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Corazon, stout dog

Just caught the end of James Dean as Cal Trask. How had I never seen this before? How am I supposed to sleep after this:

Good God Gracious Wow James Dean Cal Trask

Good God Gracious Wow James Dean Cal Trask

??? The corazon must, indeed, be a stout dog. Wallace Stevens is right again, it can kill a man. To be honest, I’m not sure about this poem….I think I need to spend some more time in it. I just really like the heart as a stout dog.

Back in Tennessee and to the ambiguous grindstone (GRE, manuscript building, next year decisions– Barcelona v. New York, anyone??–, working the Alhambra + pork off of hips, organizing work from Davidson).

So hello, again, blog. You’re still appropriately titled, as it seems I am still happily wandering/split precisely down the middle in terms of where to go and what to do.

besos.

I’m late once again in the telling of wonder, this time by hours of driving along the Mediterranean with good music and good people–just the right amount of satire emanating from both. The idea was to make it back to Barcelona, both because I want a serious love affair with the city and because War on Drugs (the Philly band we saw with Animal Collective in Valencia) was scheduled to play there at the end of their European tour.

Due to our frolicking in seaside towns, and the general laziness that quickly overcomes a person when sprawled on Alicante’s fine-sanded beaches, we were late to the band’s set in a bizarro club in maybe the only deserted barrio of Barca. Though we were unfortunately two weeks late for the Sex & Metal Party, we did manage to enjoy warmgooey handfulls of their “Wagonwheel Blues”: a group Spanish reporters describe as “inequívocamente dylaniana” . I know Adam’s voice can curdle pleasingly like Bob’s, but all I can think about is a Dylan-themed adventure park, complete with tambourine men jingle-jangling everyone, No Bum Chewing Gum, and a Hurricane roller-coaster that leaves your shoes soggy with a vague sensation that you’ve done something wrong. I was also reminded once again of the Spaniards’ general reluctance to dance/move anything but the head in a slight, indie-chic sway. That being said, the crowd dug them– the review said that the band knows like few others how to balance classical rock influences with the independent rock trends of today. I do appreciate a song that builds as well as MGMT’s “Kid’s” and doesn’t depend on the waves of squeal and spasms at a discoteca (where dancing is drunkenly encouraged) to make a lasting impression.

On top of the music, a hehe coincidence: two of the band members happen to also be those guys from Philadelphia that worked at University City Housing and refused to help Brooke and I move like 80 boxes in the scorching sun– “we’re not in the south anymore,” we’d said. I just knew they were some crazy artists living in their brains and looking good while doing so.

You may be confused how I get from the Barcelona music scene to burning styrofoam. The answer is: we drove through wine country, lounged for a bit in the tiny Spanish Miami beach, and stumbled upon Valencia just in time to catch the artists putting the finishing touches on their oversized plastic and styrofoam caricature effigies.

Fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa falllllas

Fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa falllllas

It looked something like this, in color.

It looked something like this, in color.

Fortunately for our lungs, we made it out before they burned them all.

I WANT IT

A masters in “Music, Word, & Image” from the Universitat de Barcelona.

!

Prounce: Cahp-ee-lay-rah.

After failing twice to catch the Alsina Graells gig up through the Alpujarras, I finally boarded with groceries, books, and music en stowe. When I arrived–with groceries, books, and music to last me a good week and a half dragging behind me like only a priss of a weekend traveller would do–I dragged my stuff up “La Carretera Principal” (the only real road) to the Carnicería where I was to pick up my keys. Yes, I picked up my keys from Capieliera’s tiny butcher. The card Rosenda placed in my hand gingerly upon departure has a picture of the snow-capped mountain and a pig’s leg.

As if it doesn’t get any better, I had a sun-filled terrace and a quiet apartment all to myself. In order to share this, as I was cameraless, I took crooked pictures on my iPhoto booth. Enjoy:

where I ate, after making, delicious blueberry pancakes.

where I ate, after making, delicious blueberry pancakes.

Yes: here I made myself meals, drank loads of tea, and retreated after walking around a bit outside to “work.” Mostly, I read and became reanomorado con one Rainer Maria Rilke. I sent a rambling email to an English language magazine in Barcelona (<3*), revised my resumes, wrote another long rambling letter to an ex that ended up being very cleansing and beautiful and will never be sent, and slept from midnight to the sound of tower peal. More on Rainer later.

*

If We Were in Vicky Christina Barcelona, Javier Bardem would Just Now Step Into Our Lives

If We Were in Vicky Christina Barcelona, Javier Bardem would Just Now Step Into Our Lives

Sunshine Coming My Way

Maybe this means some poems will come, too. I’m tired of this por los nubes crap.

There is so much that clings to us, and wants to keep warm.

our faces jacked toward the blue.

Familiar things– the blue sky,

Spring sun,

some dark musician chording the sacred harp,

His spittle of notes

Pressed violets in his sitll darker book of revelation.

Why do they stay so cold, why

Do the words we give them disguise their identity

As abject weather,

perverse descriptions, inordinate scales?

The poem is virga, a rain that never falls to earth.

That’s why we look this way, our palms outstretched,

our faces jacked toward the blue.

—–CHARLES WRIGHT, “THINKING OF WALLACE STEVENS AT THE BEGINNING OF SPRING”

Because it’s been way too long since I’ve though about poetry and have forgotten how to do it in eloquent English prose, and because I’m still a fan of the Nick Hornby list genre, I’m going to make a list of all the things I love about this poem.

1) “Jacked.” Who has ever used this word so well? Our faces jacked toward the blue, as if some imaginary car jack forced it awkwardly up there and we’re just hanging out leaking and ready to be fixed. That’s what not writing has felt like these past few months. And the way he awkwardly juts that line out there? Damn.

2) “Why do they stay so cold”!!!!!! Thanks again, Rachel (seriously, you’re my poetry lifeline from way over here), for re-directing me to Stevens’s “The Snowman.” One must have a mind of winter/…And have been cold a long time…” and his perfect parallel structure, that amazing butt-rushing phrase: one must have been cold a long time. I love how Wright takes that anxiety, or that nihilism– whatever it is that Stevens gets from the Snowman that I could never even begin to attempt in an abstract word (!)– and throws it back. A poetry Snowball fight. Why do they stay so cold, why/ Do the words we give them disguise their identity/ As abject weather. They want “to keep us warm”… ah, so good the way he gives them the action here, like Stevens’s snowman that almost hears but can only listen, having been so cold for such a long time.

4)No longer a list but I still needs must lean on my crutch: it has just occured to me that “jacked” rivals Stevens’s “shagged,” and that I never would have thought that possible mumbling through those pretty words (junipers shagged with ice !!) in Henri Cole’s class in awe of the Davidson Spring and the poem and all.

5)It has also just occured to me that it is nowhere near the beginning of spring in Granada, but I’d like to keep on pretending it is, anyways.

There is so much that clings to us and wants to keep us warm.

6) I had to look it up, and check out the perfection of “virga”:

{trli}1. Mus. A symbol used in plainsong notation; the note designated by this (see quots.).

1925 Ibid. (ed. 4) 555/2 Virga (L.) ‘A twig’. A square note with a stem or tail… The plainsong Virga is interpreted as a quaver. 1954 A. HUGHES Early Medieval Music xi. 380 The essential difference between the pre-Franconian mensural notation..and the modal notation which preceded it lies in the fact that there is a definite sign (..the virga of plainsong) for a long note.

2. Meteorol. Streaks of precipitation that appear to be attached to the undersurface of a cloud and usually evaporate before reaching the ground. Also pl. in same sense.

. 1959 R. E. HUSCHKE Gloss. Meteorol. 611 Virga is frequently seen trailing from altocumulus and altostratus clouds.
(Oxford English Dictionary online). That ‘59 quote really makes me want to know what “altocumulus” and “altostratus” really means, and if I can apply these words, too, to the anxiety I have about the hard coldness of descriptions/the mere violets… or to, y’know, love, or something.

Fellow wordpress blogger “Tapastalk” has reminded me of why I was so drawn to the word percebes in the first poem, the first blogname, and the firstplace. I’m sure my poetry seminar never thought it could (or should) go this far.

Some delightful excerpts:

PERCEBES!!

PERCEBES!!

An interesting and strange food, its said that before the 18th C its unlikely people actually ate these crustaceans, considering them as appetizing as rocks, or even imagining them to be small monsters with many, very ugly, feet.”

Some accounts state that they were thought to be the early form of Barnacle Geese, birds which to the medieval eye seemed to appear out of nowhere. The geese don’t of course, but in an age before mass transport, people had no idea that these birds migrated and therefore hatched their eggs elsewhere.”

If so, please let me know.

PS: coming back sooon, whoever’s out there

xoxo,

sara

Incentives for Compilation: Rachel’s right-on heartache playlist, falling back in love with John Cusack in High Fidelity, and the current ambiguity and thus non-pigeonholable idea of home.*

1. “Rocky Top,” Felice and Boudleaux Bryant. Osbourne reminds us that the song was first released on Christmas Day in 1967…” awaiting celebration by my birth, of course.

I remember screeching with delight when non-Tennesseans enjoyed this song in college as a danceable relic from the Volunteer State’s gleeful hillbilly past. It pushes its way to the top with nostalgic bonus points; it conjures memories of The Maxx in North Carolina, a car ride in the Tennessee Hills sometime mid-nineties whilst wearing too-tight and too-long jean shorts, and the most wholesome and American of a young Tennessean’s activities: slathering your bodies with (car) paint and rooting the football team on while the high school band does its best to make Rocky Top great without the words. You realllly need the half-bear other half cat chick to make it work.

2. “Tennessee,” The Silver Jews.
Goodbye you suckers and steady bad luckers
We’re off to the land of club soda unbridled
We’re off to the land of hot middle-aged women
Off to the land whose blood runneth orange.

Ya esta. Plus it managaes to make the you’re-the-only-ten-I-see joke hip.

3. “This Must Be The Place,” The Talking Heads. I can thank my Dad, originally, and Nikki Hurt, who helped me re-find this song not long before I re-found Rob Gordon.

Home is where I want to be
Pick me up and turn me round
I feel numb – burn with a weak heart
(So I) guess I must be having fun
The less we say about it the better
Make it up as we go along
Feet on the ground
Head in the sky
It’s ok I know nothing’s wrong . . nothing

Hi yo I got plenty of time
Hi yo you got light in your eyes…

Home – is where I want to be
But I guess I’m already there.

Nikki, this is for you girl. And Elena, this one’s for you.

4. “June Bug,” The B-52’s.

I’ve heard the B-52’s (los b cincuenta y dos) in Granada THREE TIMES. How incredible?! Imagine my flailing limbs in Sugarpop reacting to the transition from Spain into freaking Athens, GA. Reaching PAST my failed attempt at musicology and my regurgitated (yet joyous!) paper about “Rock Lobster”’s unique postmodernity, I find a glistening trove  of B52 memories. They have been constantly on request since I was what– 5?? Picking the song was the hardest part. June bug wins only because I want to avoid another “home is roaming” thing (cause otherwise, it’d def. be “Roam), but also because of the mangifica linea: “The mouth of the river is laughing at us.” So good. In the red. mud.

5. “Shine,” Collective Soul. Wherever (air? water? ground? ) it is, heaven let yo light shine down.

*Location TBA

a little update:

Thanks, Anne Carson and Jason Koo, for sending me “Kinds of Water: An Essay on the Road to Compostela”:

We think we live by keeping water caught in the trap of the heart.
Coger en una trampa is a Spanish idiom meaning “to catch in a trap.” Coger por el buen camino is another, constructed with the same verb; it means “to get the right road.” And yet to ensnare is not necessarily to take the right road. … Pilgrims were people who got the right verb.

Pilgrim? Not quite. But close.

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