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He's the best-looking corpse in the room
Feb. 14th, 2012 08:20 pm
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 1, which is the high for the day; hanging there since 1 p.m. Melting light snow pretty much all day. Back above normal yesterday, and again today, for the 23rd day in the last 25. So far in 2012: 33 days above normal, 13 days below normal. (By way of comparison, in 2002, the year winter forgot, there had been--at a glance--seven below-normal days to this point, and maybe seven more by the end of March. Last year, it looks like there had been about 29 below-normal days to this point.)
It strikes me, though, that thinking of poems is probably something like seeing pictures to take. You walk around with a camera, and everything looks like a picture. If I'm sitting here looking for poems, probably I can find one in my cat's weird collection of bird calls and snorts and wails and beeps. Whether it would be a poem I would like would be another matter. I was looking through some Ted Hughes poems last night, thinking that it seems like the guy just writes down everything he can think of or something. (I often think of a thought I thought when I first read a bunch of Leonard Cohen's poems: I think this guy doesn't really know whether a given poem he's written is any good or not. I think about that in relation to the advice I'd give to grad students about submitting papers (which I was talking about in a comment back there a bit ago): it's not your job to figure out whether what you've got is good enough; it's your job to do as much on it as you can, and then give it to someone else whose job is to figure out whether it's good enough. Well, you know, generally speaking. Anyway, the thing is, eventually you get to be Leonard Cohen, and whatever you've got is good enough just because you're Leonard Cohen. Or Robert Frost, or whoever.) I feel like probably I couldn't write poems like that because I want any poem I write to be the best damn poem I could possibly write, but when I think about it, I guess I kind of did used to write poems that way, back in the year or two as an undergrad that I wrote a fair number of poems (including one or two aping William Carlos Williams a bit). One night there was going to be a lunar eclipse, so I went out and sat by the river and tried to watch it as a poet, like you might try to watch it as a photographer. I wrote something about how the eclipsed moon was like a hard-boiled egg yolk rolling up the salt of the sky. Yeah, not too good. But most poems are not too good, almost all of them, really. But it would be like anything else, wouldn't it--the more not-too-good ones you run through, the more pretty good ones you end up with. Setting out to just write the pretty good ones and skip the not-too-good ones is not a good strategy. (I'm not really sure whether I've been stuck the last few years with the same problem about writing philosophy papers--that I want every one to be the best damn paper I could possibly write. I did resolve a few years ago to quit writing papers about things just because I like them ... which I guess you could say has had the undesirable side-effect of keeping me from writing anything about Nietzsche. But it doesn't take resolution not to write about Nietzsche; it would feel unholy to write about Nietzsche just for the hell of it ... or just because I might lose the Nietzsche course if I don't.)
Here's the best thing I've found on the internet in a while: an up-to-the-minute star chart for Toronto. You'd think it wouldn't be hard to find something like that, but I've been looking intermittently for years and just came across this one yesterday. And so today I have discovered for the first time in my life, unbelievably, that the Big Dipper revolves around the Little Dipper (which rotates, roughly, around Polaris), after noticing that the Big Dipper was above the Little Dipper this afternoon, after being below the Little Dipper last night (and realizing that the sky extends past the Earth's axis, which is one of those things that's obvious, but only if you think about it). It also occurred to me, looking at the chart last night and thinking about how it all works, that probably the reason I notice the Big Dipper in the summer and Orion in the winter is not, as I'd supposed, that Orion disappears in the summer and the Big Dipper disappears in the winter, but that Orion is higher in the sky in the summer, and the Big Dipper is higher in the winter. I'll say again: thank God the mysteries are not revealed all at once.
One more thing on the heavenly bodies: I've noticed Jupiter creeping closer to Venus over the last weeks or months, so I looked up on the Farmer's Almanac's rise/set doodad yesterday to see when they'll cross--Jupiter will set two minutes after Venus on March 11, and three minutes before on March 12. So Jupiter will overtake Venus sometime early on March 12, I guess.
What I've been meaning to say something about is "flow" and piano-playing. I had also for some reason intended to say something about Margaret Wente's Valentine's Day column on why you shouldn't wait for lightning bolts, but then I would be violating the purpose of the facebook group I have thought of setting up, which would be called "Would everyone please stop paying attention to Margaret Wente". (She is, it must be conceded, strangely charming. Very strangely. "Am I the only person who thinks Valentine's Day is a crock?"--I ask because I happen to be living under a rock.) Well, maybe not everyone should wait for lightning bolts, but I'm in favour of 'em myself, I gotta tell ya; worked for me.
It strikes me, though, that thinking of poems is probably something like seeing pictures to take. You walk around with a camera, and everything looks like a picture. If I'm sitting here looking for poems, probably I can find one in my cat's weird collection of bird calls and snorts and wails and beeps. Whether it would be a poem I would like would be another matter. I was looking through some Ted Hughes poems last night, thinking that it seems like the guy just writes down everything he can think of or something. (I often think of a thought I thought when I first read a bunch of Leonard Cohen's poems: I think this guy doesn't really know whether a given poem he's written is any good or not. I think about that in relation to the advice I'd give to grad students about submitting papers (which I was talking about in a comment back there a bit ago): it's not your job to figure out whether what you've got is good enough; it's your job to do as much on it as you can, and then give it to someone else whose job is to figure out whether it's good enough. Well, you know, generally speaking. Anyway, the thing is, eventually you get to be Leonard Cohen, and whatever you've got is good enough just because you're Leonard Cohen. Or Robert Frost, or whoever.) I feel like probably I couldn't write poems like that because I want any poem I write to be the best damn poem I could possibly write, but when I think about it, I guess I kind of did used to write poems that way, back in the year or two as an undergrad that I wrote a fair number of poems (including one or two aping William Carlos Williams a bit). One night there was going to be a lunar eclipse, so I went out and sat by the river and tried to watch it as a poet, like you might try to watch it as a photographer. I wrote something about how the eclipsed moon was like a hard-boiled egg yolk rolling up the salt of the sky. Yeah, not too good. But most poems are not too good, almost all of them, really. But it would be like anything else, wouldn't it--the more not-too-good ones you run through, the more pretty good ones you end up with. Setting out to just write the pretty good ones and skip the not-too-good ones is not a good strategy. (I'm not really sure whether I've been stuck the last few years with the same problem about writing philosophy papers--that I want every one to be the best damn paper I could possibly write. I did resolve a few years ago to quit writing papers about things just because I like them ... which I guess you could say has had the undesirable side-effect of keeping me from writing anything about Nietzsche. But it doesn't take resolution not to write about Nietzsche; it would feel unholy to write about Nietzsche just for the hell of it ... or just because I might lose the Nietzsche course if I don't.)
Here's the best thing I've found on the internet in a while: an up-to-the-minute star chart for Toronto. You'd think it wouldn't be hard to find something like that, but I've been looking intermittently for years and just came across this one yesterday. And so today I have discovered for the first time in my life, unbelievably, that the Big Dipper revolves around the Little Dipper (which rotates, roughly, around Polaris), after noticing that the Big Dipper was above the Little Dipper this afternoon, after being below the Little Dipper last night (and realizing that the sky extends past the Earth's axis, which is one of those things that's obvious, but only if you think about it). It also occurred to me, looking at the chart last night and thinking about how it all works, that probably the reason I notice the Big Dipper in the summer and Orion in the winter is not, as I'd supposed, that Orion disappears in the summer and the Big Dipper disappears in the winter, but that Orion is higher in the sky in the summer, and the Big Dipper is higher in the winter. I'll say again: thank God the mysteries are not revealed all at once.
One more thing on the heavenly bodies: I've noticed Jupiter creeping closer to Venus over the last weeks or months, so I looked up on the Farmer's Almanac's rise/set doodad yesterday to see when they'll cross--Jupiter will set two minutes after Venus on March 11, and three minutes before on March 12. So Jupiter will overtake Venus sometime early on March 12, I guess.
What I've been meaning to say something about is "flow" and piano-playing. I had also for some reason intended to say something about Margaret Wente's Valentine's Day column on why you shouldn't wait for lightning bolts, but then I would be violating the purpose of the facebook group I have thought of setting up, which would be called "Would everyone please stop paying attention to Margaret Wente". (She is, it must be conceded, strangely charming. Very strangely. "Am I the only person who thinks Valentine's Day is a crock?"--I ask because I happen to be living under a rock.) Well, maybe not everyone should wait for lightning bolts, but I'm in favour of 'em myself, I gotta tell ya; worked for me.
