Zugenia's Procrastination Salon

If you say "moncynnæs uard" out loud (hard "c"), you can hear that it means "keeper of mankind"—or the "middungeard" (soft "g" like "y"), middle-ground, or Earth, the place that God made to keep man. This all from "Cædmon's Hymn," the 7th-century poem considered the first recorded poem in English (in this case, a Northumbrian dialect of Anglo-Saxon):

Nu scylun hergan hefaenricaes uard
metudæs maecti end his modgidanc
uerc uuldurfadur sue he uundra gihuaes
eci dryctin or astelidæ
he aerist scop aelda barnum
heben til hrofe haleg scepen.
tha middungeard moncynnæs uard
eci dryctin æfter tiadæ
firum foldu frea allmectig

My 11th-grade English teacher, Mrs. Hodgman—the same woman who taught us always to staple papers diagonally so that the paper doesn't tear when you flip the page, advice I follow religiously to this day—came to class for weeks carrying a portable record player on which she would play a recording of "Cædmon's Hymn" several times at the beginning of each class until each and every student had it permanently emblazoned in his or her memory. I know it to this day. I recited it at Nightbird Books to get a 5% discount on my purchase during National Poetry Month. And I woke up with it playing on a loop my head at 5:30 this morning.

There's an audio recording at the Norton Anthology website (follow link, scroll down to #2) that sounds remarkably like the recording Mrs. Hodgman used to play us. Maybe it's the same one. In any case, I highly recommend subjecting yourself to this exercise of memorizing—really, fast hard memorizing—a poem in a foreign form of English. First of all, as Mrs. Hodgman told us from the beginning, if you force yourself to hear the words, you will hear the English in Anglo-Saxon, and it is really cool when the lines begin to release their meaning to modern ears. Secondly, there is no greater comfort to someone (like me) constantly worried about her ability to retain information in this, the Google Age, within the hard drive of her own brain, than to be able to call up nine lines of Early English poetry at any time. In fact, I have decided to spend more time memorizing poetry just because I can, so you can expect more posts along these lines.

The text of the poem above is from the University of Toronto's Representative Poetry Online—follow the link for more information on Cædmon and his Hymn, as well as a modern English translation, though I seriously recommend listening to the recording linked above several times before you translate.

How strange: I seem to have taken an inadvertent hiatus from procrastinating for the second half of February. I have been busy, folks—reviewed a book, finished an article, wrote a conference paper, attended two conferences (one in Auburn, AL, the other in New Orleans), all the while teaching, writing recommendation letters, reviewing applicants to two different graduate programs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now I'm grading a pile of exams, writing more recommendation letters, planning my graduate seminar for tomorrow, and getting to work on both another article and a book chapter.

But that's not what you come here to read about.

So what have I got to say for myself extracurricularly? Auburn was fun; New Orleans was funner. I ate no fewer than two dozen raw oysters in my time there. Half of those were shucked for me, one by one, by the self-proclaimed "Baddest Shucker on Bourbon," who continually yelled, "YOU KNOW ME! I WAS ON CNN!" as he worked. I drank a hurricane. I danced in a jazz club. I ran out of money. Huzzah.

Last night D showed two amazing Jean Renoir films at Girl & a Gun: The River (1951) and The Golden Coach (1953). Stunning, both of them. D and I were the only ones there. People have no idea what's good. Oh well.

I am still totally, completely, and utterly sick of this stupid cast on my stupid arm. It's supposed to come off a week from today, and I plan to bitch about it until it does. I dreamt last night that I figured out how to squeeze out of it and I felt very clever indeed.

That's really all I can muster right now. I realize that I'm not very entertaining when my head's in my work, so I leave you with some poetry and animation culled from the internet and sent my way by a star student:

I'm just about to leave for the airport—I'm going home to NYC for Thanksgiving! Derek's coming with, and we plan to visit various galleries, eat ourselves silly at various dining establishments, and see at least one million films that will never hit the screens of northwest Arkansas.

In anticipation of this most esteemed and food-centric of national holidays, I offer, behind the cut, the bawdy limerick D wrote in honor of the culinary phenomenon that is turducken.

( There once was a dish called turduckin... )

Happy holidays!

I know I don't have to tell you, dear readers, that there are few better ways of procrastinating online than playing with online translators. But until I read this post by mushinoko, I failed to appreciate the epic procrastinatory proportions of Babel Fish poetry.

I find it also works timekilling miracles with song lyrics. To wit, Journey wrung through Japanese:

When on the girl lonely world those ranges of the raise in salary city boy
and the singer of smell of smokey room of the cheap perfume it depends the wine for smiling
which is taken going exactly his anywhere,
in order exactly small town where south Detroit
which takes the train of the midnight when it goes anywhere
withstands you had lived, to find the fact which in the night
is hidden somewhere other than in regard to and the bottom investigation of the type
which waits for the shadow and she of the train of midnight lives steadily,
the feeling which can share the night when it goes steadily at night
Streetlights life of the people who are passed exactly

Oh man. This is trouble.

The Scooter has moved on to that big Yankee Stadium in the sky. (Not the one I wrote about in terza rima for an 11th-grade English assignment inspired by Dante's Inferno, in which George Steinbrenner is condemned to an eternal home game in which the Yankees flub every possible play—under the management of the then-recently-late Billy Martin—and George is perpetually prevented from firing anyone by the divine intervention of baseballs that fly out of nowhere and down his throat every time he opens his mouth. No, I'm certain Phil is chillin' at the game further upstairs.) From the NYTimes obit:

Phil Rizzuto, the sure-handed Hall of Fame Yankees shortstop nicknamed The Scooter, who punctuated his extended Yankee life as a broadcaster with birthday wishes to nuns and exclamations of “Holy cow!” died today. He was 89.

...

He was a 5-foot-6-inch, 150-pound sparkplug who did the little things right, from turning the pivot on a double play to laying down a perfect sacrifice bunt. He left the slugging to powerful teammates like Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Tommy Henrich, Charlie Keller and Yogi Berra.

“I hustled and got on base and made the double play,” he said of his role. “That’s all the Yankees needed in those days.”

His career statistics were not spectacular: a batting average of .273, 38 home runs and 562 runs batted in. But in his best season, 1950, when he hit a career-high .324 and drove in 66 runs, he won the American League’s Most Valuable Player award.

Rizzuto was frequently compared with other shortstops of his era, among them Pee Wee Reese of the Brooklyn Dodgers and Marty Marion of the St. Louis Cardinals. But to DiMaggio, his teammate for eight seasons — each man lost three seasons to military service during World War II — Rizzuto was the best.

“The little guy in front of me,” said DiMaggio, one of the game’s great centerfielders. “He made my job easy. I didn’t have to pick up so many ground balls.”

Though he may have been the "little guy" on the field, Rizzuto towered over other commentators in the great game of Divergent Baseball Announcement. Quoth the NYT: “Rizzuto’s ramblings and pro-Yankee sentiments maddened detractors, who felt he paid too little attention to the game. But fans adored Rizzuto as they would a delightful uncle, and colleagues were fond of recalling his scorecard notation of 'W.W.,' for 'Wasn’t Watching.'”

If you've never read O Holy Cow!, a collection of found poems based on Rizzuto's broadcasts, now would be the moment to do so. A sample (courtesy of the Comic Baseball Association, which has considerately posted a few of the pieces online so I don't have to run home and dig out my copy of the book and come back and transcribe—they've got more over there, so pay a visit):

Chess

I.

A lot of money in that chess.
I'll tell you that.
It's gotta be..
Can't be...
Not a good game for television.


II.

I'm not knocking it.
But it's not a spectator sport.


[September 4, 1992
Texas at New York
Rich Monteleone pitching to Rafael Palmeiro
Seventh inning, no outs, bases empty
Yankees lead 6-3]

Hall and Nokes

So second time around
Mel Hall and Matt Nokes
Solve Tapani's pitch
Heh Heh
That's right
John Moore's on the ball.
It does sound like a good rock group.
Hall and Nokes.
Oh?
Hall and Oates?
Oh yeah?
That's one I missed.
I'll have to go out
And buy some of their records tonight.

[June 11, 1991
New York at Minnesota
Kevin Tapani pitching to Alvaro Espinoza
Fifth inning, two outs, two base runners
Twins lead 1-0]

Reversal of Opinion

And he hits one in the hole
They're gonna have to hurry.
THEY'LL NEVER GET HIM!
They got him.
How do you like that.
Holy cow.
I changed my mind before he got there.
So that doesn't count as an error.

[July 10, 1992
Seattle at New York
Dave Fleming pitching to Andy Stankiewicz
First inning, no outs, bases empty
Mariners lead 1-0]

And finally, in memoriam:

Prayer for the Captain

There's a little prayer I always say
Whenever I think of my family or when I'm flying,
When I'm afraid, and I am afraid of flying.
It's just a little one. You can say it no matter what,
Whether you're Catholic or Jewish or Protestant or
whatever.
And I've probably said it a thousand times
Since I heard the news on Thurman Munson.

It's not trying to be maudlin or anything.
His Eminence, Cardinal Cooke, is going to come out
And say a little prayer for Thurman Munson.
But this is just a little one I say time and time again,
It's just: Angel of God, Thurman's guardian dear,
To whom his love commits him here there or everywhere,
Ever this night and day be at his side,
To light and guard, to rule and guide.

For some reason it makes me feel like I'm talking to
Thurman,
Or whoever's name you put in there,
Whether it be my wife or any of my children, my parents
or anything.
It's just something to keep you really from going bananas.
Because if you let this,
If you keep thinking about what happened, and you can't
understand it,
That's what really drives you to despair.

Faith. You gotta have faith.
You know, they say time heals all wounds,
And I don't quite agree with that a hundred percent.
It gets you to cope with wounds.
You carry them the rest of your life.

[August 3, 1979
Baltimore at New York
Pregame show]

Spam Filter: March 19, 2007.

Allied cog, veiled cappuccino,
peace elegant.
That’s what runs our nation.
If you would like to stay for the X3D Earth WC meeting,
please let me know.
Badlands. DVD anger.
Mullen than toroidal.
Lot welldone.

I have an ad for "tasteful Girls Gets Topless," which is an intriguing twist on Girls Gone Wild. But it only gets better from there:

pretty-pretty Cuties at hardcorre!

courteous Young Cuties so grandiose and yooung.

Young Womans so nice and flirtatious!

turned on ruussian in poono!

esthetical russiian Gayy!

Ah, email.

My sister sillygirl84, lately M.I.A. somewhere in the Maine wilderness teaching youngsters to weave god's-eyes with popsicle sticks and hunt moose or some such summer-campness, has long been traumatized by our mother's tendency to tell anecdotes with no perceptible narrative arc. To wit: "So I was on my way to pick up the car, and then I noticed that artichokes were on sale at Fairway, and later I was going to meet your father at the Cornell Club, and we've been meeting there a lot; I like to use their gym..." and then she trails off, and sillygirl84 says, "And?" and mom looks a bit surprised and says, "That's it," and sillygirl84 turns to me with that look of painful disbelief that says, "Can you believe what this woman does to me?? I have been enduring this abuse for years!" and I say, "I'm opening another bottle of wine."

Eventually my put-upon sister, in a mood of self-preservation-oriented generosity, devised the following solution to my mother's wayward storytelling: that when mom had (mistakenly) determined that the "story" was finished, she add, "And then I found five dollars," thereby giving the anecdote some semblance of form, if not particularly scintillating content.

It has worked amazingly well.

In a similar spirit, Unfogged suggests the following community project:

So it occurred to me that in a more perfect world, many, if not most, poems would end with "Fuck you, clown." For example...

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
Fuck you, clown!
-----
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Fuck you, clown!
-----
"Leave my loneliness unbroken!- quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!"
Quoth the Raven, "Fuck you, clown."
-----
so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

fuck you
clown.

I find it works particularly well with the Mad Lady Poets, such as Emily Dickinson:

In the Parcel – Be the Merchant
Of the Heavenly Grace –
But reduce no Human Spirit
To Disgrace of Price –
Fuck you, Clown!

Anne Sexton:

What a lay me down this is
with two pink, two orange,
two green, two white goodnights.
Fee-fi-fo-fum—
Now I'm borrowed.
Now I'm numb.
Fuck you, clown.

And, of course, Sylvia Plath:

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.
Fuck you, clown.

Mad props to Bitch Ph.D. for the link.

From Reuters: The Ministry of Fun Cracks Down on Santa Standards

( Full text of article )

Well. In other news, my grandmother recently gave me a bunch of my childhood writings she's been collecting over the years. It's a pretty weird collection. But it does contain a selection of poetry I wrote in high school that won me a scholarship from a local bank, which contains a poem I was quite fond of at the time but haven't seen in years, since I lost all my own copies of it. So here you go: High School Poetry Share Time with Zugenia.

( Hate Song )

Look what I got in my inbox today:

Strong erection
Long duration of effects
No prescription asked

I've generally avoided posting poetry on my LJ, because 7 years in grad school have taught me to be properly ashamed of my occasional poetic tendencies. But, for those of you who do not find poetry embarrassing, this is a piece I worked on in the year following 9/11 as I tried to think about things.

( an exercise in being part of history )

Edited to add: This piece is clearly a "post-9/11" poem, and several phrases from the "heavens are raining humans" stanza were taken from children's accounts of what they saw as they watched the Twin Towers burn from their classroom windows. But, overall, I was thinking more about the aftermath of that event: the mobilization of the war in the middle east, the insitution of a new kind of fear, and those questions I was considering yesterday about how one goes about thinking about this kind of thing—do you put yourself on the inside or the outside? What about the people who already lived in "those cities" where things, people, are always in danger of blowing up—are you one of them now? What does it mean to imagine yourself so? Is it compassion or presumption? One of the drafts was entitled, "The Poet Imagines Herself a Part of History, While in Baghdad, People Wait." Anyway.

For some reason, as I was walking home from the gym this evening, I thought about my friend B. I haven’t seen B in something like two years, since he retreated to an isolated cabin somewhere in the wilds of Rhode Island to contemplate the desolation of the cultural landscape and make scary spoken-word art. I did, however, have a conversation with him recently by IM. Apparently he does come out of the woods once in a while to offend people’s sensibilities and get himself banned from various poetry slams. We had the following exchange:

( b's scary art )

Incidentally, B’s partners in poetic crime included local indie rap phenom Sage Francis, whose most recent album, A Healthy Distrust, is available from Epitaph records. It’s less of a blatant assault on the senses than the performance described above. The Playboy review of the album quoted on the Epitaph site says that Sage “comes off as a bookish Eminem.” I don’t know what’s funnier: that assessment, or the fact that Sage's album was reviewed in Playboy. But I digress from my shameless plugging of other people’s accomplishments. When not collaboratively spitting meat on people, B has recently been busy posting in verse at Dolan’s Funeral Home, and trying to get a website devoted to consumer education off the ground. One day he is going to show up in the middle of everything and blow us all away in a wordstorm. Mark my words.

Around the same time B disappeared from the Providence Poetry Slam scene, I made my own retreat and stopped writing poetry. I had to, you know, dissertate. But last May I did write this piece for him:

( dream journal: for b )