open your eyes

Other things I am currently obsessed with, besides the aforementioned U. S. of Tara:

• "Jolene" by Dolly Parton (surprising, given my ambivalent disdain for country);
• Jane Kenyon;
• Italo Calvino's The Baron in the Trees;
• Italo Calvino's anything;
• Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (on which I might be doing my thesis);
• Big Love (HBO);
• hummus;
• my cats;
• Le Magazine Litteraire (which I can only read with the help of the French dictionary which never leaves my side);
• sensory perception;
• holistic medicine;
• memory/nostalgia.

Also, I want to write something. I had a poem tonight at the very cusp of existence, while I was outside with my sister in the trees, but I lost it by the time we'd come in. I think I'll go try to salvage what I can.

Dutch Interiors, Jane Kenyon Christ has been done to death in the cold reaches of northern Europe a thousand thousand times. Suddenly bread and cheese appear on a plate beside a gleaming pewter beaker of beer. Now tell me that the Holy Ghost does not reside in the play of light on cutlery! A Woman makes lace, with a moist-eyed spaniel lying at her small shapely feet. Even the maid with the chamber pot is here; the naughty, red-cheeked girl. . . . And the merchant's wife, still in her yellow dressing gown at noon, dips her quill into India ink with an air of cautious pleasure.