooms," about Lowell labor organizer (and later Philadelphian) Sarah Bagley
"Clear," about languages I don't even remotely have a grip on
"Bounce," in memory of a choreographer and a theatre techie
"Tug," because I'm in Asheville and/or Princeton/Philadelphia most Februaries
"Twenty Seconds," prompted by a German pig-farming regulation
"Lightening Up," because Shrove Tuesday was nigh
"The Ides of February," because it was more interesting reading about Romans than trying to come up with something related to historical or festive events tied to the 15th
"As Cowards Remain, So Dumb and Grayer Gray," because I wanted to write something metrical, and Emily Dickinson's valentines are demented

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Tell Luna, tea is waiting

Today is crowded with overlapping possibilities. Newark Museum's virtual Carnival Celebration runs all day, with the samba/capoeira session at the same time as Iowa's English country dance gathering. Says You's Kisses and Quips show was on my calendar for a long time, but my church's cabaret for Habitat for Humanity streams at the same time. Plus, there's tomorrow's Tuupelo poem to draft, doing enough Chinese/Welsh/Spanish/French to stay in Duolingo's Diamond League, putting ten postcards to voters in the mail, doing something about the butternut squash I roasted two or three nights ago before the next Misfits Market box arrives . . .

This week had a lot of crud. I'm trying not to brood about the things I cannot change, but I am reminded of other bloggers greeting February with EVERYBODY BRACE NOW There's something about the months before the equinoxes that make them feel like a long haul, even though in my case they also feature the birthdays of some of my favorite people. And fatigue with both the pandemic and the equally unrelenting and life-threatening banality of evil is also a thing. It took me five times as long to get to things I normally enjoy dispatching with ease, and some things that would literally make me feel better (working out, dancing, ironing . . .) keep getting shafted because it's easier to stay in the rocking chair for one more Duolingo/Mimo/Earpeggio lesson.

Anyhow, I do like the Befruary take on this gloomy gray stretch of the season, and I did my metal-dawg / Taurus-with-Virgo-rising thing and herded/hauled my mental sheeps to meadow and market. New poems up at Tupelo:

Day 6: "More than a Single Bound" (prompted by a motorcycle stunt)
Day 7: "Gazing at Tennessine" (prompted by Periodic Table Day)
Day 8: "Free As . . ." (prompted by National Kite-Flying Day)
Day 9: "Sweet Spot" (prompted by the Feast of St. Apollonia, patron saint of toothache sufferers)
Day 10: "Imperfect Fragment" (prompted by Edmond Halley)
Day 11: "Gathering Up All the Fragments" (prompted by Lydia Maria Child)
Day 12: "A Foot-Long Tongue" (prompted by Charles Darwin)
Day 13 (up later today): "Through a Screen, Darkly" (prompted by Absalom Jones, a Black Episcopalian priest and essential healthcare provider during a yellow fever epidemic)

The "someday" reading list is getting new titles added to it pretty much every day. There's an orchid display at Cheekwood this month; with Darwin's Contrivance by which British and Foreign Orchids . . . now in my Google library, I'd be keen to see it, but it's indoors, so I'll have to content myself with old photos instead, like these:



Ironically, as a household, we are not hugely into holidays. My belle-mère and closest cousin are by far more into (and better at) decorating; I mailed a Valentine to the BYM last year mainly to yank his chain (it was an adorable design, but it also had glitter); there have often been professional and/or performance obligations that had me on duty instead of at gatherings. That said, I'm weak for stickers and ribbons (even though they too often leave the ironing board and cutting mat weeks or even years after the festival they were originally purchased for), and every third year or so I work up the energy to donate something related to Lunar New Year to the church auction. This year's donation wasn't directly tied to LNY, but the winners of the bao subscription were easily gracious about me wanting to skip January, so I expanded yesterday's delivery of shrimp bao to include Taiwanese tea eggs, radish cake, and pineapple-ginger bubble tea:



The photos show my second take at mixing the tea; the first batch tasted fine but looked revolting. "Failing better" is definitely a thing here. ;)

[The subject line is from a valentine by Emily Dickinson that may be the most daft thing (outside of political/medical misinformation or art historical polemics, natch) I read this week.)]

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some things that didn't make it into this week's poems

How the Turkish Liberace could be a cousin of Mr. Heat Miser.

Betty White as Liberace's beard.

"Busterkeys" as one of Liberace's names.

The lemon-anchovy sauce also included radishes:


The feast of St. Dorothea/Dorothy, patron saint of gardeners.

That St. Dorothea is no longer on the General Roman Calendar because of a dearth of historical evidence for her deeds.

Guy Mollet getting pelted with tomatoes in Algiers.

The HMS Beagle.

The first Olympic dogsled race.

The founding of Magnum Photos.

Bottle opener patents.

Deflated bears and elves (or was that a penguin? *squints*):



Possibilities for Sunday's poem currently include:
Ballet Day
National Fettuccine Alfredo Day
National Periodic Table Day
Popcorn Day
Rose Day
National Burn Awareness Week

Poems published so far (all at https://www.tupelopress.org/the-30-30-project-february-2021/):
"Getting Close to Venus"
"Hotlines"
"Shepherd on a Narrow Bridge"
"Not Done, and Not Doing Things Over"
"Observing the Holidays"

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9 reasons I enjoy Jackie Lau's #AsianRomCom books

https://jackielaubooks.com/ The Ultimate Pi Day Party is currently free, and the Nashville Public Library has some of her titles.

1. The settings include small-town and urban Canada, and coping with a wide variety of parents, siblings, and friends . . .
2. . . . some of them refreshingly and hilariously down-to-earth, and others exasperatingly "why can't you be more like _____," which is a dynamic I totally feel from multiple angles. I have cried with relief when people step up for protagonists who disappoint their parents by not having a "real" job.
3. That said, there are a quite a few scientists and CEOs in the mix. They're often driven and/or grumpy. I can relate to that too. (One geologist wears a "Schist Happens" shirt.)
4. Abortion is discussed as the right choice for characters who had them. More on that by Emmalita. #RomanceForRoe
5. There's a lot of good food. Including mooncake ice cream.
6. There are brutally honest little girls (often nieces) who know what they want. One five-year-old is a food snob who "has a better chance of enjoying blue cheese and Kalamata olives than pepperoni pizza" and delightedly samples (and critiques) "the green tea-strawberry, the passionfruit, the black sesame, [and] the matcha cheesecake" flavors at the shop her anti-ice cream uncle takes her to (observing that the place looks like a unicorn threw up in it) but also names a unicorn "Havarti Sparkles." Another corrects her uncle on the pronunciation of dinosaur names. Another really digs venomous spiders, which her uncle can't stand . . .
7. Several protagonists don't speak Mandarin/Cantonese well, if at all. I feel seen, both in terms of the awkward situations they find themselves in and the recurring frustration of being expected to be good at / comfortable with something one has zero natural facility for. (Not incidentally, I tested out of a half-dozen levels of Spanish Duolingo last night, but my next super-basic, hint-heavy Mandarin lesson may require a full glass of verdejo for me to chill out enough to get on with it.)
8. Love doesn't magically cure clinical depression or other chronic/recurring conditions, and it was horrible-great when one of the heroines starts yelling about how infuriating is when people insist or imply you haven't tried hard enough or spent enough on finding a solution while knowing fuck-all about every last exhausting potential treatment you've already tried or considered.
9. There's plenty of humor and sass, from friends and siblings (and sometimes parents) who take the heroine or hero's goals seriously but not their taste in clothing or pizza or beer.

[My previous mention of Jackie Lau's books.]

In addition to reading Lau's two most recent books, I also binged on some picture and chapter books this week, including:

Most of the Princess in Black series by Shannon Hale, Dean Hale, and LeUyen Pham
Real Cowboys by Kate Hoefler, which will be featured trilingually (English, Spanish, ASL) later this year as a storytime video produced by my colleagues.
Jules vs. the Ocean by Jesse Sima

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