Foretelling the Future By a Randomly Chosen Passage from a Book
Look! More snow, only slightly cold, and I’m alone inside with my hissing radiators.
An “office” sounds better if you call it a “study.”
A perfect morning for some bibliomancy.
Turn to the first poetry book you see, an exclusively online friend of mine tells me. On the page of your birth month, use a word from the title to write your first line and improvise from there.
I like to think I know my own mind, and my own mind likes a little outside guidance.
Chinese Erotic Poems from the Everyman Library, though I am a woman, and the libraries are closed. “The Riverbank, anonymous, 600 BCE: “By the high riverbank / I cut branches and twigs. / When I don’t see my man, / I feel morning-ravenous.” Pretty spicy.
Whenever I walk into a library I wonder: how many of these books have been used to kill spiders?
Weeping willows by a riverbank toss their long hair. Theirs is the most lyrical tree name, am I right?
Linnaeus believed them to be in Psalm 137: “By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion / On the willows there we hung up our lyres…”
Who will write the moral history of my generation? Divination. A divine nation.
(Turns out willows don’t grow on the banks of the Euphrates. Turns out they were poplars.)
Unpopular opinion alert: asking advice does not oblige you to take it.
Robert Browning chose Cerutti’s Italian Grammar to learn the fate of his relationship with Elizabeth Barrett. How dry! But then, this translation exercise: “If we love in the other world as we do in this, I shall love thee to eternity.”
The world is way too goddamn with me. I’m trying to be present to the spatiotemporal qualities of this cup of coffee.
A pregnant pause—what will it birth? With nowhere to go, lounging around eating candy, time just gets fatter. As though in confinement.
Quick! Somebody give me another assignment. Somebody tell me that what we do matters.
The State or Period of Being a Child
This morning my sister sent a recording of my nephew, five years old, standing on a stepstool at the kitchen stove: “Please enjoy this video of Luka watching popcorn pop. Little pleasures I guess!” I watched it five times in a row without stopping.
One of my favorite prompts to give to my students: Pick a scene from your childhood and describe it in three sentences. Long shot, middle shot, close-up. Gradually zoom us in, really letting us see it. Fascinating how other people depict their youth. Misty naturalism? Horror-movie fisheye?
In their classic book on fairy tales, Iona and Peter Opie write, “a man not given to speculation might as well walk on four legs as on two. A child who does not feel wonder is but an inlet for apple pie.”
What do I remember the most about childhood? An intense and often thwarted desire to be understood. Also struggling not to laugh with my sister in church, mint chocolate chip ice cream in pale green scoops, and calling milk “moo juice.”
How do kids acquire their shared body of folklore? Wherefore all of us at Humphrey Daycare Center in Shreveport disporting in the playground to the dirty rhyme: There’s a place in France / where the naked ladies dance / There’s a hole in the wall / where the men can see it all?
Child abuse, child molester, child care, child’s play.
The concept of childhood didn’t emerge in Europe until the 1600s. The birthday party didn’t start until the mid-nineteenth century.
Miss me with your gauzy nonsense about carefree innocence.
Every dad a glass tyrant, afraid to shatter. No truck with pluck or smarts or suggestions. Just a shush from mom. Just a fatherly slap in the face for lip and sass.
Childhood and its irrevocability. Childhood and its vulnerability. The ability to feel deeply rubbed away by something referred to as maturity.
Geographies of childhood! Riding bikes around the neighborhood until you enter the suburbs of adulthood. Before you know it, that’s where you have to live.
Parenthood? Hard pass. I never asked to be born.
“Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days,” said Flannery O’Connor. She portrayed herself as “a pigeon-toed child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex.”
How much is enough to pronounce an experience good?
The suffix “-hood” denoting “state, condition, character, etc.” or a body of persons of a particular class. The quandary of quantifying that which is qualitative.
What’s the statistical probability of possessing “a happy childhood?”
