another poem to animate?

The Catch
-----
Something has come between us—
It will not sleep.
Every night it rises like a fish
Out of the deep.

It cries with a human voice,
It aches to be fed.
Every night we heave it weeping
Into our bed,

With its heavy head lolled back,
Its limbs hanging down,
Like a mer-creature fetched up
From the weeds of the drowned.

Damp in the tidal dark, it whimpers,
Tossing the cover,
Separating husband from wife,
Lover from lover.

It settles in the interstice,
It spreads out its arms,
While its cool underwater face
Sharpens and warms:

This is the third thing that makes
Father and mother,
The fierce love of our fashioning
That will have no brother.

—A.E. Stallings

One of the possible poems to animate

New Folk
----------
I said Polk was dressed in Blues but hairier and hemped.
After "We acoustic banjo disciples!" Jebediah said, "When
and whereforth shall the bucolic blacks with good tempers
come to see us pluck as Elizabeth Cotton intended?"
We stole my Uncle Windchime's minivan, penned a simple
ballad about the drag of lovelessness and drove the end
of the chitlin' circuit to a joint skinny as a walk-in temple
where our new folk was not that new, but strengthened
by our twelve bar conviction. A month later, in pulled
a parade of well meaning alabaster post adolescents.
We noticed the sand-tanned and braless ones piled
in the ladder-backed front row with their boyfriends
first because beneath our twangor slept what I'll call
a hunger for the outlawable. One night J asked me when
sisters like Chapman would arrive. I shook my chin wool
then, and placed my hand over the guitar string's window
til it stilled. "When &e moon's black." I said. "Be faithful."

-- Terrance Hayes

CFP: Feminisms and Rhetorics

Feminisms and Rhetorics ought to be particularly splendid when hosted by the fine folks at Michigan State University in October 2009: cfp here.

starting to add interactivity to Flash

A basic script for moving the playback head in the timeline:

bird01.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_OVER, myClickReaction01);

function myClickReaction01(e:MouseEvent):void {
bird01.gotoAndPlay(8);
}

............................

Mouse events you can track: CLICK, DOUBLE_CLICK, MOUSE_DOWN, MOUSE_LEAVE, MOUSE_MOVE, MOUSE_OUT, MOUSE_OVER, MOUSE_UP, MOUSE_WHEEL

XeyeX

Xtrees

Xone

my letter

X is sly, crossed over itself, hiding what's underneath, denying what's underneath.

And what's underneath is always something by someone else.

There is no essential core to X: it is always placed on top of that something else.

Even the X of X-ray: it is all about seeing through a surface, into something else.

Once more...

Each new semester, a new attempt to blog. Each new semester, a reminder of the hard finitude of time. We'll see how far this goes. I'll be keeping up with all (well, most of...) the assignments for English 328.

the economics of word choice

“In a letter to clients, Mr. Bouton described the rogue trader as ‘an imprudent employee in the corporate and investment banking division.’”

Mr. Bouton is chairman of Société Générale, the French bank that announced yesterday that one employee — the one described above — had defrauded the bank of $7.1 billion. (I typed “million” the first time; even my fingers are disbelieving.)

If, like me, “imprudent” is not your first choice of adjective to describe such actions, what would be your first choice?

metaphors about/with snow

a light dusting • heavy and wet • a blanket • corn • Snow White • deep powder • I melted under her glare • his dandruff drifted... • Words like winter snowflakes (How Odysseus could speak) • She blizzarded me with messages • Snow Crash • My snow-hearted mistress • Don’t snow on my parade • I felt-snowed in • A snow-day of the spirit • Her snowy voice fell over us • Swimming in snow • Her eyes were snow globes • A flurrying laugh • A Sahara of Snow •

"...of the moral teachings of snow": many extended metaphors

I may be missing the UP, just a little, desiring to sit in the convalescent chair looking out to the Portage on a night like this.

(And, yes, those aren’t all technically metaphors. And I didn't say they had to be good.)

More?

I've tried this before

It was lots of pictures and occasional posts, sometimes posts just to post and sometimes because I had something I wanted to work out. I am serially consistent, for a month or two or maybe even six, and then I move on to the next whatever that I pursue for a while. So the blog gave way to learning about moving. (Meanwhile: this being-a-teacher is the longest I have done anything persistently in my life.)

I also come back to things: I learn in punctuated ways. I may not draw for a long time, and then I come back to it. I may not write for a while, and then I come back to it.

I know I need to be writing here -- this internet space -- again and more if I am to have any understanding of how writing can shift depending on where it happens and the time of its space.

I also want to be more productive with metaphors. Hence the next post.

Yoga, Milwaukee, and the Post-season

There’s this guy who breaks the calm of every single Saturday morning yoga class by hugely and boisterously  whooping “Thanks, teacher!” immediately upon our gentle end-of-class “Namaste” murmur. It’s ice water every time, his abrupt loud cheeriness. I sometimes wonder if the people who run the Yoga Center pay him to do this, so that we learn how -- with a little effort -- we *can* return to the inside quiet created by the work of class. Everyone puts the props away then, usually, moving thoughtfully, with little cheery words back and forth.

After the guy yelled this morning, though, someone else said, “This cold! Good for the Pack!” 

And so while people rolled up their mats and stacked the blocks, they enthusiastically chatted about how the Giants can’t possible be ready for the kind of cold that settled on Wisconsin overnight. It was -- is -- the kind of cold from which people hide themselves (if they must go outside) inside Michelin Man down coats, huge furry hoods, gloves like small den-living animals, and grandma-knit scarves. You can’t see faces. You see breath steam only. But before they got bundled, all the yoga people doing this talking this morning -- all this talk about Favre, the point spread, and last week’s game -- all these yoga people had been in their delicate yoga clothing balancing their torsos over their carefully balanced hips. We were after quiet together up until the moment class ended. Then we were after not that. 

Yoga would never have been invented in Milwaukee. There’s the playoff game tomorrow, and we live here now.