ALL OVER BUT THE CRYIN'


My brother got himself wedded, and nobody freaked out or misbehaved too much. Nobody was too rude to me--although my uncle telling me that everyone was worried about me and thought I was "only wanting to get married" because my brother was doing it? That was pretty insulting.

I acted as best man, or at least, best and only sister. I got the breakfast and the coffee and carried the rings and the ring pillow and the envelope with hella tips and picked out the shirt and tie and hefted the suit and fished out the clean underpants and undershirt and dress socks and pinned on the boutonniere. I picked up dog poop, and stepped miserably in cat puke, and appeased sour old female relatives, and ate wild venison sausage. I pitied my poor cousin, trapped under 75 pounds of frump. I located the appropriate poem and read it.

And my new sister-in-law's family leaned in, at one point, to commend my brother's fortitude. "She's a lovely girl, but she can be ... volatile," one auntie said. "And T. is so calm! He is so patient with her, and so kind. I don't know how he does it!"

I looked at her and said, "Wait until you meet my mother."

At any rate, it was lovely to be out of the exhausting and debilitating heat, and in a place with temperate weather. My brother's neighborhood is sweet and garden-y.


There were sour cherries on backyard trees:





I made my brother's boutonniere. He'd requested good smells,
so I foraged some lavender and lemon thyme:



And I made the bride's bouquet. She wanted purple. I plucked the
pollen-y stamens from all those lilies:






And TF joined me the next day and charmed the hell out of everyone:

"IN FRONT OF THESE OUR FRIENDS"


Blogging light until I return from my brother's wedding. Will he and his soon-to-be wife have a (gasp!) Quaker wedding? Nobody knows. There is a contract, which they are calling a "katubah" although ain't nobody Jewish between them. They may be marrying themselves, which is legal in their state. Both of which could quite resemble the way Friends do it. But then again, my brother is under much fewer restraints--especially regarding matters of faith and tradition--than I am. I BEST be having a Quaker wedding!

At present, is my dress pretty and my cork-heeled wedge sandals perilously high? Yes.

Will I therefore tower over TF? Much to his delight.

Has my father apologized for being a total asshole? Shockingly, yes.

Is teaching exhausting the hell out of me, and is my paper for Leeds still half-assed? Yep.

Can I wait to get out of the insufferable inferno that is now Subtropical City? Hell no. I fly to the land of mountains and cool air and splendid views and people doing outdoorsy stuff.

ON FATHERS

"...what did I know
what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?"

--Robert Hayden, "Those Winter Sundays"


I have been thinking and reading lots about masculinity this summer. I still don't entirely get its fragility, its bluster and bravado. Its construction is so dependent upon other men, their opinions and bullying, their respect. And I have been thinking about fathers since reading Clio Bluestocking's post, how much women need fathers, and how awkwardly men can and cannot fill that role. It's like they're just knocking around in a badly fitting pair of shoes, oblivious to the harm they can cause, oblivious to their power to do good.

I haven't spoken to my father since he unleashed a whole bunch of misogynist and sexist vitriol, several weeks ago. He sent me a CD he'd burned, of his usual showtunes/Kurt Weill/Sondheim something-or-other. The gift means he is attempting to apologize. Except, it isn't really an apology, because showtunes are his obsession, and mainly because an apology includes the word "sorry" in it. I'll be holding out on that one until eternity, though. And nothing is gained from insisting on being right.

On the occasion of the day of fathers, our commodified American holiday wherein we are supposed to go out and buy some tacky shlock, I wanted to share a memory.

My father and I were swimming. I was three. We were in Ontario, at our cabin, on the same lake where my paternal grandparents had gone on their Prohibition-era honeymoon. It's a place that my father goes to in order to in some ways "be" with his own father, who died before my dad was 5. And who, as lore would have it, was a strapping example of skilled masculinity. Athletic, charming, tough, handsome, handy.

As the above showtunes example likely indicates, my father is and was and will not ever be an outdoorsman. He's a pretty poncy and intellectual sort of man, quiet, with a sharp and subtle sense of humor. A keen dresser, who smells good, is punctual, and always has a comb and a handkerchief in his pocket. A hard worker, and diligent. But he can't fix things, gets flustered by newness, is easily embarrassed, hurts himself flagrantly, and passively demands all kinds of care. Woe betide you if you brush against that which is "private" information. Or, god forbid, if you point out his lack of capability. He is brittle.

We were out in the lake. I did not yet know how to swim. I was wearing a styrofoam egg, the better to keep me afloat in the deeper water. He could stand. I would paddle to him. We were at the drop-off, where the water turned from greenish clarity to solid ink-black depth and nothingness.

My father goaded me to take off the egg. What did I know? He faced me towards the deep. "Now, go under and open your eyes," he said.

I did. And I was terrified, pouring up through the surface in a panic. Everywhere was emptiness, and I couldn't right myself. There was no light. Anything could be lurking in the water and I wouldn't be able to escape. If ever there existed a definition of "the void," that was it.

He laughed.

I still don't know what the lesson is. My father mocked my fear, after setting me up to be afraid. He did not console me.

But he was there to physically catch me.

JUNETEENTH!


The 18th of June is a big deal down here.

I remain amazed that it took so damn long for the news of manumission to permeate the South. Certainly, that taking so long was on purpose, and once the news actually arrived, there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle. But 18 months after the fact? I mean really.

Y'all know the story, right? Emancipation was decreed in 1865, but news traveled more slowly the further one got from Washington. West of the Mississippi, things were still a bit patchy, communications-wise. So enslavement continued, especially in Texas, even though the war was over and the laws had changed.

It took a while, all through the second and third week of June 1866, the weather heating to inferno levels, for the truth to arrive. And then, the public "no" newly entered the Black vocabulary.

I like to imagine the way the news traveled: on foot, via one human mouth shouting it aloud, from house to house, the jubilation and shock reverberating westward. The joy of freedom, and also its attendant terrors, must have been unbelievable. As in, it probably took a few minutes for things to sink in. And then I imagine that folks whooped out loud, and cut their eyes at each other, and gathered themselves together. And then they left. I think it's HL Gates who talks about the proliferation of freed slaves wandering the roads, after emancipation. Such wandering scared the hell out of white people, who ascribed all kinds of perfidy to that mobility. But really, folks were out there looking for one another, for their families, for their parents and children. They were trying to piece together a life.

Underneath the freeways, these roads are the same roads. Slave feet and free feet walked along them.

Here it's 98 degrees every day, with no rain, the sun unrelenting. I can't believe the heat. I can't believe the lizards in the flowers. I can't believe I just bought a fancy sundress for my brother's wedding, one that cost me some $335. I was partially talked into it because it could do double duty as a nice dress well into October here, given this seasonless clime. A girl needs summer clothes here, much more than she needs wool tights.

And I thought I could wear it also when I am invited to attend further high Black church functions with TF and his extended family. It's tough enough being the only white face in the place, but man, those church ladies know how to wear the clothes. My professor-lady skirts and well-worn Dansko sandals ain't cutting it, amidst the fancy hats and suits and shoes and handbags.

Besides, if everybody's going to keep asking if TF's rampagingly adorable nieces and nephews are our children, I best represent.

SUBTROPICAL SOLITUDE






June sucks. Every year it sucks. I get derailed by the abundance of seeming "free time" I have and how I am supposed to fill it and whether I get to enjoy it or should just make grim use of it. The critical voice in my head grows increasingly loud and shrill. By July, usually, I've found some way to keep the wolf of depression at bay. But these weeks I am hounded.

I didn't entirely anticipate being in Subtropical City this summer. I thought I'd be in NYC, pushing away at my book, doing research in the NYPL, seeing my friends, being easily social, people-watching, walking everywhere, window shopping, making strawberry rhubarb pie, joining up again with my poetry group.

I am fighting back against the wolf,in as many ways as possible. I am upping my dose of anti-depressant.

I've been biking to work every day, in an attempt to exercise. I am teaching an early class, so when I leave, the temperature is tolerable and the streets empty. When I return three or four hours later, though, it's a murderously humid, mosquito-infested inferno replete with dudes who whistle and make kissy noises at me. Giving them the finger helps my state of mind.

And I've been trying also to eat more fruits and vegetables, because doing so traditionally brings me pleasure. There's a nearby market that sells (relatively) local produce. (Does Mexico count as local if it's only five hours away?) And so I have been shopping there with some frequency. There is a certain joy in standing in a small crowd of all types of people pawing through the okra, and listening to everybody talk recipes. Or discussing their shared memories of shelling beans on the front porch.

This food is still unfamiliar to me. There are so many kinds of fresh beans! Shell beans, cream peas, butter beans, black-eyed peas. And then the tropical things like plantains and coconut and pineapple and key limes and these tiny pea-sized peppers that can scorch an entire dish. What the hell does someone do with salt pork, or fatback, or jicama, or "noonday" onions? Figuring out how to cook new things serves as a kind of self-care. And also care for others, which tends to make me feel better, always.

I'm also considering scaling back some of my ambitions for the summer. Will I be able to write this book THIS summer? I don't know. I didn't think I'd have so many smaller writing projects to also work on. Or a class to teach. I didn't think I'd fall in love with a fireman who's now in cop school five days a week and is exhausted by the shift in gears. I didn't entirely realize that half my colleagues would decamp. Or that I'd have to force myself to find my urbane socializing in cafes and libraries and shops, because there is no pedestrian culture, here.

The balance between "too much" and "enough" is perennially difficult to strike.

THINKING COUNTS



In this week's Widely Read Magazine I discovered the publication of a poem by someone with whom I went to poetry school. This someone was not a someone who was my friend. S/he wrote lots of poems of the look-at-me-I-am-so-cute-and-sexy! free verse confessional variety, and being that s/he WAS both cute and sexy, consequently got a lotta play. I do not write these kinds of sexily confessional poems, despite having gone to the MFA redoubt of such poetic making. My poems are a bit more ... formal, in both content and style.

Indeed, I rebel against the hegemony of the confessional free verse narrative, mainly because I am not a narcissicist, and also because I think that the Romantics and their swoony lyrics have just about now had their due. Nonetheless, my poet-acquaintance just published in the fucking Widely Read Magazine. Gar! Envy!

And this discovery occurred as I was also reading Hollander's The Work of Poetry, and thinking, fuck. Just fuck. Hollander's book is useful for my own critical work, but it made me realize: I miss making poems like I can't even explain. All the quiet space within me is devoted to writing my "book" and there is simply no room in there for poetry this summer. I don't know when there WILL be room, and I am trying very much to trust that such time will come. And soon.

And oddly, I also got a letter from the Girlfriend of My Youth, who lives in Neighboring State. I haven't heard from her in months, if not years. GMY is single, having parted ways with her own longtime GF. And GMY reported that she is actively trying to get pregnant, turkey-baster-style, with sperm-bank donations. I find this fascinating and a little nuts. It's totally something she would and could do. And she'll be a rockin' mother. But man! That's so expensive! And going the pregnancy route solo is ... brave as hell.

TF keeps saying, "you finish this book, then you get to do what you want." That might mean writing more poems, or egads, getting hitched with TF and trying to have a kid together. I mean really. No pressure or anything.

So I keep "working" on my "book." I am remembering a thing that Beloved Adviser told me when I first began dissertating: "thinking counts." It counts as labor, because it IS academic labor. Writing isn't just the time spent with the ass in the chair--although the ass-in-the-chair is by far the most important part. Writing can't happen without lots of reading and musing and wondering and note-taking. I am telling myself this in an attempt to feel less guilt about how slow my progress is.

The "book" is its own kind of generation. Slow and strange and steady.

WRITING AND ENDITING


I am trying to write myself a book this summer. I do have a dissertation draft, but now I am trying to revise that turkey into something more ... book-like. This means I need to think more critically about my theoretical frame, which means I need of course to think about my introduction. But I am realizing that beginning at the beginning is a pretty bad idea. I get derailed, and overwhelmed, and frustrated by my own repetitions and then there's the lit. review that I know has to go (because I've read Germano, who says I gotta jettison the list-y summaries) but I don't even know what to dispense with and what to keep and blech. Where TO begin, then? I have decided to dig into the middle, with chapter 2, as chapter 1 was recently polished to a fine sheen and sent out as an article.

Have I been able to do this?

Why no, as I am also teaching a summer course. And trying to prepare for my research trip to the UK, which is proving considerably more complicated than it should be on account of university bureaucracy. And then there's the research and drafting of a conference paper, too, to be delivered at Leeds.

And of course, I am suffering from what Renaissance Girl also seems to be stricken with: the dreaded OCD cleaning that always seems to accompany working at home. Because I mean REALLY, the floors needed mopping. They totally did! And then files ordered, and mail dealt with, and crap thrown away. Because who can write when there is chaos?

I am reminded of something Second Reader told me about when he was dissertating. Apparently, he'd go through the library locating mis-shelved books. And then bringing them helpfully back to the librarian.

In other writing-news, I have had an article accepted for publication. With no substantive revisions required. This is my first peer-reviewed article acceptance. The journal will be available wherever obscure and regional medieval publications are sold. You know, like at the Barnes and Noble and shit.

The acceptance is a balm for my soul. But it is not making the book-writing any easier.