Maggie is really worked up over the painters. She barks her head off whenever they're around and gets really short-tempered. So much so that she bit Scarlet and cut her face. I had to take Scarlet to the vet. Luckily, it's a superficial wound—nothing a couple of days of Neosporin won't cure. But the blood scared the hell out of me. It was a lot more than I would have expected such a small cut to make.

Anyway, Scarlet is fine, and Maggie continues to bark. I put the shades down in hopes that it would help, but it hasn't. The only thing that seems to help is sitting with her, and even that goes out the metaphorical window if the painters make any "sudden moves" like lifting a roller.

--
In other news, my grades posted:

Gender and the Gothic in American Women's Writing - A
Nonfiction Workshop - A
Publishing and the Profession - A

Guess I did all right.

--
Tonight I am going to trivia at the K&B with delree, drscottc, and others. Don't wait up.

My final projects are in: 23 pages on Emily Dickinson, Ann Radcliffe, and the Gothic; 17 pages of nonfiction; and 75+ pages of copyediting and layout for The Robert Frost Review. I submitted grades for my students at 8:00 AM. It's the end of the academic year again. I'm done. (Whew.)

This semester really knocked me for a loop, but I like to think that this past spring was my last one like that. Of course, it won't be; next year I'll be going on the job market, compiling my dissertation, taking comps, etc. Besides, it's not like I'm going to stop taking courses. I'm done with required coursework, but that's not stopping me from taking a class on Modernism, Poetry, and Place to help me prep for comps. I'm kind of an overachiever like that. [Then again, being an overachiever didn't keep me on track for NaPoWriMo this year. I still want to finish the Colo(u)r sequence, but I just couldn't give it the attention it needed—not with everything else I had to do.]

Still, congrats to everyone finishing one thing or another at this time of the year. Whether it was a(nother) semester of school, NaPoWriMo, or something bigger and better, rock on.

--
As part of my Hattiesburg pre-summer "tradition," I'm house- and pet-sitting for AB. Because I do this so often, I've started thinking of Frank, Scarlet, and Maggie as my surrogate pets. I love taking care of them. I miss having my own pets, especially Chatri. I know she is happy with Mom, Mr. Ray, Rhett, Missy, and Sable, but I still wish I could have her with me. Unfortunately, I don't think I have the heart to separate her from her surrogate family when the time comes for me to move on.

Right now Frank is out doing cat-type things, Scarlet is napping at my feet, and Maggie is barking at the maintenance men downstairs. I feel bad for Maggie because I know how protective she is of the house and its inhabitants. She is starting to drive me crazy, though. I can't calm her, and all that barking is giving me a headache. I'm trying to stick close to the house so the maintenance men can access the bathroom, but I might have to find myself some company to distract me from all the noise.

--
I leave for France on June 8th. I'm not ready, but I'm working on it. I've started making lists—stuff to pack, stuff to buy, errands to run, etc. I'm really, really excited, but who wouldn't be?—it's three weeks in France! L'Abbaye de Pontlevoy is only about 5-10 minutes from Montrichard and about 2 hours from Paris. I'm still trying to decide what I want to do during my interim. I've been told Orléans is beautiful and quite hip, but I'm probably going to chat it up with my classmates and see what they want to do.

Our group is small, only six students plus the professor. My understanding is that we'll have a couple of staff members from International Programs and the Abbey to help us, but for the most part, it's just us writers. Only two of us are graduate students; one is a non-traditional student, and the remaining three are undergraduates. I think it'll be a good mix.

I'm trying to avoid going nuts with this whole trip, but it's so easy to go to travel clothiers and be convinced that you need to buy all kinds of expensive stuff. I'm going to limit myself to the bare essentials so I can save money. This trip is going to eat up a lot of my summer funding, and I need to make sure that I'll still be able to pay rent when I get back.

--
My sister has agreed to let Alexandra come to visit. She's going to spend July and August in Baton Rouge. Which means that when I get back from France, I'll get to spend a few days with my niece. I haven't seen her since my sister and her husband moved to Tacoma a couple of years ago. It'll be fun to be an aunt again.

--
In case you didn't know, I'm in love with a wonderful guy who loves the fact that I'm as geeky as him. And despite all the insanity of school, writing, life, etc., I'm happy—genuinely, insanely happy.

Dear Readers,

In honor of Blog Reader Appreciation Day, I want to thank all of you for putting up with my crap:

1. Fangirl musings on why [insert anime, TV series, character, etc.] is TEH GRATEST EVAR!!!~!1.
2. All that really bad fanfiction I wrote back in the day.
3. Years of refusal to capitalize words in, or run spell-check on, my entries.
4. "College life is teh suck" rants.
5. Statistics posts, particularly ones charting my progress on schoolwork.
6. Memes. Lots and lots of memes.
7. All that talk of witchcraft, my coven, and the pagan community.
8. Emo rants about how my life is so hard. (It is and it isn't, just like anyone else's life.)
9. The "progress" from BA to MFA to PhD.
10. Any and all moments of TMI.
11. Cryptic posts—also usually emo.
12. "My work just got accepted to [insert journal here]!"
13. Goddamn, all the chronicling of The Bone Folders.
14. Procrastination. (For example, all the NaPoWriMo poems I haven't posted yet.)
15. Moving.
16. Weeks without updates.
17. Emoticons.
18. Crazy over-intellectualizing.
19. Other infractions that I've missed.

It's been almost seven years since I started this little chronicle, and I'm glad to have each any every one of you among my readers. Thank you for sticking with me through all of this—from early twenties (one year from a BA) to late twenties (one year from a PhD). Thank you for all your comments and love. Special thanks to the various "anonymous" users who poke their heads in and leave comments, despite not being members of the LJ community.

You've made this more than just some diary—you've made this into a circle of trust and friendship. Thank you again. For everything.


Sincerely,
Your Humble Blogger

More!

--
The substance of light


Sensations do not exist in the sweep
of a landscape: the wing falling on it

behaves as the short-wave shade of grey
that salmon, lobsters and autumn leaves obtain

from the almost limitless range of colour
available for commercial use today.

--
Orchestrating sunlight


2 pm on a clear day in New York:

the aurora borealis etches
its high-frequency radiation in eggs,
potatoes, teeth and hair. Photons
with the highest energy scatter the yellow

of living creatures.
                  Without an atmosphere,
the sky produces clouds black as spectral fire,
reverse lagoon rocks, and the long moon
glossing the surface toward London.

--
[no more x-posting—just links from pussipost and napowrimo2007]

I'm getting looser and looser with these so-called erasures. The more I work with this color book, the more I mess with the order, tense, and punctuation of what comes out of the working. I guess now these poems aren't so much "erasures" as "poems made using a giant word bank." Oh well. I like the direction they're going, regardless of how I make them.

Anyway, here are two more:

--
The architecture of iridescence


Aztec deity in search of a few wavelengths:

sodium, overlapping scales, a piece of metal foil,
grating of 6,000 groove per cm.

The bands narrow. Moonbeam basal membrane

becomes darker, fainter—to pool fibre, puffs,
mobile order, the Madagascar moth used to make jewellery.


--
The goddess Iris


The bridge, as it were, between the messenger and her summation.

The hem of God's cloak and almost all his history.

An angle of about 42 degrees and Alexander's dark band.

Supernumerary arcs where energy is lost and the violent, emerging light.


--
[no more x-posting—just links from pussipost and napowrimo2007]

Cracked Slab has posted their "A WINNAR IZ ME" announcement on their main page and prize page. Holy shit—it's really real. I was beginning to think the whole thing was some crazy, elaborate dream.

I'm reformatting the manuscript this week. Lots of little changes to make, the least of which is a whole new acknowledgments page. (And thanks to both drscottc and riddleson, I will be doing this while rocking out to '90s rap. Takin' it all the way back to middle school!)

And yes, despite having 1,459,302 other things to do, I'm still writing poems for NaPoWriMo. Just need to transcribe and post the damned things.

Forgot to post, but didn't forget to write. Here are the poems for 4/2 and 4/3, respectively:


--
An image from the sun


For centuries, philosophers made elegant attempts
to produce green. Shadow still would give rise to blue.
This, they correctly assumed, was not a result.

‘In a very dark Chamber,’ Newton recorded ‘a round Hole,’
‘the Shut of a Window,’ a stick in the prism’s second surface.

The thin medium of air becomes visible only
when it directed onto a surface. Colour television
is based on this principle of additive mixture.


--
The rhythms of light


The Black Death closed down Cambridge University in 1665.
The key to the problem was to bring all light to focus.

--
[x-posted to pussipost and napowrimo2007]

Wow. Just...wow.

Thanks, everyone. I wish I had time to thank each of you personally, but know that it means the world to me that so many people have supported me over the course of this project. (Seriously, you don't spend 8+ years working on a book without having friends like y'all.)

And yes, I realize this sounds like a cheesy acceptance speech, but I mean it when I say that I'm humbled by all your love and support.

This is the first in a sequence of poems based on erasures from this book. Of course, erasures aren't that exciting by themselves anymore, so I'm retooling the words slightly and working on companion "illuminations" for the poems. (Think of it as an erasure recorded on top of something else.)

Anyway, these illuminations won't get done during NaPoWriMo—I don't have the time. So, for now, enjoy the unformatted text of the Colo(u)r poems.


The Nature of Colour


In daylight the sky
we manufacture,

the brain reduces to
gold, a film of wing,

heat reflected, plumage
into its components

—hemoglobin, melanin,
carotene & chlorophyll.

               ———

Colour is pigment, the most
primitive fruit combined

into approximately 9,000,000
possible permutations

—which first appeared
in 1929 to explain why

a pale mauve sunset
captured the opposite.

--
[x-posted to pussipost and napowrimo2007]

I waited a couple of days before announcing this publicly, but I'm pretty sure it's safe.

The Bone Folders is the winner of the Heartland Poetry Prize and will be published by Cracked Slab Books.

Friends, I am beside myself and can hardly believe the news.