buried in the library and other pleasures

[bronze_ribbons]

Headachey, itchy, and in mid-flail on a couple of projects, but good things still abound:

Housework, housework, housework...where's the vial of snake venom when one actually needs it? *grumble* ... but the house being cleaner, yes, that's a pleasure.

Definitely, solidly hooked on Untitled now, and not just because Draco gave Ginny a copy of Gaudy Night for her birthday.

Dichroic, M'ris, qrssama (and others?) responding to some of my prompts.

The theme of this past Sunday's services was the new hymnal supplement, Singing the Journey. For me, the highlights were "Building a New Way" (printed reggae-style in the hymnal, but performed a la "Disco Inferno" with piano, bass, and percussion, including "ooh, oohs!" from one of the drummers) and "When Will the Fighting Cease" (a seventeenth-century four-part canon with lyrics by Nick Page and Nita Penfold). There was also the postlude -- a sparkling Jeremy Young arrangement of "All Creatures of Our God and King," with the drummer adding in a brush-stick improvisation on his cymbals -- and Jason's sermon, a tough, provocative rumination on "what do Unitarian Universalists have to sing about?" (i.e., what he thinks it will take for us to be taken seriously as people of faith rather than "a version of the ACLU with a choir").

Short board meeting tonight (adjourned at 1 hour, 48 minutes). A beer and a steak taco afterwards, along with conversations about Jeff Buckley (Grace is one of Jason's "desert island discs"), auction/stewardship/plans for St. Louis, the Muppets, squealing babies, and other sources of delight and mayhem.

Newsy phone message from a friend I haven't seen in far too long.

A couple of fun poetry picture books from the library shelving cart: Paul B. Janeczko and Chris Raschka's A Kick in the Head: An Everyday Guide to Poetic Forms and J. Patrick Lewis and Kyle M. Stone's Please Bury Me In the Library. From the latter:

A great book is a homing device
For navigating paradise.

A good book somehow makes you care
About the comfort of a chair.

A bad book owes to many trees
A forest of apologies.

- JPL, "Great, Good, Bad"

and

A children's book is a classic
If at six, excitedly
You read it to another kid
Who just turned sixty-three.

- JPL, "A Classic"

Not quite a classic, but ten of Jim Harrison's "Letters to Yesenin" are in my copy of The Body Electric (a poetry anthology), and I haven't quite figured out how they got under my skin, although it's true that I have a weakness for poems infused with strange humor or ferocious sorrow, and Harrison offers both:

It would surely be known for years after as the day I shot
a cow...

...I am halfway through
a bottle of vodka and am happy to hear Manitoba
howling outside. Home for dinner I ask my baby daughter
if she loves me but she is too young to talk. She cares
most about eating as I care most about drinking. Our wants
are simple as they say. Still when I wake from my nap
the universe is dissolved in grief again. The baby is sleeping
and I have no one to talk my language. My breath is shallow
and my temples pound. Vodka. Last October in Moscow I taught
a group of East Germans to sing "Fuck Nixon" and we were
quite happy until the bar closed. ... My face in
the mirror asks me who I am and says I don't know. But stop
this whining. I am alive and a hundred thousand acres of birches
around my house wave in the wind. They are women standing
on their heads. Their leaves on the ground today are small
saucers of snow from which I drink with endless thirst.

Comments

[kassrachel.livejournal.com]

Wow. That Harrison is amazing.