Quiz Nachos

In what was perhaps the most loserly year of my life, seventh grade, I decided to keep a journal, but not an ordinary one full of thoughts and feelings and poems and stories. I already had one of those. I needed a special journal that would be entirely objective-- a bare-bones record of the days’ events, sans commentary. This idea struck me after my dad gave me an extra pocket appointment planner from his work. Never having seen such a creation, I was enamored of its stern, daily columns with spaces for every hour of the day-- perfect for a woman with nary an appointment but a real desire to write stuff down. Every so often I run across one of those old planners as I’m organizing and expect to find useful insights into my 12-year-old mind. I found one recently and opened it at random to November 12, 1989. I'm still puzzling over that day's entry, a cryptic account that I'll reproduce here in full, just as it appears:

Quiz nachos!!!


Around that time, I also received as a gift a real diary with a bluish soft-filter photo of a ballerina and a tiny combination lock requiring its owner (me!) to spin through the letters of the alphabet and spell out a secret code. A page of directions ordered me to memorize the secret word and dispose of this instruction sheet immediately. The secret word was “Mum.” That was easy to remember. Mum, after all, was what I needed to keep, as well as being the main reason for the lock.

Over the years I’ve had an assortment of journals. But, more and more, I’m curious about how other people look at the process of writing stuff down--not only what they record in their journals, but when, how and where they choose to write.

Grab Bag 'O Facts:
1. A woman I know writes in her journal the instant she wakes up, so that her entries get tangled up with her dreams.
2. Pepys wrote everyday solid for ten years.
3. Some extremely creative men I know don’t keep journals (I live with one).
4. Some people claim they can’t think when writing on lined paper.
5. Yesterday in class I sat next to a very quiet girl who took notes on our Faulkner lecture in beautiful shorthand.
6. Pepys wrote shorthand in his diaries.
7. Virginia Woolf, inexplicably, referred to herself in the third person as “Miss Jan” in her childhood notebooks.

One last fact: When Theodore Roethke died he left behind 300 notebooks. That’s 300 journals stuffed with scribbled ideas, entries, poetry fragments and aphorisms drawn from his work as a poet and a teacher. How much footage is that in shelf space? Fortunately, all that writing has been edited down into one slim, spectacular volume of poetry and notes entitled Straw for the Fire.

Here are some quotes to tide you over until you can get a copy:


I love how a skeleton looks.

Oh poor words, bear with me.

I stay away from death by turning toward her face.

I am beside myself, sitting by you.

Therefore, I shall get on with the daily business of revelation.

I broke my tongue on God.

Live in perpetual great astonishment.

God, alone, is poor.

We cry against critics: because it’s so important they be better.

May my silences become more accurate.

The splendid irrationality of a peacock’s tail.

Teaching: one of the few professions that permit love.

I trust all joy.

Every sentence a cast into the dark.

Reject nothing, but re-order all.

God give me, not grace, but energy enough to move around!

Float like a Butterfly

My classmate’s husband works at the Museum of Natural History, and she was generous enough to ask him to rustle up some free passes to the current butterfly exhibit for Just and me. Maybe because it was such a picture-perfect fall day, or because I had just come from annotating a 12-page John Ashbery poem, but the butterflies (sealed in display cases and fluttering in their humid glass room) seemed like the most deliriously pretty things on Earth. Two of them, brown with circular markings, made me want to drop everything and take up a career in textile design.







Ain't they purdy? Sorry, by the way, about the infrequent posts lately. I'm trying to make up in photos what I don't have time to produce in words. I’m also working really hard at the moment to impose some kind of structure on my week: school time (reading, tutoring, classes, commuting, and attending the occasional lecture or conference) and non-school time (everything else). So far, it’s working—well, sort of. I’ve gotten into a fairly comfortable 6:30 a.m. tea-and-books routine, and I try to make some time for dinner (Trader Joe's frozen tomales and shrimp must have been invented by an enterprising grad student) and the occasional non-school book; right now I'm reading Cold Comfort Farm, an enormously hilarious novel that you should buy this instant if you don't already own it. In terms of sheer funniness it ranks up there with A Confederacy of Dunces.