I feel like I’m still, in many respects, processing what feels like a gloriously whirlwindish summer — much in the same way I’m still organizing and editing photographs from my travels. I’m at an interesting place where the images and physical memories of being in the places where the pictures were taken still seems quite fresh and clear, but the photographs themselves — particularly the ones I like the most — seem like a shocking surprise. They are rapidly becoming their own discrete objects. This process seems more fluid to me — more like a Polaroid developing — than the instantaneous not-the-thing-itselfness — that constant separation/mediation between thought/image/speech/memory — that happens with poetry and prose. During my travels, I consciously made an effort to spend time with the camera down, simply looking/being without the mediation of the lens, without documenting, and these are the moments I can call up very clearly within my mind. The pictures, though? Constant surprises after-the-fact. I love this process of re-vision.

But the fall semester. It loometh.

I think what I appreciate the most about summer is the opportunity to become more of a student myself again. To learn/try/see new things, to read off-topically and on-topically, to establish better (ha!) study habits, to just sometimes be very still/quiet, and — most importantly — to reestablish connections with my own writing that inevitably deteriorate during the height of end-of-the-semester craziness (if not earlier). So I’m concerned about losing sight of some of these things once I layer some of the other components back in. Mostly it’s not wanting to turn into Grading Borg. Or, worse yet, Crabby Procrastinating Grading Borg.

I adore fall, though, and the clean slate-ishness of the new school year. I’m happy about the classes I’m teaching, and really looking forward to seeing my students again. This always seems like a time of excitement and energy for me: shiny protractors, new rulers, crayons with wax-perfect tips, the smell of fresh pencil shavings, and pinkpink erasers!

In the meantime? There’s a Lemon Refrigerator Cheesecake (with homemade lemon curd) chillaxing in the fridge for tonight’s back-to-school departmental potluck.

JM: You got a what?

AH: A kitten.

JM: A chicken?

AH: A kitten.

JM: Oh . . . a chicken.

AH: Okay. Sure. A chicken.

JM: How many chicken you have now?

AH: Four.

JM: What? You got four chicken? You must be crazy!

AH: I got a new chicken. The other three chickens were here before.

JM: Four chicken!

AH: Four chickens, yes.

JM: I bet they all climb up on table and do whatever they please. Try climb up on your leg. Complete out of control. So how many chicken you have total? Four chicken?

AH: Four chickens, yes.

JM: So you going to be that person.

AH: I guess so.

JM: Such no-good useless chicken. You can’t even eat it. Maybe you stuff with catnip and roast in oven? Chicken is good to eat!

* * *

JM: Did you hear about Jet Blue flight attendant? He can’t stand anymore and go slide down slide!

AH: Yeah, I heard about that.

JM: You must be spend money all the time flying here and there. And they charge you for everything. You want take bag. They charge it! You want snack. They charge it! You want pillow. They charge it! No wonder you don’t own your own house.

AH: OMFG.

JM: And oh! I such worry because everywhere they have bed bug! And you all the time go stay in expensive hotel. So then you going to bring home bed bug! You better check your sheet before you sleep in it! I tell you. Everywhere you like to go, you end up with bed bug. And can’t get rid of!

AH: WTF?

JM: When I fly from Japan time, everybody dress up so elegant for go flying. Wear nice suit. And hat. And high heel. Now everybody wear broken blue jean and tee shirt! Or sweat pants! And then I heard about worm come down from ceiling!

AH: What?

JM: Worm! Fall out of ceiling! So-call maggots! Everyone scream to death!

AH: Maggots?

JM: And rat crawling around on floor! I so worry! You promise me you check your seat first before you sit down on plane.

I couldn’t stop looking.

The dye-transfer coloring is visually beautiful, of course — something about the heated intensity of the color giving the gritty quotidian realities within the photographs an almost surreal patina — a lacquered, Cutex-nail-polished weird glamour.

Visual pleasure was only part of it, though. The tension between the visual beauty of the images, and the uneasy grotesqueries of their content, was heart-rending for me. The attentiveness — the mindfulness, if you will — of the aesthetic resonated very strongly with and for me, but it was ultimately a sense of the tenderness of the gaze that completely unraveled me. An acceptance of the shabby, the crazy, the not-beautiful, the banal, and the mundane. Everything seemingly as it is, and therefore completely unshelled. Completely vulnerable. An aperture open to aperture. And because of that tenderness of looking unspeakably beautiful.

That these pictures — particularly the ones from Los Alamos — seemed full of kitschy cultural tropes from my own 1970′s childhood in Wyoming (where everything was always a little bit behind–flower power and disco a thin varnish over sedimental layers of 1950′s and rugged frontier sensibilities) is undoubtedly also part of their appeal for me: a Jarrellian Lost World of sorts, maybe. And it’s not an easy nostalgia, or a Lost World that I would ever care to return to, but rather a place of terrible vulnerability, helplessness, and suffering.

Eggleston’s photographs capture this sense of a Lost World in the fleeting instant at which it’s lost in each passing moment, and it’s a Lost World that’s revealed as uncertain, vulnerable, and in pain; chock-a-block with fraying banalities of kitsch and schlock — banalities that are recognizable from my own cultural vocabulary and which ultimately end up, perhaps, underscoring my own poignant sense of the Japanese aesthetic of utsuroi, or evanescence.

This image, an untitled photograph of simple plastic animals on a worn table, made me weep the first time I saw it. A completely personal response in many respects, I’m sure, but still . . . why? How? Maybe something about the aleatoric/chance randomness of the animals almost like a John Cage composition. (In fact, for some reason it made me think of the colored vocal lines in “Aria (1958)”.) Maybe it’s the questions that get raised — and every Eggleston photograph raises unanswered questions. Maybe it’s the attentiveness of the eye that notices. Or maybe the tenderness of the framing and the recording. Democratic is the word that is used for Eggleston’s approach/aesthetic, and yes, this seems true to me, but what I feel so powerfully moved by is, I think, the large compassion of his vision.

AH: If you were worried, you should have called me.

JM: I don’t know if you home or not. Always you go here or there. Who know?

AH: Yeah, but I always have my cell phone with me, so you should just call.

JM: But I don’t want you try talk on phone while driving.

AH: Well then I’ll see that you called and when I’m not driving, I’ll call you back.

JM: But what if you somewhere and other people around? I don’t want everyone can overhear our private conversation.

AH: Um . . . ?

JM: Anyway, I so worry! What going to happen if you slip outside your apartment, and bung! You hit your head! Some professor here last winter go outside to smoke cigarette and she fall down and hit her head! And nobody find her. So she freeze to death! Isn’t that crazy?

AH: Yeah. Kind of.

JM: Anyway, I thought you go teach in Nebraska and afterward maybe just poop out. Your father and I, we went to Cheyenne and all walking walking all day long and complete poop out. We come home and sleep like dead people! So I thought maybe you go teach for ten days and after you been home you complete poop out and sleeping like dead person all this time!

AH: Yeah, I’ve been tired. But I’ve been trying to get a lot of writing done before school starts.

JM: You better! Is doggy-dog world! You have to publish! Or perish! You go here or there all somewhere, wherever you please, so I don’t know when you have time to writing! So you don’t watch out, you end up perish!

AH: Um, I’m a Full Professor? I think that if I haven’t perished yet, I’m probably going to be okay?

JM: Full Professor, but still tonkachi head. Hey!

AH: Yeah?

JM: When you go back teach Nebraska again? Christmas time?

AH: Yeah.

JM: Oh, goody goody! You get to go to marvelous New Year party, don’t you?

AH: Yeah.

JM: But I have to tell you something. Don’t eat Oyster Rockefeller when you go! Don’t eat it! You don’t watch television, so only get so-called internet or whatever. I don’t know if you know about oil spill or not. So I going to tell you. Don’t eat it!

AH: I know about the oil spill. And I’ll tell you what. I won’t eat the oysters if you’ll stop buying meat with hinky expiration dates.

JM: You mean Dead Meat? From the Dead Meat Section?

AH: Exactly.

JM: You don’t buy from Dead Meat Section?

AH: I don’t buy a lot of meat, but when I do, I don’t buy the Dead Meat. No.

JM: Wow! You must be rich! We on social security now. And you know, you such blood sucker. Sucking, sucking all your parents’ money. Have to send you to music school. But hey, guess what?

AH: What?

JM: Your father brought Alaska King Crab and we going to eat today!

AH: That sounds great! Are you going to put a newspaper down on the table and hammer it?

JM: Well, I been thinking very carefully about it, and I don’t want to hammer. I have nutcracker. So going to crack open that way. And guess what else?

AH: What?

JM: I going to use scissors and very neatly cut open and take out whole big piece at once and dunk in butter. No smash. That’s what I been thinking about.

AH: Okay, then.

JM: Yeah. So that’s what I been thinking.

Nobu the Cat: Dude! WTF?!

Nanami the Kitten: [persistently] Got milk???

Nobu the Cat: [resignedly flopping on his side ] Whatever.

* * *

Heartichoke to Nanami the Kitten: Hey, where did all your whiskers go? Why don’t you have any whiskers? Nobu! Did you chew off all the kitten’s whiskers?

Nobu the Cat: [crickets]

Heartichoke to Nobu the Cat: Don’t you make the ajapa face at me, mister.

Nobu the Cat: [ crickets]

And so what, I wonder, might be hidden inside a page? Or inside this screen? Inside your screen?

What does my Nio look like? What does yours?

What if my Nio is simply the stones themselves? Virtual stones, at that. Virtual stones, for the metaphorical stones, for the metaphysical Nio.

But I like the stones.

I’ll make a small pile of them here. Like gold new potatoes.

And then later I’ll cook them with rasins and cumin and ginger and snap peas and cinnamon.

2. Speaking of apartment repair, it was unnerving to wake up to pounding and scaffolding, no balcony, and my landlord and his father stationed right outside my dining room windows, blaring KFUCK: The Universe’s Most Loathsomely Treacly Country Hits Ever or somesuch on their transistor radio. Today I heard that Exes in Texas song. Eesh. Although? I did also hear Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy.” Which, okay, I kind of <3, to be perfectly honest. I used to love the Glenn Campbell show, and Rhinestone Cowboy? My favorite. Le sigh. When I was four, I told my parents I was going to marry Glen Campbell. Of course, I'd also earlier announced plans of pleading my troth to Gomer Pyle, so clearly I was a Very Disturbed Child. Or, maybe we just had shitty television reception then in Laramie, Wyoming. Only two stations came in reliably and the bunny ears, wrapped in podgy silver rolls of tinfoil (as if that was supposed to help!), had to be constantly tweaked and gyrated. We didn't even get PBS.

3. Have been gloriously holed up (That sounds suspiciously a lot like gloryholed, doesn't it? Which sounds, well . . . naughty, doesn't it?) Oh hell, now I have to start this sentence all over. Have been gloriously holed up readingreadingreading and writingwritingwriting and hanging out with the cats, and sweeping up the crockery after the cats break the crockery, thereby entailing the picking out of new crockery on eBay for the cats to break. It's pretty awesome! And such a shame that the summer is rapidly drawing to a close. How about let's add on another month please? Pretty please?

4. I recently realized that I've been procrastinating completion on a book project, because I'm very unsure of what sort of direction I might want to take next/after. I hate being in limbo between creative projects, and like to have at least a little bit of a start of something new before I finish a book. (You know, all that Hemingway-esque Always Leave Something to Work on the Next Day crap, right?) But deliberate procrastination seems equally crazy, and just another form of stuck-ness. I am all about the Anti-stuck-ness these days. Stasis (as in stuck-ness, and distinct from, say, stillness, which is completely different and not a problem) = suffocation, paralysis, and (not to put too fine a point on it) death. But worse, because you're not actually dead yet. So it's like being buried alive. Even worser? It's self-inflicted! So maybe what I'm saying is that Stasis = Self-Inflicted Zombification. Like you ate your own brains! (Confession? It's entirely possible that I had waaaaay too much caffeine today. Mea culpa.) So no more procrastination on this book project. I’m moving forward.

5. Enough buckshot to constitute a blog post yet? I say yes.

Inhospitable to the trolling of search-engine spiders who simply shriveled up and died clinging to a rusted meta-tag.

Even the virtual tumbleweeds stopped rolling through months and months ago.

Even outlaw spambots stopped hiding out here.

Mostly I’ve been traveling all over the place. Pinging and ricocheting here and there like a demented pinball. I love it . . . I love going places, and I love impersonating my Author Function. But I’ve been constantly either Frantically Preparing to Leave Town or Frantically Catching Up From Having Been Out of Town. It’s been hard to settle in and find a routine, a groove, and so I’m constantly mole-whacking instead.

You should probably know that I’m very fond of moles.

I’m recently back from a wonderful summer residency teaching at the University of Nebraska low-residency M.F.A. Earlier this summer I read and gave workshops at the WyoWriters’ Conference in Cody, Wyoming. I visited the Heart Mountain internment site which was powerfully humbling and moving, and I also then spent several beautiful and hallucinatory days in Yellowstone National Park. Later on in the month I took a trip up the inland passage of Alaska, and spent a few days in Seattle after. Part of The Next Thing I was nattering on about in blog posts from the start of this year had to do with Making Things Happen, and travel is definitely One of Those Things. So I went. And I saw some stuff.

I’m obsessed with taking pictures. And thinking about what it means to take pictures. So this summer has been filled with taking a shitfuckload of photographs. And reading Barthes’ Camera Lucida, Lia Purpura’s On Looking, and John Berger’s About Looking. For starters. I bought a refurbished Nikon D5000 from eBay at the start of the summer, and it’s — well — amazing.

Random Japanese Mother Tidbit: In response to my nose piercing, I caught my mother calling me a Hole Punch under her breath when I saw her in Cody.

Okay. I think that’s all for now.

2. Until yesterday, I had forgotten about the deliciousness of dried apricots.

3. Why is it always such a fine fine line for me between being bored and being overstimmed?

4. I think somebody should design a flushable apartment. Where you hit a flush button, and a sonic swoosh comes along and automatically cleans/dusts/vacuums/scours everything clean and funnels it all into some sort of recyclable lint trap thingy. I’m also a big proponent — perhaps I’ve mentioned this before? — of travel via pneumatic tubes, like at the bank’s drive thru. At bare minimum, it would be amusing to send one’s cats back and forth via pneumatic tube delivery system.

5. Last night I dream I have a passel of little brothers. They are, oddly, all towheads. The entire lot of them’s identically garbed in maroon hoodies and blue jeans and tube socks. They’re like a series of towheaded fraternal Russian nesting dolls. I’m staying at a hotel and I want to take a shower, but I can’t because the room’s crammed to the gills with smelly boy stuff — the entire bathroom and bathtub overflowing with dirty wet towels. I pull out some of towels from the bathtub and find a boy’s foot in the bathtub. It’s pale white and squishy and waterlogged, and vaguely fungus-y. “Clean up those towels!” I scold one of my towheaded brothers. He takes out the towels, but leaves the foot in the bathtub. “Will you get that foot out of the bathtub?” I say. “Is that your foot?” He shakes his head no — it belongs to one of the other brothers — and tosses the foot in the bathroom wastebasket. “Hey, you can’t leave that foot there,” I tell him. “Don’t you know that’s medical waste?”

6. Sandias, Old Town adobe, and King Sushi on my event horizon.