Susan Stinson

05:06 pm: Happy birthday, bounce_n_jiggle!
When I remember the experiences of unexpected abundance that you've created for so many people, it's no surprise that the phrase "movable feast" comes so strongly to mind when I think of you. Through your efforts, wrongs get redressed. People get re/dressed. And, despite everything, there often seem to be high gusts of joy emanating from your general vicinity.

I hope that you're having a truly beautiful day.

01:13 pm: Morning
Slow flurries of leaves like chips of light drifting over the bike path.

Also, yesterday, a very small snake wriggling past my front tire. I didn't see it until I had stopped to take off my sweater. Today, a squirrel almost ran in front of me, but changed its mind and whipped around so fast that its tail bent in a plush U at the edge of the path.

Tags: daily life, northampton, trike

05:16 pm: The Real Cost of Prisons Comix: Book and Reading
The Real Cost of Prisons Comix
Lois Ahrens and Ellen Miller-Mack



Wednesday, Oct. 22 at 7 pm
Broadside Bookshop | 247 Main Street | Northampton | MA |
From the Real Cost of Prisons Project

This newly-published volume contains all three of the comic books produced by the Real Cost of Prisons Project: "Prison Town: Paying the Price"; "Prisoners of the War on Drugs"; and "Prisoners of a Hard Life: Women and Their Children". Graphically and emotionally compelling, full of moving stories and straightforward information, this book is an education in the politics and human cost of mass incarceration

Lois Ahrens is the editor of this volume, and the founder and director of the Real Cost of Prisons Project.

Ellen Miller-Mack wrote the stories for two of the comics in the volume. She is a nurse practitioner who has worked with women in local jails.

The Real Cost of Prisons Project brings together activists, legal professionals, artists and others, to create educational resources that expose the effects of incarceration on individuals, community and nation.

" I cannot think of a better way to arouse the public to the cruelties of the prison system than to make this book widely available." ----Howard Zinn

Tags: politics, real cost of prisons

01:43 pm: Jonathan Edwards conference: Beauty, Christine Dixon
I was at a Jonathan Edwards conference this weekend, which had the theme on Jonathan Edwards on Beauty in Art, Nature and God.

Beauty was central to Jonathan Edwards's theology, and, although most of what I understand of it is from listening to scholars lecture, it's something I love about his thought. He writes of God as the supremely beautifying being, constantly creating beauty. He defines beauty (he distinguished between secondary and primary beauty) as cordial consent of being to being.

I love that. If beauty is consent of being to being, it's in motion. It's in relation to others, not static.

Also, one of the speakers this weekend quoted Jonathan Edwards as saying: Beauty leads to the self transcendent and enlarging practice of virtue.

I want to go there. Self transcendent and enlarging practice of virtue. I'd love to follow paths of beauty to ask that of myself.

When we were discussing this after one of the papers, I said, "As a fat woman in a culture which denies my beauty, although I continue to assert it, I have a question about Jonathan Edwards's use of corporal beauty."

That felt good. I hadn't ever spoken as part of the group at a Jonathan Edwards' conference before; I've only been listening. I've realized, after the past two weekends, that one of the things writing and researching this novel has been about for me is integration: trying to get to more internal wholeness, and let the edges of more of the things I care about touch each other, cordially, and to find the beauty in that frission or melting or transformation or exchange.

The paper was "'The Splendour of a Constant Eternity': The Heart and Beauty in the Trinitarian Theology of Augustine of Hippo and Jonathan Edwards," and it was quite gorgeous. It was by Christine Dixon, whom I had never met, and who died on her way from Australia to deliver it at the conference. I want to say here that her work moved me very much, and, in her death, which those who knew her were visibly feeling deeply, I saw -- again -- a welling of our common humanity, everybody's, and what I can only, or anyway, want to, call, again, beauty, the beauty of someone working as hard as she can with the tools and effort and patience she can muster and the help she can find, to approach what matters most to her. To us. The beauty of working hard, too, from where I am, and, at least at this one point, to have our work meet. To be self transcendent and enlarged in the practice of virtue as we try, and keep trying, until there is a place to stop. I'll be thinking of Chris, who I did not know, and her family and friends.

08:48 am: Coming to Northampton for Nolose?

• Northampton, Mass., is certainly a distinctive community. Jonathan Edwards was a minister there in the early 18th century, until he was sent packing; Smith College was a product of local philanthropy in the 19th; Calvin Coolidge was mayor in the early 20th. And the town experienced several decades of decline before a 1980's revival. Now it is the thriving home of a variety of outspoken minorities; two of the most visible, Kidder notes, are lesbians and psychotherapists. (A recent census, on which people were allowed to provide their own job descriptions, also yielded a stump grinder, a weapons technician, a fish smoker, a factotum and three millwrights.) Meanwhile, some tension lingers between the newcomers, who call the place ''Noho,'' and the longtimers, for whom it is ''Hamp.''



• You can get outstanding vegan cupcakes at Cafe Evolution in Florence. (But not every evening -- if in doubt, check the hours). In downtown Northampton, the Haymarket, Paul&Elizabeth's and Bela's are vegetarian restaurants (Haymarket is also a popular coffee house), and the best Indian food is at India Palace. I also want to recommend the Polish food at Sofia's Praise in Hadley. And the Mexican food at La Veracruzana in downtown Northampton. (It's true! It's good!)



• It's raining.

12:33 pm: High Garden Season
Counting my blessings:

• Last night, I went out to a chinese restaurant with friends for a birthday, and the celebrant, who is friends with the owner, brought along a bag of green beans from his garden and gave it to the kitchen, so we had a huge bowl of his own green beans with tofu - tender! delicious! gone fast! -- with the meal. The staff were working on preparing another heap of green beans on one of the tables in the dining room, but I hear that they do that all the time. Also, we were at a round table with one of those giant lazy susans that you could gently spin to get the dragon skin to come to you. We talked bees, donkeys, and adventurous photojournalists.



• My love brought more buckets of tomatoes. Yesterday, I made a brazilian salsa with her peppers and tomatoes, then poured it over salmon and baked it with some of her zucchini. I poured it all over some greens before I ate it. Yum!



• I made my mama's biscuits for breakfast, and had them with a kind of fritatta with eggs from my beloved's hens, onion, garlic, zucchini, tomato and monterey jack.



• I had left over biscuit dough, so I baked it in a pie pan, and think I might make a tomato pie. Also pepperonata from some of the sweet peppers. Then I'm going to make a sauce from the rest of the tomatoes, shred the zucchini, and freeze it for winter.

Tags: daily life

08:33 pm: Tomatoes
I put the soapstone that used to be the top of a woodstove on the burner (electric), cut the stems off a tabletop full of very ripe tomatoes, squeezed out some of the juiciness, stuck four cloves in an onion, threw in a bag of little carrots, some peppers from the garden, basil, marjoram, oregano, thyme, and simmered for some hours. I really like the cloves in there, and the way the carrots gave up their sweetness and thickening texture. I haven't decided if this is a soup or a sauce, but it tastes beautiful, and there's plenty of it to be both.

Also, while I waited: toast with a little bit of leftover pesto, a little fresh mozzarella, and a slice of perfect tomato.

Also, the seedling that I picked up on the street back in June, the one under the sign about what kind of heirloom tomatoes these were that passersby were being urged to take for free, turned out to have tomatoes the size of marbles that taste so sweet.

Tags: daily life

12:15 pm: Letting the Past Testify
I loved the review of Marilynne Robinson's new novel in the current issue of the New Yorker.

I need to find her essay, "Puritans and Prigs." Here's a quote that the reviewer, James Wood, uses in his review:

We are forever drawing up indictments against the past, then refusing to let it testify in its own behalf -- it is so very guilty, after all. Such attention as we give it is usually vindictive and incurious and therefore incompetent.

Is the past more guilty than the present? Is that a useful question to think about when considering our own responsibilities to the world as it is now?

Tags: marilynne robinson

10:56 pm: The Fair
The fair. Oh, the fair. It is sparse and thick, at the same time. I got two free tickets this year. (The fairgrounds adjoin my street, which means lots of noise and traffic. Some years I find an envelope in my mailbox with free tickets, and some years I don't.) This afternoon, I went.

• I caught the very end of the youth talent show auditions, which featured a group from Holyoke called Scarlet Sky, playing loud rock and doing a head-shaking near head-banging thing in choreographed unison in their black t-shirts and studded belts. I only saw the big finish, but liked both their rebellious attitudes and the open way they hugged their moms when they were done. The drummer (I think) had a skull cap with a row of little skull and crossbones painted on it, another had what looked like spats -- one black and white checked and one pink with patterns -- over his keds. The one woman had a streaked shag, a resurrection t-shirt, and bandannas -- come to think of it, the spats could have been made of bandannas, too.
  
  I was making notes on my yellow pad as I made all of these fashion observations (it's a little slow at the fair; I'd brought a book about Mrs. Dickens' recipes, too), when the young woman's mom called over to me across the folding chairs, "Hey, are you drawing?"
  
  I was startled, but held up the page to show her. "I'm writing."
  
  "Oh. She thought you were drawing her." At the same time, her daughter said, "I was like, whoa." She sounded a little impressed by the idea of being drawn, despite being in a rock n roll band. The fact that it was writing, not drawing, meant that there were no further questions.



• I am seriously starting to recognize the line dancers in their black skirts, white shirts, fringed shawls and black boots. A few are my size, and I'd say most are my age or older. They came on after the youth talent show auditions. I wonder if, one year, they'll start to recognize me.



• I had a delicious golumpki. I also had a small chocolate milkshake at the dairy barn from the 4-H. The shake, not to be confused with a frappe, has gone up to $1 after many years of being fifty cents.



• There was wrestling in front of the grandstand. New this year. I only watched a bout or two, but before they started, the burly bald guy in charge stood in the little padded ring and announced that the world of wrestling had lost a great because Walter Kowalski died this morning. He said that some of the wrestlers in the troupe had studied with him, and he called them all out of the dressing room to stand in around the ring in a moment of silence. It was clearly sincere, and made the weird and probably pretty hard-to-do dance of the wrestling that followed seem all the more strange.



• I caught just a little of the good polka band in the music tent (same one as last year), with its following of dancers, most notably, as I watched, an elegant old man. The polka band took a break, so I wandered off to the beer shed, where the Soul Sensations, who had excellent voices and were working hard in this way that I love in musicians at the Three County Fair, were singing "Bad Girls," one of those disco songs from the peak of my yearning youth, when I definitely would have made spats out of bandannas if only I'd thought of it.

Tags: fair

05:57 pm: Del Martin

I only heard Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon speak once. It was at the National Women's Studies Conference in Boston in 2000, and it was in a huge, very hot room. I was in the back, in front of one of maybe two fans, and I could barely hear Del in the front. If I leaned forward, though, I could tell what she was doing. She was giving a history of actions she'd been involved in, and she was listing names, trying to make sure that we knew how many others had been involved in the work she and Phyllis had done over the years, that they were part of communities and movements, and that what every single person had contributed had mattered. I was sweating and irritable, about to get a bus home, but now, I'm so glad that I was there, and heard the faint, strong voice of Del Martin doing that.

May her work be honored and remembered. May the ones who knew and loved her find the things they need to mourn.

ETA, via fflo

A blog entry by Del's friend Kate, of the National Center for Lesbian Rights

Del Martin Obituary

Tags: deaths

02:34 pm: Plant History and BP
I love trying to consider history with organisms other than humans in mind. It's good for perspective and calms the nerves. For instance, here is a very thorough Plant Trivia Timeline. Sample:

1554  First written record of the tomato.  Italians grew the plant by about 1550.  Thomas Jefferson was the first American to grow tomatoes, in 1781.  Tomatoes were eaten in New Orleans by 1812.  George W. Carver dedicated himself to promoting the tomato, in addition to his work on peanuts.

Also, I just learned this:

Archaeologists use the term BP to mean "years Before the Present", which avoids the whole philosophical debate about AD and BC versus CE and BCE. The only trouble is, the Present, of course, changes every year. Since the BP designation was at least originally associated with radiocarbon dating, archaeologists chose the year 1950 as 'the present'. Radiocarbon dating was invented in the late 1940s, and, also, atmospheric nuclear testing was begun in the 1940s, which makes, at least the theory goes, radiocarbon dates after 1950 virtually useless, anyway.

09:16 am: Noah's Ark
I just noticed that an excerpt from Noah's Ark, Judith Frank's novel-in-progress, is up on the NEA site.

Judy is a lovely person, with a life that keeps getting fuller and fuller in such gorgeous ways. She brings heart, nerve and ambition to her writing, taking on the most charged subjects and insisting on the complexity of her characters. And she's generous with her critical eye -- she's brought such passion and nuance to the critiques she's given Spider in a Tree.

This taste of her novel-in-progress this morning made me want to praise her.

Tags: judy frank, writing

07:56 pm: Reservoir
Today I rode to the reservoir in Leeds. I haven't been there before, in all the years I've lived here. It is past the end of the bike path, past Look Park, and there is a big hill on the way, since this is the beginning of the rise into the hill towns above the Connecticut River Valley. I wasn't at all sure I could make it, but I put on my swimsuit, brought a jar full of ice water, a pear, and a bunch of my stuff in a bag, and tried. The hill on Florence Road had me gasping, and I finally got off and walked for a little while. I wasn't sure how much farther the reservoir was, and there was also a pretty big downhill that made me nervous for the ride home, but, once I got there, it was perfect. A little sandy beach, other people on bikes pulling up, families. I put down my towel and walked into the cold water. It's a river, marked off with rope and floats for swimming. Lots of kids, and lots of room. There were many little fishes in the water. A very tan and friendly woman told me the sandiest place to walk in, to avoid the rocks. The water was cold and lovely after all of that effort, and I was langorous. I floated on my back, and swam to a far corner, then back. There were foamy bits on the surface.

When I got out on the beach, a chubby little boy showed me his rubbery chain of flowers, which twirled and bounced, and told me the story of his only sunburn. I read bits of The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice for Writers, by Betsy Lerner, the pieces at the back about what editors want from writers and what writers want from editors, and about the life of the book itself, once it's bought. It's not good for daydreaming about books, but it's a bracing reminder of some common points of view of people who work within the industry. I'd been enjoying reading my Dickens biography, which, itself, was a study in a dazzlingly successful career as a novelist and some of its costs. But I'd finished the biography, and the beach, with the water in front of me and the ride home still ahead, was a good place to think a little bit about the publishing industry, with plenty of gritty sand and the story of a sunburn so bad that a little boy had to take a shower instead of a bath to put it in perspective.

There was also a little girl walking very purposefully down the beach, saying to herself, "Something is wrong. Something is wrong." I looked up, but couldn't see what was the matter. Finally, in the water, she shouted, "Something is wrong, and IT'S TADPOLES!!!" She went running up the beach, and the next time I saw her, she had a jar full of green water, trying to catch some of the very present small fishes.

Also, I saw a garter snake before I set off, small and fast, there in the dirt near where I park my trike. Such a good late summer day.

I saved my legs for the one hill, but, mostly, it was coasting, all the way home.

Tags: daily life, dickens, northampton, publishing, trike

08:36 am: Boys on the Bike Path
On Wednesday evening, I was riding my trike on the bike path to go to the house of friends for dinner. Near the beginning of the path, a group of maybe twelve or so boys (junior high age? or high school?), came out of the wetlands on their bikes and gathered in a big clump across the path in front of me. They were some distance away, but, immediately, I heard the overexcited, loud voice of a kid looking my way and saying rude things about my body, intended, I think, both to be heard by me and so be hurtful, and also, for sure, to be noticed by his friends for wit and nerve in breaking the ordinary rules of how people treat each other.

He decided it would be funny to break away from his friends and ride his bike as hard as he could directly at me, looking me right in the eyes, and yelling, "Aw, shit," over and over. It was very theatrical, the joke being that I was so huge that he was in terrible danger that I would crush him. He actually was putting both of us in some danger, because that was some stupid bike riding. I just kept going, so if it was also a game of chicken, he lost. It played out without other commentary -- his friends didn't laugh or move, at least until, glaring and relieved, I finally rode by the big group, and a couple of them muttered something about heavy machinery.

Dinner was beautiful and abundant. So good to see my friends.

I haven't replaced my bike light yet (it's $60, and when I took it into the shop, they said to try cleaning the corrosion on the inside with steel wool, but the result was that I went from having uncertain light to none at all), but I'd brought a flashlight to strap to the handlebars with bungy cords for the darkness of the path, away from streetlights, on the ride home. First I had it strapped wrong, so all of the light went up into the trees, but it was pitch dark at the start of the path, and I rode off the edge into dirt right away because I couldn't see. So I adjusted the light. The part of the path that goes through Florence was easy, since there were lights from the town to help me see, but just before I got back to a darker section, a rider with no lights, who, in my quick glimpse of him looked like another boy, slipped onto the path in front of me from the street. He stayed just in front of me for the rest of the path, and I had to keep adjusting my flashlight to catch his reflectors so I wouldn't run into him.

It's almost poetry now: the shapes farther up the path, approaching or riding away, the kind of ugly thoughts they pulled out of me, and also the beauty. One of the things that sticks with me is how clearly I saw the first boy, the one who charged me, as I stared into his face. I saw his moment of calculation before he started yelling. I had on sunglasses, so he would have missed my eyes, but my face must have been so present for him, too. And then, on the way home, the flickering shape in front of me, comfort and obstacle both, maybe wanting to stay on the asphalt with my little capsule of light, maybe wanting the company, too.

Tags: fat, trike

09:51 am: An Exact Replica of a Figment of my Imagination
I've got an enormous amount of respect and affection for Elizabeth McCracken, as a writer and as a human being. She's got a memoir coming out in September, and there is an excerpt from it up now at O magazine:

This Does Not Have To Be A Secret

This is how it starts:

Once upon a time, before I knew anything about the subject, a woman told me that I should write a book about the lighter side of losing a child.

(This is not that book.)


The memoir is called An Exact Replica of a Figment of my Imagination, and you can pre-order it here.

Tags: books, elizabeth mccracken

10:22 am: What does my writing owe my neighbors?
There are dangers here of parochialism, isolation, and romanticizing home (who makes it, at what cost; what happens there; who gets to stay and who gets to leave and who has to stay and who has to leave), but, still, this is speaking to me this morning:

To stay at home is paradoxically to change, to move. When poets -- and people of any other calling -- stay at home the first thing they move away from is professionalism. They move away from "professional standards." Their work begins to develop under pressure of questions not primarily literary: What good is it? Is it at home here? What do the neighbors think of it? Do they read it, any of them? What have they contributed to it? What does it owe them?

from "Notes: Unspecializing Poetry," in Standing by Words by Wendell Berry


PS: A old school bus painted green and white with THE VEGAN BUS painted on its side just had a hard time making the corner to drive down my narrow street. They gave a little toot of a honk a bit farther down. I wonder what's going on at the fairground this weekend! Okay, I just googled: The Vegan Bus. Either they are going to the Hunter/Jumper horse show at the fairgrounds, or some of them just live around here.

Tags: daily life, writing

07:48 am: Insight
Over a few weeks, I got into a rhythm with this round of revision of my novel. I had already gone through the manuscript, moved big chunks around, marked passages with ideas or just the desire for more depth, and made a table listing all of the chapters with their dates (refining an effective grasp on when actual events happened and how that relates to the narrative needs of the novel has definitely been one of the ongoing challenges; for instance, how to keep continuity and a sense of urgency when I'm making leaps of years...), bullet lists of each chapter's content, and ideas for editing. I'd never done anything like that before, and it really helped me to have a way to see the structure of the book at a glance.

The book had twenty five chapters at the start of this revision, and twenty three at the end of it. The first four chapters went more slowly, but I got into a rhythm of revising a chapter a day. Since my lap top crashed, and I work much better out of the apartment, I was going to the public library every morning with with folders full of paper. Every morning, working in 45 minute chunks with 15 minute breaks (I love that!) I'd read and edit what I'd done the day before, then start to work on the next chapter. When I finished, I'd usually swim or go somewhere on the trike, then at night at home, I'd type up the changes I'd made and print them out to read the next morning.

I was pretty immersed, and making big changes (I've cut more than seventy pages over the course of two revisions), and it became pleasurable in a kind of light, stringent way. I kept getting clear ideas that seemed simple and right to me about things that I'd been struggling with, in the pool or on the trike or in bed. A lot of the work was about pushing the emotional and dramatic tension that I feel pulsing so strongly in the story closer to the surface so that it helps pull the reader with human urgency through a story about religion in the eighteenth century. No one else has read the whole manuscript yet, but I've got some really strong, good response to the beginning of the book. (I knocked on the side of the wooden drawer of my desk when I said that. No jinx.)

Last week I read an article in the The New Yorker about scientists trying to trace how insight works in the brain. Here's an abstract of the article. I was interested because a lot of what the journalist, Jonah Lehrer, was describing was consistent with the experience I was having of solving difficult problems in the book. This is one thing I found interesting:

[Psychologist Jonathan] Scholler had demonstrated that it was possible to interfere with insight by making people explain their thought process while trying to solve a puzzle -- a phenomenon he called "verbal overshadowing." This made sense to Jung-Beeman, since the act of verbal explanation would naturally shift activity to the left hemisphere, causing people to ignore the more subtle associations coming from the right side of the brain.

For me, something about that feels true, even if everything is happening in words.

Tags: novel in progress, writing

06:24 pm: Trike Chain
( The chain came off three times. Every time, someone stopped. )

Tags: trike

08:13 pm: Brown Accordion Folders
I've been revising on paper, lugging copies of the manuscript up to the library in the basket of my trike. I've been working from a manuscript from April that's all marked up, a clean copy of an interim manuscript in which I've made some big cuts and restructuring moves, a chapter outline with dates, summaries and ideas for revision, and a yellow legal pad. Plus, timelines, notes on spiders and insects, and such.

I've been carrying everything in a sturdy black canvas shopping bag with a broken zipper that Sally brought me from this year's AWP. Sometimes I've had to put that into a plastic garbage bag to get my papers home dry in the rain. All of my papers and folders barely fit in the bag (hence, the broken zipper). There's a brown accordion folder that I've been using for the April manuscript and a legal sized expanding marbled brown paper portfolio with a fold-over flap that has both a snap and a built-in rubber band to keep it shut for the interim manuscript. These two old fashioned folders have become beautiful with wear. I already loved the accordion folds and now some of them have gone feathery. I've had to reinforce the edges with silver duct tape, which shines. I love the work they've done for me in containing my unruly book, and I love how they are changing texture from the friction of this revision.

Tags: daily life, jonathan edwards, novel in progress

09:37 pm: Friday Night at the Morgan Horse Show
I had the fan on in the bedroom last night, so I couldn't hear the loudspeaker from the fairgrounds, but when I walked past the open window in the kitchen, an auctioneer was doing clear, fast bidding patter. "$20,000, I've got 20. 20. 20. 20 can I get 21. 21. 21.50. Can I get 22? 25? 25? 25? In or out? 25. 25. Believe I would. 25. 25." It, whatever it was, sold for $24,000, to benefit something.

Then another announcer came on, and they started blasting -- surprise me! -- YMCA! Encouraged by the dj, people sang along with the chorus. Then he said, "I know it's been stormy all week, so here's The Weather Girls." Sure enough, It's Raining Men.

I have a very distinct memory of throwing myself into dancing to It's Raining Men at a lesbian bar in Central Square in Boston in the early eighties, having a little argument in my head with the lyrics, because I was like that, but every time I tried to make it rain somebody besides just men, I started thinking too hard about it raining any big old bulky person at all, so I gave it up, and just danced.

Who would have thought the Morgan horse show's Friday party would blast all that into my kitchen?

Tags: daily life, northampton