Inchoate

from dictionary.com:

in·cho·ate [in-koh-it, -eyt or, especially Brit., in-koh-eyt]

–adjective
1. not yet completed or fully developed; rudimentary.
2. just begun; incipient.
3. not organized; lacking order: an inchoate mass of ideas on the subject.

[Origin: 1525–35; < L inchoātus, var. of incohātus ptp. of incohāre to begin, start work on, perh. equiv. to in- -in-2 + coh(um) hollow of a yoke into which the pole is fitted + -ātus -ate1]

I just learned this word today. Or more likely, I've seen it before but glossed it over without bothering to look it up, assuming that I already knew what it meant.

As I try to get back into writing, I'm making a point looking up words I thought I already know the definitions for, only to discover that I'm always slightly wrong. Using words more precisely will help me write more precisely, so this is probably a good thing.

Anyway, inchoate is a word I will need to begin using immediately, to describe myself, to describe this blog, and to describe any of several projects I'm trying to complete right now. I like the fact that it looks and sounds so similar to incoherant.

Love is a mix tape

First, the title of this post doesn't come from my own clever brain, rather, it is the title of an actual book by Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield. I haven't read it yet, but it comes highly recommended and I'm hoping to pick it up soon. The artwork at left comes from this book.

With the slow demise of cassettes, I have been contemplating the phenomenon of the mix tape in my own life and in our culture. I still remember the first mix tape I made for my husband, back in 1996. He was on vacation in Maryland, I was preparing to leave on a (separate) trip to Florida, and his birthday was approaching. We hadn't been dating long enough for me to send anything too expensive or too romantic, but I wanted him to know I was thinking of him. The perfect solution? A mix tape, of course! Between packing my suitcase and the arduous process of casette-to-casette recording, I stayed up all night making that tape. I mailed it the next morning, and I suppose the rest is history. He did marry me, after all.

While CD's and other new-fangled technologies make it easier than ever to create a personalized music mix for yourself or your friends, I can't help feeling that we're missing out somehow. Back in the day, a mix tape was the perfect gift, because the recipient understood the amount of thought and effort that went into its creation. Today, you spend a few minutes plugging the songs into your computer, hit the "burn" button, and you're done.

I guess what I'm really pondering here is nature of gifts. As children, we start out by making things with our own hands and anything we can stick glitter onto. As we get older and wealthier, we can afford to buy more elaborate and expensive gifts for our loved ones. But I can't help wondering if those pricy gifts, which take just minutes to select and purchase, are really a better representation of our affection than the time and energy invested in the creation of a mix tape, or even a macaroni necklace.

Bookmobile

I'm working on a more serious, more lengthy post, but until I get that together here's a quick book recommendation: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. I read a glowing review of this book on a Harry Potter forum, of all places, and decided to check it out. I think it's the best new book I've read this year. On the surface, it's a book about a 15-year old autistic boy who is trying to figure out who killed his neighbor's dog. Of course, like all good books, there is much more to it than this. It's a quick and thought-provoking read: subtly funny, poignant, and devastating all at once. If you have a good head for math and numbers you'll enjoy it even more, as the book is packed with impossible math puzzles (but you don't have to understand them to read the book). As for me, I am becoming increasingly interested in the way human language develops (with a talkative two-year-old in the house, it's hard not to be) and this book brings up many interesting questions about the ways we learn to communicate with each other and the assumptions that we make.

Fidelity

Apropos of nothing, I really like the song Fidelity by Regina Spektor. It's kind of pop-y, and I hear it on the radio five times an hour, but I love it anyway. She has a sensational voice, but I think it's the pizzicato violin (or what sounds to me like pizzicato violin; I'm no expert) that sucks me in. The video is fantastic too, starting out in black-and-white and ending with handfuls of colored pixie dust (watch it here). Plus, I dig her black-and-white heels.

Oddly, even now, years after the New Kids on the Block debacle, I still feel somehow embarassed when I find myself liking a song that gets heavy radio play. Am I secretly a music snob? Why do I feel like I should have to work harder to find music I like?

Hey! You got your curry in my chocolate!

I recently watched a profile on Food Network about Vosges Haut-Chocolat in Chicago. Owner Katrina Markoff utilizes unusual and unexpected spices and flavorings to create exotic truffles, chocolate bars, and even ice cream. I was intrigued by the idea of combining things like olives, wasabi, or pink Himalayan salt with chocolate, but never expected to actually taste any of these crazy concoctions. Imagine my surpise when I stumbled upon a display of Vosges chocolate bars at my local Whole Foods. My first reaction was sticker shock. $7 for a chocolate bar? Inconceivable! But as I continued shopping I kept thinking about the chocolate, rationalizing that they were large-sized bars, and made with expensive ingredients, and surely I could afford just one?

So I went back to the display. The first bar that caught my eye was the Red Fire, made with chili peppers and cinnamon. However, I have already tasted similar flavors from both Moonstruck and Dagoba, so I decided to go with my second choice: the Naga bar, combining sweet Indian curry powder with tiny coconut flakes. I was alternately skeptical and fascinated when I finally got home and opened the bar. Inside, the chocolate was smooth and shiny with cute images of a girl with a shopping bag stamped onto the squares. I browsed the detailed "instructions" on the back of the box (which recommed savoring the chocolate using all five senses), closed my eyes, and took a bite.

Wow! I know it's a cliche to talk about having a party in my mouth, but the flavor was incredible. Sweet, salty, savory, and creamy all at once. I was impressed! I've tasted a lot of unusually flavored chocolates, (particularly in London, where all the sweets seemed to be made out of flowers) but this curry bar was the first one to really knock my socks off. If you get a chance you really must try this chocolate (and if you don't like it, send me the leftovers). I'm going to have to try the Black Pearl (that's the wasabi one) next.

Spring Cleaning

Hmmm...it smells like fresh cut grass, the world is puddle-wonderful, I think spring is here at last!

With the first week of really nice, spring-like weather I have been feeling a strong compulsion, verging on physical panic, to organize my house (and by extension, my life). Last weekend, for example, when I should have been outside frolicking, I was rearranging my closets. It started out innocently enough, with me trying to find a box of sandals and other summer-y shoes. Then, naturally, I had to unpack the summer clothes, and then find my daughter's warm-weather stuff as well. Before I knew it, I was in full-on spring cleaning mode.

This cleaning jag feels similar, though not so intense, to the "nesting" instinct I experienced during pregnancy. It culminated the day before my daughter was born, when I could not sit still for a second because of all the imagined tasks I had to complete before the birth. I remember pleading with my husband to help me hang some ceramic hippos above the window in the nursery, so our baby would have something interesting to look at (keep in mind that newborns can only focus on things about 12 inches away from them, and it takes months for their eyesight to fully mature). Finally, I dragged out a stool to do it myself. My husband talked me down from the brink of madness (because lumbering my 9-month pregnant body onto a stool would have been madness indeed), the next day I gave birth, and the hippos were forgotten. In fact, they remain unhung to this day.

It's interesting how the change in seasons still brings back those primal "nesting" urges, even though as humans we don't necessary have our babies in the springtime.

(the painting is Spring by Alphons Mucha)

"I have lost to February"

February always seems to arrive just at the point when I can't take any more winter. Regardless of what the groundhog sees, February always teases me with some lovely, spring-like weather: just enough so I get excited about unpacking my sandals and summer clothes. Then February laughs and turns back into winter. Curse you, February!

I'm trying to make this blog more about my own thoughts and less about linking to other people, but often I find that someone else has said what I'm trying to say so perfectly that it would be a loss not to mention it. Today, I am thinking about a haunting Dar Williams song about two lovers whose relationship can't withstand the winter. It's called, appropriately, February:

And February was so long that it lasted into March
And found us walking a path alone together.
You stopped and pointed and you said, "That's a crocus,"
And I said, "What's a crocus?" and you said, "It's a flower,"
And I tried to remember, but I said, "What's a flower?"

On a day like today, when it is so gray and cold and it feels like it will never stop raining, it's hard to remember the meaning behind words like "spring" and "sunshine" and "joy."


(Melancholy by Edvard Munch)

A Pure and Perfect Mango

Many of you who know me in real life will be aware of my personal grail quest: the search for the perfect mango. I've eaten just one perfect mango, several close-to-perfect mangoes, and entirely too many terrible mangoes. I just don't have the knack for picking the good ones. But that doesn't stop me from trying.

The one in the photo, which I ate yesterday, was slightly less than perfect. The texture was good: firm, slippery, never stringy (if there's anything that makes my skin crawl more than a stringy mango, I don't know what it is). The flavor was a little off, a little too astringent, perhaps, but I was pleased with it. So pleased that I rushed out to buy four more mangoes from the same box at the same store. We'll see how that pans out.

There was a poem I wanted to quote in relation to mangoes and my often fruitless (ha!) pursuit of them. I know I have read--or heard--this poem somewhere in my past, and I know there is a line about eating a pure and perfect mango. I've been obsessing about it for hours and I think I have narrowed down the poet: Carolyn Forché. I think I attended one of her poetry readings and heard the poem there. It makes me crazy that I can't remember for sure. I pored over my bookshelf and discovered that I do own a book by Ms. Forché: Against Forgetting. Unfortunately, this is a collection she edited, and does not actually contain any of her work. Even the internet is silent on the subject of Carolyn Forché and mangoes.

I'm sure the poem wasn't about mangoes at all, more likely it was a poem about war or civil strife. Yet somehow I remember that one line, the ideal of the pure and perfect mango.

A eulogy, of sorts

In October 1995 I was just starting college: young, idealistic, naive. I was priveleged to attend a writer's conference with such local writers as David Lee (Utah's first Poet Laureate) and Leslie Norris. Norris was a Welsh poet influenced by Dylan Thomas (whoever he was) who moved to Utah in his later life. I was equally priveleged to attend a poetry reading by Professor Norris, which included the title poem from his most recent book of poetry, A Sea in the Desert. I described Leslie Norris in my journal that night as "an incredible man...with broad gestures (but small hands) and a worn but scarcely hidden Green-Isled accent".

My favorite stanza from his poem A Sea in the Desert goes like this:

A man is moon to his own sea --
he draws it after him,
like a dog it follows him
the days of his life.

You can read the poem in its entirety here. I love the way the shape of the poem echoes the rhythm of waves on a beach. Something about the idea that we each tug our own ocean along behind us really resonates with me. When I first heard this poem, I thought that this metaphorical ocean described the pool of our experiences, our "baggage", if you will, which we can try to share with each other but at the same time can only be completely understood within ourselves. A lonely idea, certainly, but to me the ocean was always the epitome of loneliness.

I was shocked and saddened when I learned, on preparing to write this post, that Professor Norris died last April. It makes me feel fragile and melancholy to learn that this man, who so inflenced me, who I haven't thought about in so many years, has passed on.

I still have the dog-eared and copiously annotated copy of A Sea in the Desert I purchased immediately following his reading. I noted the date inside, 10/11/95, but wish I had thought to have him sign it. I guess in the end a man's poetry is as much of a signature as anything else he could provide.

(art by JMW Turner (Dawn After the Wreck) and Hokusai (The Hollow of the Deep-Sea Wave off Kanagawa)

Global Warming: D'oh!

Global warming is real and it's "probably" our fault. Frankly, I'm surprised it took a team of scientists to figure this out, because who else's fault would it be? Oh right, the cows. Regardless of whose fault it is, here's a fun article from Newsweek about how we can't and won't do anything about it.

But I'm not here to get up on my soapbox about global warming. I'm no expert. I haven't read An Inconvenient Truth, I don't drive an electric car, and I haven't even seen the electric car movie (although I hope to do all of these things sooner than later).

No, I'm here to talk about the draft. Wait, I'm actually here to talk about the Bible. Again. I was watching The Search for Noah's Ark (one of my favorite Biblical subjects) on The History Channel the other day. In addition to searching for the physical location of Noah's big boat, various well-educated people were exploring theories about what (aside from the wrath of God, that is) might have caused such a large-scale flood that people would be talking about it for thousands of years. And the most interesting theory (to me, anyway), was that Noah's flood was caused by global warming. That's right. The Earth got too warm, the oceans started to rise, and the Mediterranean spilled into the Black Sea through a narrow isthmus. There is archealogical evidence of this, in fact, in the form of underwater beaches. While this may or may not be the origin of the Biblical flood story, it's certainly worth thinking about.

Am I saying global warming is not caused by humans, if it was happening thousands of years ago? Not really. The people in the Bible didn't have cars, but they certainly burned a lot of stuff (all those animal sacrifices, for one thing). I'm no scientist, but I don't think it's improbable that people could have been the cause of global warming all the way back then. What I'm really trying to say is that, when the oceans start rising, it's a big deal, and when they say that the oceans will rise 7-23 inches in the next 100 years, I find it pretty scary.

What should we do? Whatever we can, I guess. There are some good ideas here. Check out these awesome solar panels Japanese engineers are working on. Thanks, Japanese engineers! Maybe by the time I buy a house (or an ark) they'll have the technology perfected.


(edited to add that my awesome sister has listed some great suggestions for fighting global warming in the comments section: check it out!)

A womb of one's own

During my pregnancy, I became a bit obsessed with my growing womb: that tiny, secret place inside of me that expanded, as if by magic, to fit an entirely new life. Now that my literal womb is empty, I have started to think about metaphorical wombs. That is, the tiny secret places inside us where we nourish any new creation: writing, emotions, music, art, whatever. I'm sure some readers will find this metaphor distasteful, however, I feel compelled to mention it here. After all, we use the expression "brain-child," is it too much of a stretch to talk about a "brain-womb"?

As I go through this process of rediscovering my inner writer and poet, I am tidying up my symbolic womb to make it cozy for the new thoughts that will take up residence there. I am hanging wallpaper and glow-in-the-dark stars, I am stocking up on fleecy blankets, I am choosing soothing music. Most importantly, I trying to keep the noisy, angry thoughts away from this sanctuary, this nursery.

(edited to add that the photo is of Henry Moore's Mother and Child, on display in St. Paul's Cathedral)

Becoming a writer again

I started this blog primarily as a writing exercise.

This post was hard for me to put together, because I had to admit to myself that I'm no longer a writer. I used to be a writer; when I was in junior high and even younger I used to write constantly. Stories, journal entries, plays, it didn't matter. Around 9th grade I discovered poetry. Actually, that's not entirely true. I think my interest in poetry started with Dr. Seuss. I kept writing throughout high school, because I enjoyed it, felt I was good at it, and it satisfied that deep psychological need we all have to express ourselves. My writing style at that time may not have been very sophisticated or mature, but I was passionate and it felt good.

Then came college, where I majored in English, and found myself doing more assigned writing than I had ever imagined. I learned how to dissect a poem to its very elements of scansion and rhyme. I learned how to read with a critical eye. Sure, I had a lot of fun in college, and learned a lot about writing and how to do it, but it really robbed me of my desire to create writing myself. I found that I could no longer read my stuff objectively, I couldn't handle writing anything that wasn't perfect and didn't meet my own newfound criteria for excellence. And I discovered that I probably wouldn't be able to make a living solely by writing, at least not right away.

So eventually I stopped. Life happened, I became an "adult," I got married, got a job, made money, and had a baby. All along I still considered myself a writer, and kept promising myself I would start writing again soon. And finally, I did. Only to realize that I don't know how to write anymore. The words I want don't come to me the way they used to. I have a hard time describing the simplest things, like the way an apple tastes or the way a sunset looks. I'm not a writer. But I hope to be one again someday, and so I'm starting this blog as part of this larger goal. I always felt like I had talent as a writer, but maybe I was good at it just because I did it so much. Either way, I hope to get back to the euphoria I used to feel when I produced something that, to me at least, was good and satisfying.

The scariest thing for me is to allow other people to read my writing as I go through this process. But I think it's essential. And so, here I am. As Ray Bradbury wrote, "The trick is: knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out."

Welcome to my blog!

I love reading other people's blogs, and generally feel that I express myself best through writing. It was only a matter of time until I started a blog of my own. Enjoy!