woodshed

it's cold and rainy so i can bring back my tweed dress.  i know my head is obscured.  i like it that way.

today read susan howe again.

slowly devouring her.

i now feel sufficiently prepared to begin a ph.d program.

made dinner already, because i had food that needed cooking.

no writing as of yet.

taught online courses, comforting and encouraging students about their topic choices.  one wants to write about the tiny house movement!  hurray, because that means i don't have to read about video games and violence, how evil the federal government is, or the nfl.

sidebar:  i mentioned to my tiny house betopic'd student that no one seems to be examining this so-called tiny house movement. don't most people in the world already live in tiny spaces?  i totally get the desire to keep things simple, believe me, but i just find the whole thing weird--mostly white, middle-class people fantasizing about living in darling little trailers and such.

okay.  i don't know if i'll get to write anything new today on account of the number of pieces of new music i have to woodshed between now and kid time and rehearsal time.  today felt like a battle in my head:  if i don't cook dinner, the food in my fridge will go to waste and we'll have to scrounge for dinner (we've been doing that a lot lately).  if i do cook dinner, i'll have to choose between writing and practicing.  if i don't practice i'll be humiliated tomorrow night.  if i do practice, i'll be putting my writing at lower status than everything else i do today.  if i don't make dinner, i'm a bad mother and citizen.

suddenly the entire world of possibilities is in flux.  is there any there there? etc., etc., etc.

oh, shoot.  that sounds really whiny and privileged.  i guess it is.

so i'll leave just leave you with these equally overwhelming notions from howe:

"the margin submerges phonic substance.  a mother's thread or line is ringed with silence so poems are"

&

susan howe/jakobson:

"why do certain works go on saying something else? . . . . jakobson says: 'one of the essential differences between spoken and written language can be seen clearly.  the former has a purely temporal character, while the latter connects time and space. while the sounds that we hear disappear, when we read we usually have immobile letters before us and the time of the written flow of words is reversible.'"

&

"a poem can prevent onrushing light going out."