Ten things about today (Tuesday edition) 11.10.

1. "Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat" just came on shuffle. Today is going to be a good day.

2. I am pulling together a new chapbook, tentatively titled any number of ridiculous things, although at the moment, I'm thinking of calling it "Spindle". Thus far it is comprised of several imagined biographies of Sylvia Plath (blame my reading Rough Magic with the fervor of a woman possessed), the eyelashes poem I wrote for my sister this summer, my first stabs at persona (from the voices of EBB and ED, what can I say, I am just that nerdy), "Yes, Virginia" which previously appeared in the zine I sold at my Providence show, and an as-yet-unwritten poem called "Ted Hughes Bakes a Cake".

3. The last of the poems I have collected for this new book is a love letter to my typewriter called "Smith-Corona", which will immediately follow this epigraph, a line from a letter written by Eddie Cohen for Sylvia Plath:

And will your husband, whoever he may be,
find contentment in talking to you or making love to you
while you are banging on a typewriter?

It was too perfect. And I had already written the poem. I love the way the stars align sometimes.

4. I have a stack of library books at least the height of my leg, all of them for a final that needs to be roughly eight pages. To say that I have actively planned on going overboard is an understatement. I am horrified at myself and apprehensive that if I allow this behavior to continue on unchecked, that I will end up miserable in a graduate school library somewhere writing a dissertation on madness in the canon of women writers with a focus on the twentieth century. Or maybe that apprehension is excitement. Or maybe I've just been awake for too many hours without breakfast.

5. Tonight is Slam Collective, as is every Tuesday. Steve Subrizi is featuring. It promises to be highly amusing, with a sprinkling of quiet profundity. Tuesdays have turned into weekends-- last week, we finished my handle of bourbon, played several debauched and raucous rounds of Apples to Apples, and stayed up much later than my normal threshold. My living room is the apparent hangout spot, and now that it has been cemented, I feel a little overwhelmed by that. I am not a hostess the way I used to be a hostess. I feel all flustered and underprepared whenever such a large group of people plant themselves in my house and drink out of my glassware.

6. I am taking a course on the Bloomsbury Group. I know I mentioned this yesterday, but I am still geeking out about getting to spend classroom time with Woolf for the fourth time in my college experience. Not that I don't spend countless personal hours talking about her work, but that's just because I cannot help myself. Cass was presenting on Christina Rossetti in our Woman & Poet class yesterday and besides laughing where I knew wombats could (and should!) fit into that conversation, I also had to laugh when she brought up Coleridge's addiction to opiates because I knew that somehow we could work in her "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" tattoo if we really tried. And then a small part of me got sad that my Woolf tattoo wasn't finished (and won't be for awhile) and also will never be visible to the bulk of the population. Whenever someone sees it in its natural habit (my ribs, for those of you who don't know), it is always something of a surprise. I can't wait to get more work done on it, even if it's just for me.

7. Moz says, "most people keep their brains between their legs."

8. I am getting seriously apprehensive for next semester. I only have one major assignment left for this one - that paper I'm seriously over-researching - aside from turning in my general portfolio, and I am antsy to finish all the silly paperwork and just GET ON WITH IT ALREADY. I hate hate hate hate hate red tape.

9. After spending so much time cruising New England last week in Wendeline, I kind of miss driving. Not that I'd want a week like that again, at least not in the near future, but I am a little too happy with the open road to say I'll never do something like that again. I keep erecting dreams off in the distance - of tour next January, or a road trip at all after I graduate next December - and though they are still so far off, I know I'll get there eventually.

10. I find myself missing Providence more than ever lately, and there's really no explanation for it beyond the understandables (my sister, my summer, getting writing done like nobody's business). But in addition to all of that, there's something more, something I can't put my finger on. Maybe I just miss feeling at home. Hampshire is comfortable, especially in this unseasonable warmth we've stumbled into the past few days, but it isn't home. It's trying though.

Spring pre-registration, and wombats.

Registration for spring classes never ends up the way I expect it to. I go into the day with a list and end up not actually taking any of the listed classes. This year, it was the advance writing seminar and a poetry workshop with a professor I really enjoy; too bad both of these courses conflict with a special class at Smith about Woolf's intellectual circle. I think I'm going to take my second class at UMass instead, some upper level class on writing experimental fiction, which is perfect for my thesis. All is well, just in a very different form that was in my mind when I woke up this morning.

The wombat above has very little to do with this, except that Cass is preparing to present on Christina Rossetti in the class we have to be at in roughly five minutes, and Christina Rossetti's pre-Raphaelite painter brother had a wombat he got through the mail. He wrote it an ode. It will be on her soon-to-exist blog. I silently pressured her into a Twitter account, and the blog is coming, I promise. I am a bad influence when it comes to technology.

Good morning.

Let's sit in the sun and read aloud to one another today. It won't be this warm out for much longer.

Cheers from the land of academia!

The fever pitch of the week has somewhat subsided, and now Cass and have confined ourselves to the living room (mostly because the cold is party prohibitive, or maybe we are just already spinsters) to do research for a final paper not due for another month. She is reading Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography, and I am reading Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath. I suppose our friends don't refer to our place as the Lady Poet House for nothing.

Other than that, peppermint schnapps and hot cocoa all around, and I welcome winter-- I dare the cold to breathe on me like it's January. Just watch, Western Mass, I will defy you. I will continue wearing slip dresses under my wool coat until the bitterest of nights, and there is nothing anyone can do about it!

We are perhaps bordering on a cautionary tale: buried in library books, enthusiastically reading passages aloud to one another, making exclamations about the ways in which women of the canon were crippled by the expectations of their environments but still somehow managed the life of a writer (too frequently at the price of great personal strife), and then, on a lighter note, getting mildly delirious--

Me: "You can't italicize a picture..."
Cass: "It's not done. It's just not done, Emily."

Ten things about today.

1. I am reading a psychoanalytic perspective on Sylvia Plath's work at the reference desk called Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence. It is very wordy and from the seventies. I am not sure if the writer is angry at Plath for her suicide or defending her behavior in talking about her schizoid personality and its manifestations in her work. Basically nerding it out for the first time in weeks. I have a taken a turn towards the academic, a process of throwing myself back into books that I tend to restart every time I get seriously overwhelmed by the rest of the world. Case in point: last winter, from about January to early April.

2. I am concerned that all of this reading about Plath is going to make me psychoanalyze my own writing. I don't think I'm ready for that, but I'm also pretty sure I wouldn't even know how to go about it in the first place. David Holbrook, in the aforementioned text, has thus far talked a good deal about Plath's reliance on an interior world to support her when her articulations were not understood by their intended audience. To be plain, she retreated inside of herself looking for answers when no one else had any for her, because no one understood her questions. He argues that her answer was the wrong one, quite passionately, saying a bunch about the glorification of modernist literature in the current (1970s) school system being responsible for rampant narcissism and nihilism.

3. The facsimile of the original manuscript for Ariel is one of the required texts for the class I'm doing all this research reading for. We haven't gotten to it in discussion yet, but we will soon, and I have to do a presentation. All the included scans of her type-written final drafts (in the order that she originally intended!!!) live at one of the Smith libraries. I suspect that I will soon make a pilgrimage, so that I may cry, and swoon, and wonder aloud what has changed about Smith since she went there on scholarship forever ago.

4. My aunt sent me a Halloween card from West Palm Beach. I never get mail, and I was definitely not expecting any from her. It had birthday money in it, which made me wonder why she didn't just send a birthday card.

5. I skipped work this morning because the pile-up of exhaustion from the events of the past week proved too crippling for me to get out of bed. I literally opened my laptop, which was next to my face, wrote a two-line email to my supervisor about feeling "under the weather" and hit send, promptly falling back asleep with my hand still on the keyboard. I did not write anything while asleep, but I kind of wish I had.

6. Every Thursday we end up talking about some aspect of space in our poetry workshop. I mostly blame Charley for this. Today's space topic was the space program during the Cold War. Sophia whispered to me that "cosmonaut" is one of her favorite-sounding words, much better than "astronaut". I would probably agree that "cosmonaut" sounds better to me, but that's probably only because I am less familiar with it.

7. I am getting very tired of my vocabulary. I need to read a book translated from another language so that I can think about sentence constructions differently. This method usually yields great results-- last semester, my seminar on the contemporary European novel drastically altered my writing. I produced some of the cleanest prose I ever have as an indirect result of the reading I did over those few months. I think I'll email the professor and ask for some suggestions, although she'll probably just recommend that I read more Sebald, and then I'll get terribly depressed and have World War nightmares that only subtly hint at what is truly going on in the background.

8. Kat Mott is sitting in my living room waiting for me to leave work. I feel like an over-acheiving employee for staying ten minutes past the end of my shift, especially because there's no one here to even see if I show up or not.

9. Cassandra bought groceries, the (arguable) best of which is my current favorite snack: Ruffles and Philadelphia cream cheese. Esme and I discussed the delightfulness of chips and cream cheese today, and it seems like we three have stumbled onto a goldmine of simple yet delicious snack food. Although Cass keeps buying fat free cream cheese, which sometimes creeps me out if I think about it too hard.

10. I have to do a presentation on the origins of microfiction tomorrow afternoon and have not done a lick of work for it. Time to slave over some photocopies of Baudelaire.

Dress-up box, and the historical girl-crushes of the week.

Playboy U named Hampshire # 21 on the list of top party schools in the country this year and while I'm not sure if that's entirely accurate (I mean, since when does a predisposition to decriminalized smokables a party school make?), our biggest party of the year is tonight, and I still have no idea what to wear.

Halloween is an event I change my mind about until the very last possible moment. But here's what I'm thinking at this sleepless moment:

>



Edie Sedgwick is what most biographers would call one of the Silver Factory's first "superstars". I am more likely to call her one of Warhol's many casualties. Regardless, she seems an appropriate costume, being that I've been living in my fur hooded coat and black tights lately. The only thing left to accomplish is the silvery hair and the eye make-up, and man, did she know how to do up her eyes. Yes, yes, this is who I am dressing up as tonight. I just wish I had a leopard-skin pillbox hat.

And then, there is that business of the Dead Poets Slam, which throws a kink into everything. I made it to the finals as Denise Levertov (a feat that flabbergasted my poetry professor, who said he was sure that Levertov would never work in a slam; however, I was one of the high scorers of the night) and so I have to show up in the library gallery looking decidedly un-"superstar":



Even if they may have both been stars in their various cosmos around the same time, that's about the end of the similarities between my two chosen Halloween personas. Incidentally, they are also my girl-crushes of the week (but really of forever: my eternal style icon and my first favorite poet of college who made me fall in love with sharks all over again).

Anyway, I'm off to turn in my thesis proposal and then do some serious writing for my last class of the week, which frustratingly absorbs the bulk of a much needed afternoon -- Georgie wants a haircut, Charley wants me to take him shopping for costume supplies, and then there's this whole business of the slam that I have to prepare for. A few extra hours in the day would probably be nice, but wait a second, isn't Daylight Savings Time this weekend? Oh wait, it's the bad version. Fuck.

Armagedon.

let the light in

It's Charley's birthday party (as an aside, happy happy birthday Charley, and fuck you for having your party during a MONSOON), which apparently makes it the end of the world tonight? At least that's what we're told by the theme of the party. I somehow interpreted this to mean that I needed Egyptian make-up. Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies.

I have a somewhat serious sewing project in the works. Not serious in that the outcome is somehow crucial, but in that the skin on my right middle finger is a little bit angry at me (meaning that it is somewhat mangled since all of my sewing callouses have disappeared). It has a fair amount tot do with Halloween. Coincidentally, Charley will probably be very jealous when he sees it.

It feels like everything I say lately is "I was going to go to college for fashion design" / "I was going to go to college for painting" / "I was going to go to college for graphic design" / "I was going to go to school for _______". Odd that all of this comes out just as I'm getting my thesis project together in order to graduate. I am such a public mess. Check for updates about that whole writing thing over on Fiction Pays The Bills (I swear I'll update it soon, really).

This day is shark bait.

Lots to buzz about. A one Jack McCarthy is storming the Northeast, and I had the exquisite pleasure of seeing him perform on two consecutive evenings, once in my own Hampshire backyard (for an hour! for free!!!) and then for the second time on my weekly excursion to Cambridge. I also gave Sam a pretty decent haircut. On the way back from Boston, I sang at the top of my lungs almost the entire way, and it was amazing. I even made the weird Alanis noises that Alanis makes in her songs. My throat felt very 90s afterwards. Katie and I laughed at my need to make such ludicrous noises, but we also decided that one of the main factors predisposing us to feminism was our childhood love/unhealthy obsession with Alanis. Yay Canada!

In "real life", one of my poetry professors told me that I am too "emotionally hard" on myself after reading selections from the manuscript of my 365 project. This impromptu meeting about the manuscript cut into the first twenty minutes of a class where I was meant to be discussing the poetry of Emily Brontë, but beyond that, it probably made me be even more hard on myself for being hard on myself in the first place.

And I got semi-lost driving to North Station, which is stupid, because North Station has signs for it everywhere. Google Maps, you are thoroughly inadequate when it comes to navigating Boston. I propose that someone create some sort of exhaustive GPS designed only for navigating Boston, one that actually recognizes what road you are on, and tells you to turn down streets that aren't one ways headed in the opposite direction. Yeah! Hop to it, Somebody!

I am using exclamation points a lot more frequently than I normally would. This can probably be attributed to the fact that I am over-tired in a way that is generally unacceptable for the level at which I must function on a given Thursday. I just want to curl up in bed with my shark and take a long long nap while someone else does my laundry, fixes me a hot dinner that isn't leftover pizza rewarmed in the toaster oven, and then maybe crawls in bed next to me. We all know how likely that is to happen.

Workshop in my an hour, with two of my poems on the chopping block. I will reiterate here for effect, I just want to crawl into bed with Grössby.