Grasping

Just walked to the office, schlepping a bunch of hanging file folders: I'm trying to sort & organize old files and to take advantage of the two roomy file cabinets in my new office. So much paper ends up in boxes. Less these days--I'd say I achieved a major shift about a year ago, after working toward it for a while: a combination of requiring my students to turn in 90% of their work online and of finally becoming more efficient with (and trusting of) my computer and laptop (and those handy USB jumpdrive thingies).

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We were treated to a nice dinner last night by Steve & Kathryn, who picked us up. Three orders of blackened salmon with mango salsa, two orders of watermelon gazpacho (yummy, but could have been more picante for my taste--can't wait to make some!), one order of basil chicken over couscous. I wanted coffee after, but refrained.

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Nice to see Robin Becker featured on Poetry Daily today. I love her work and can't see why she's not, well, bigger. Looking forward to reading the new book, Domain of Perfect Affection.

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New fun word: planemos. They're planets that orbit each other rather than circling a star. Several have been found over the years, but apparently this new pair is causing a buzz.
One quote from this BBC article made me grin: "They appear to have been forged from a contracting gas cloud, in a similar way to stars, but are much too cool to be true stars."

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Just got a call from HR: time to schedule my benefits meeting. Sweet words: health insurance. After three years without. (Happy feet!)

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Still working on the new story. It's coming through slowly, about a page a day, but still feels much larger than I initially thought. This is a good thing; it means I'm letting it be what it wants to be instead of clamping down and prodding it into some safe form/length/shape. Here's an excerpt from what I wrote Thursday morning:

Charlie leaned closer, examining the mask: a papier mache Green Man composed of individual leaves, each hand-layered onto a paper pulp base form. I tried to construct the mask based on photos I’d made of Nelson sleeping on the sofa—hands folded across his chest, exhaustion tugging his features like gravity itself, he always looked like he was practicing—but in the end, I asked him to model for it.

“A death mask?” he mused, arching his eyebrows.

“I’m thinking more of a Green Man.”

“What, again?” he groaned, and I remembered the afternoon I’d posed him endlessly amid the branches of a bushy camphor tree on the lawn near the Menil Museum. The tree had been cut to the ground at some point, but multiple trunks had arisen to ring the central stump, a platform I coaxed Nelson to stand upon. Shooting roll after roll of film in the late afternoon light, I coached as he peered dutifully from the glossy thick leaves—a little more covering the forehead, now just the left side—while his patient expression turned weary, then stoic, then openly curious: had I captured the essence I was asking him to provide? Were we through yet?

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[photo: gourd vine climbing past our (second-story) bathroom window, 8/2/06]