Two Poems

I've always been inwardly insecure about my self-perceived inability to appreciate poetry. I just never felt like I got it, and that that fact somehow said something crucial about who I am as a person. But, I'm fed up with feeling that way! Here are two poems that I appreciate at face-value. Upon reading them once through, I felt like I was able to connect with the sentiment personally, and without extensive interpretation or analysis. Then I wanted to re-read them. Maybe people just like poems because they are pleasant to read, and that's enough? Or maybe I really just don't get it, but am finally ok with that aspect of my being:


Ah! how harshly the youth of the student passes,
While all around her, with passions ever fresh,
Other youths search eagerly for easy pleasures!
And yet in solitude
She lives, obscure and blessed,
For in her cell she finds the ardor
That makes her heart immense.

But the blessed time is effaced.
She must leave the land of Science
To go out and struggle for her bread
On the grey roads of life.
Often and often then, her weary spirit
Returns beneath the roofs
To the corner ever dear to her heart
Where silent labor dwelled
And where a world of memory has rested.

-Marie Curie, ca. 1893-1894

and:

One need not be a Chamber - to be Haunted -
One need not be a House;-
The Brain has Corridors - surpassing -
Material Place -
...
Ourself, behind ourself concealed -
Should startle most -
Assassin, hid in our Apartment
Be Horror’s least...

-Emily Dickinson, c. 1863

Well partly..

The Blue House by Tomas Tranströmer

The Blue House

It is a night of radiant sun. I stand in the dense forest and look away toward my house with its hazy-blue walls. As if I had just dies and was seeing the house from a new angle. It has stood for more than eighty summers. Its wood is impregnated with four times joy and three times sorrow. When someone who lived in the house dies, it is repainted. The dead person himself is painting, without a brush, from inside.

Beyond the house, open ground. Once a garden, now grown over. Stationary breakers of weed, pagodas of weed, welling text, Upanishads of weed, a viking fleet of weed, dragons heads of weed, lances, a weed empire! Across the overgrown garden flutters the shadow of a boomerang that is thrown and thrown again. It has something to do with a person who lived in the house long before my time. Almost a child. An impulse comes from him, a thought, a thought like an act of will: “make… draw….” To reach out of his fate.

The house is like a child’s drawing. A deputizing childishness that grew because someone—much too soon— gave up his mission to be a child. Open the door, step in! In here there’s unrest in the ceiling and peace in the walls. Above the bed hangs a painting of a ship with seventeen sails, hissing wave crests, and a wind that the gilt frame can’t contain.

It’s always so early in here, before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices. Thank you for this life! Still I miss the alternatives. The sketches, all of them, want to become real. A ship’s engine far away on the water expands the summer-night horizon. Both joy and sorrow swell in the dew’s magnifying glass. Without really knowing, we diving; our life has a sister ship, following quietly another route. While the sun blazes behind the islands.

From The Blue House, translated by Goran Malmqvist, published by Thunder City Press. Copyright © 1987 by Goran Malmqvist. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Slime molds?

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/10/04/science/20111004-SLIME.html

Wednesdays are demoralizing...

It's true--they are. My oranges have been peeling pretty sloppily lately. I can only imagine this guy's horoscope:



Grad school's much harder than anticipated. I'll make you a graph of my emotional well-being as a function of days of the week reminiscent of those oft-discussed study abroad feelings roller coasters, and give you a peek into my mental state these days. Warning: it's unstable. Give me an update-I'm desperate for some real correspondence.

How would you like to be a juice model?

This is a moment, not realized until captured.

Something to be remedied:

unforgivable.

The latest craze

I saw an ad somewhere for a company selling adorable little moss terrariums as home decor. They were super cute, but really pretty expensive for what they were. I spent a day (unemployment is the best) digging up moss and glassware, visiting my local model train hobby shop, and hand-painting tiny people. I feel pretty ok about how they turned out:





my dad liked it, so i made a similar one for his office:




Other than terrarium construction, I've been trying to unpack and settle into the new apartment. Outdated and messy pictures of it can be found on my friend Kevin's blog. Orientation begins Wednesday and classes on Monday, with a mandatory "get to know each other" canoe trip the Friday in between. I hate outside things. And ice-breakers.

Artist of the Week: Irma Boom

Making beautiful books

It takes two to make a thing go right

New Pet

Rocky has a new friend

Jane has new job

Inaugural post

It's our 2011 Inaugural post--BTSD has been in business for almost two years! (and is still the best gift, ever.)

Still at a crossroads, still unsure of everything, and still hoping you'll make it for Mardi Gras. If you make it down I can foot the lodgings since you'd be flying. Playing it by ear...

Today I tried to decide if I had a bigger girl crush on Lily Tomlin or Meryl Streep. I think it's Meryl, but it was sturprisingly hard for me to decide. Then surprisingly weird how long I thought about something so stupid, haha.

Now to Business; our Artist of the Month:


Jessica Harrison of the UK

Things of hers to look out for:
Twisted porcelain dolls (2010), the Oral Displays series (2008), Fly Lashes (google this separately), and pretty much all the other creepy shit she's made.

Can ya dig?