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A blog on blogs
This is an interesting article on Japan's blogging culture. There, blogs aren't a vehicle for self-promotion or polemical tirades. They're humble records of daily life, in the apparently long-standing Japanese tradition of diary-keeping. The article attributes this blogging posture to a number of factors, primary among them a Japanese social ethic of humility and deference. It's interesting to me--although it shouldn't be surprising by now--that a nation generally without Christian tradition would embody some fundamental tenets of the Christian spirit in, of all places, its blogosphere. It's disappointing to me that, once again, Americans touting their Christian tradition prove to be so often brash, offensive, and proud in their own electronic communications.
I'd like to think that the blogs I frequent--those of my friends, mostly--occupy an honorable position in the blogosphere, avoiding the showing-off that is such a temptation with this medium. I'd also like to think that our blog here is more a record of our lives, our thoughts, and our treasures than a venue for self-aggrandizement. I also use it as a practice of discipline in my writing, but in that context I can be prone to showing off. So, in a motion of transparency here, a confessional litany of words I paused over (because I wanted to sound a little smart or clever) while writing this post: polemical, postures, social ethic, tenets, confessional litany. OK, enough about me. Read the article.
Labels: writing
Other People's Poems: Naomi Shihab Nye
I "met" Naomi Shihab Nye at a reading she gave in D.C. two years ago. I immediately appreciated her sense of humor, her gentle presence and humility in light of the audience's pleasure, the detail and groundedness of her poetry, and the fact that when I told her afterward that I, too, was a slow eater (she had mentioned her own slowness during the reading), she got very excited and gave me a hug. A much more rewarding meeting than the one I had with Anne Lamott, who, if you would believe it, is just as crabby in real life as she admits to being on paper. At least she's honest.
Anyway, this poem is being put up here for Jason and Annie, in honor of their yet-to-exist-in-the-open-air alien tater tot. Naturally, life with a child won't always be as sublime as this poem implies, but I hope you'll be able to recognize its every day sacredness, anyway.
Where Children Live
Homes where children live exude a pleasant rumpledness,
like a bed made by a child, or a yard littered with balloons.
To be a child again one would need to shed details
till the heart found itself dressed in the coat with a hood.
Now the heart has taken on gloves and mufflers,
the heart never goes outside to find something to "do."
And the house takes on a new face, dignified.
No lost shoes blooming under bushes.
No chipped trucks in the drive.
Grown-ups like swings, leafy plants, slow-motion back and forth.
While the yard of a child is strewn with the corpses
of bottle-rockets and whistles,
anything whizzing and spectacular, brilliantly short-lived.
Trees in children's yards speak in clearer tongues.
Ants have more hope. Squirrels dance as well as hide.
The fence has a reason to be there, so children can go in and out.
Even when the children are at school, the yards glow
with the leftovers of their affection,
the roots of the tiniest grasses curl toward one another
like secret smiles.
Other People's Poems: Billy Collins
In anticipation of a Thanksgiving to be spent at Grandma Langdon's house. When I was little, and my cousin and I shared a bed in "the pine room," we would count all the animals we could find living in the knots of the pine-paneled walls.
"Creatures" by Billy Collins
Hamlet noticed them in the shapes of clouds,
but I saw them in the furniture of childhood,
creatures trapped under surfaces of wood,
one submerged in a polished sideboard,
one frowning from a chair-back,
another howling from my mother's silent bureau,
locked in the grain of maple, frozen in oak.
I would see these presences, too,
in a swirling pattern of wallpaper
or in the various greens of a porcelain lamp,
each looking so melancholy, so damned,
some peering out at me as they knew
all the secrets of a secretive boy.
Many times I would be daydreaming
on the carpet and one would appear next to me,
the oversize nose, the hollow look.
So you will understand my reaction
this morning at the beach
when you opened your hand to show me
a stone you had picked up from the shoreline.
"Do you see the face?" you asked
as the cold surf circled our bare ankles.
"There's the eye and the line of the mouth,
like it's grimacing, like it's in pain."
"Well, maybe that's because it has a fissure
running down the length of its forehead
not to mention a kind of twisted beak," I said,
taking the thing from you and flinging it out
over the sparkle of blue waves
so it could live out its freakish existence
on the dark bottom of the sea
and stop bothering innocent beachgoers like us,
stop ruining everyone's summer.
Other People's Poems: Czeslaw Milosz
In order to keep us accountable to this blog, perhaps inspire a little creativity and at least thoughtfulness in ourselves and in you, and honor the creativity and thoughtfulness of other . . . creative and thoughtful people, I am instituting a weekly feature: "Other People's Poems." Suggestions welcome, as I have a limited number of poetry books.
"Treatise on Theology: 16. To Tell the Truth" by Czeslaw Milosz
To tell the truth, I don't understand anything. There is only our
ecstatic dance, a diminutive part of a great totality.
They are born and die; the dance doesn't stop. I cover my eyes,
as if to protect them from the images rushing toward me.
Perhaps I only appropriate the gestures, words, and actions, proper
to the small patch of time assigned to me.
Homo ritualis. Aware of it, I do what is prescribed for a one day's master.
Labels: Other People's Poems
Patience is a Virtue
I just updated my Facebook profile (a rare move), and changed my status to read "Kendra Langdon Juskus is hunting and gathering." (A side note here to clarify that I do have a Facebook profile. After giving many disparaging soliloquies in opposition to the thing, Ryan "gifted" me with it for my birthday. I'm sticking with it as an exercise in self-control, trying not to get carried away with self-definition and self-glorification, and resisting the temptation to add too many applications, details, and activities so that it usurps all of my real-life time. But I'm on it. So friend me. Let's make this official.)
I have been hunting and gathering for several weeks, inspired by a few interesting job leads to search the employ
ment jungle, parse out some fruits with promise, and take a bite at them. I do feel like I'm slowly gleaning and storing away some prospects--none that, by my tone I'm sure you can tell, have particularly struck a passionate chord with me. And I think that's because I am also hunting and gathering in another, deeper way. I'm hunting for the particulars of really important things like my identity, my dreams, and my purpose. These are things in constant flux, but their changing nature is particularly acute in this period of life when very few people are legally responsible for me and when my own responsibilities are relatively limited. Meanwhile, the possibilities are endless. When my current job ends in December I can do any of the following:
1) "Become" a writer, devoting my newfound free time to writing poetry, articles, and essays and perhaps vainly shipping them around the country for publication.
2) "Get a real job" in a position that may or may not be appropriate for me, with an organization or company that may or may not do fulfilling work.
3) Buy a house. This has been on our minds lately, but taking this plunge would preclude us from taking several other actions that appear later in this list, such as
4) Move to New York. It's home. A man on the radio last night won tickets to a Bruce Springsteen concert and said, as he gleefully thanked the radio station, "Yeah, I used to go see Bruce a lot back up New York way." Grammatical awkwardness aside, there is part of me that never wants to have to say that.
5) Move to a new apartment. With light. Obviously to do this and buy a house at the same time would be unwise.
6) Have a baby. Difficult to juggle as new home-owners, I'm sure. Also may not be something we end up having all that much control over.
7) Move to the country. This prospect seems idyllic at times, probably because neither of us has ever had to wake up at 5am to tend to cattle or try to wade through the vagaries of the the latest Farm Bill as it applies to our lives. Thus we consider doing this in conjunction with people like Wren and John, who actually know how to do it, or Greg, who--we've heard through the grapevine--is suddenly intent on being a farmer.
8) Stop, drop everything, and leave. WWOOF it all over Europe for a few months and return to . . . who knows? At which point the dilemma begins again.
The problem is that while we could do any of these things, we cannot do all of them. We are lodged in reality whether we like it or not, and each of these options carries with it the inevitability of diverse joys and griefs, as does our current life and life in general. Ryan likens our situation to that of pieces on a chess board. Along with our friends--scattered across the nation and the world--we are tentatively taking up new moves and positions, but also watching all of the other participants in the game make their own decisions. If more people move to one city, will we follow suit? If someone does invite us to farm with them, will we take them up on it? If we have a baby, will we leap ahead of everyone else, and be left behind at the same time?
At the same time that all these questions whirl around--and they seem to come in droves, attacking our defenses all at once--I have to remind myself to surmount the situation and look at it from a wider angle. "Patience is a virtue," I often quip to hurried people. It's easy for me to believe this in the context of relationships. When friends who are single or dating get caught up in the momentousness of every little relational detail and begin agonizing about missed opportunities or apparent mistakes, I proffer them the examples of long-married couples whose stories have taught me a lot: a woman who hated a guy in college, but who ended up marrying him several years after graduation and is still happily married to him today; men and women who, after being widowed, have reconnected with high school sweethearts with whom to happily live out their years; husbands and wives who dipped in and out of each others' lives for years before they ever settled down together. The fact that my own relationship with Ryan failed for a period in college often surprises people--surely the road to marital bliss isn't plagued by such blind turns.
But whereas it's easy for me to toss these examples out to others, I, or we, who are all in this upheaval of our twenties together, need to see their parallels with life in general. That of course there are blind turns and potholes and even wrong ways. That most likely, in twenty years I will not regret having passed up buying a condo in Washington, DC, or having a baby in 2008 that I could have had in 2007, or spending a year of my life uploading web content and writing on the side. Most likely we will have a lot of memories, and a lot of stories, and a lot of unwanted advice to give to our children--probably along the lines of, "patience is a virtue," which, like us, they'll probably have to learn for themselves, anyway.
Labels: good thoughts
A Relaxed Mind is a Creative Mind
When we first birthed this blog, we received a number of skeptical comments from close friends, who all expressed doubt as to Ryan's involvement (or lack of involvement) in the operation. Loved ones teased that Ryan would never actually write anything, either because he so often vehemently rails against electronic modes of communication, or because they had heard lyrics from his now-defunct high school band, "Know Talent."
Lest anyone be under the impression that my husband is vapid, dull, and humorless, I offer you the following as examples of what his genial, easygoing mind miraculously discovers and/or conjures during the work day. Enjoy.
Welcome to the Juskus Ruckus Family Band's campfire bonanza. Which one are you?
In reference to me having a sore throat: "a thousand suns that rise up continuously and never set...the heat that burns the chaff and swallows up every last drop of sweet moisture 'til parched we live and dry we die...clamoring for a thousand moons to block this life-giver gone awry...well up in me a sense of water that flies high and comes sliding down just one more time."
In reference to a road trip:"sounds great...and we can follow the spiraling donut on our journey outward and inward...slamming Arlington and Fairfax before moving on to bigger fish like Loudon county and its perennial exurban development harvest...commiserating the last horse farm in NOVA before entering that land of milk and honey...where coal miners live idyllic lives of just the right amount of suffering and familial joy...where nothing bad ever happens and where every day is a Saturday afternoon...West Virginia...take me home, oh country roads."
I'm sorry...this little leprechaun with 11 fingers and green hair
rushed into my office and stuffed me under my desk around 4:06pm today
and all I could hear were his jitters and curls like a whirly-gig
dancing on the computer's keys. i woke up, ate a spoiled banana and
saw that chicken had fled the coop. lord help us.
-mo faux
I recently sent Ryan the following lolcat:
And received this in return:
i r stealin ur heart:
So. Stand corrected, haters.
Recipe for Distraction
To say that my recent days at work have been mind numbing would be to dishonor the sensation with a predictable cliche. The fact is that my brain has become so petrified with uselessness that an excruciating amount of effort is required even to drag myself into the realm of creative writing. One would think that, with all this free time on my hands, my days would be replete with literary inspiration and written proliferation. Alas, the sight of eggshell-white walls and concrete building-sides doesn't easily whet my creative appetite. I suppose I could use the drudgery to force my words onto the page, as good writers are supposed to be able to do, but I'll spare you that now and get to my point. It is possible, after all, that you too are having a mind numbing day, and would therefore welcome the recipe for distraction that I have advertised above. Therefore, read and enjoy this essay from The Sun Magazine. It explores issues of identity and family and language--some of my favorite things to ponder, nerd that I am--in a narrative and personally (and refreshingly) accessible style. Frances Lefkowitz is honest and articulate. I'm glad that she wasn't too mind-numbed to write this.
Labels: good thoughts
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