tells me. Another reason I love him.
There must be something perverse about me.
You are perverse
, I tell myself; and fill up my head with Brownie, the way he winks when he makes a deal, licks his lips, rolls his eyes like a con man, fooling.
The thought is cheering, and so, buoyed up, I make myself a cup of ginger tea and wander off to bed. It looks like the rain’s going to keep on like this all night. I lie on my back and imagine myself applying aggressive kisses to Brownie’s warm mouth. The rain continues, sweet, sweet music on my roof.
16
Enough of this shilly-shallying, it’s time for me to get my paper for the Swann Symposium knocked together and into the mail. Willard Lang in Toronto has been breathing down my neck; a letter last week, a phone call yesterday afternoon, pipping away in his so awfully polite mid-Atlantic squeal, reminding me of what I already know perfectly well, that he’s extended the deadline twice (and only because I’m a member of the Steering Committee) and that November 15 is absolutely (eb-sew-lutley) the cut-off date if I want my paper included in the printed proceedings.
The title I’ve decided on is “Mary Swann and the Template of the Imagination,” not the blazing feminist banner I’d planned on, but a vague post-modern salute, demonstrating that I can post-mod along with the best ofthem. Begin, begin! I take a deep breath, then punch my title into the word processor.
I bought this word processor from a friend, Larry Fine, the behaviouralist, who was trading up. He had a pet name for it—Gertrude. I paid over my fifteen hundred bucks, cash, always cash, cleaner that way, and promptly dechristened it, not being one to stick funny names on inanimate objects. Larry came over one evening and helped me install it in a corner of the kitchen, which is the room where I work best—a dark, fruity confession, but there it is.
So! The counters are wiped clean. It’s Saturday, exceedingly frosty outside. The yellow tea-kettle, a gift from sister Lena, gleams on the stove. Only a sister gives you a kettle. Only an older sister. Get going, I instruct myself, you’re such a hot-shot scholar, what’re you waiting for?
It would be a big help if I had my copy of
Swann’s Songs
on the table beside me, but Brownie hasn’t returned it yet. He tells me he’s “quite enjoying it.”
Enjoying!
Probably he’s taken it west with him. Lord, he’d better not leave it behind in a hotel room or on the plane—but he wouldn’t do that, not a book. Books he holds very sacred. If only —
Never mind, I don’t need the book. I can close my eyes and see each poem as it looks on the page. For the last few years, haven’t I lived chiefly inside the interiors of these poems?—absorbed their bumpy rhythms and taken on their shapes? They’re my toys, if you like, little wooden beads I can manipulate on a cord.
Unworthy that. Settle down. Enough. write!
I’ve already made up my mind to skirt the topic of the Swann notebook. A gradual discounting is what I have in mind. Perhaps I’ll just note —“allow me to note in passing”— that Swann’s journal-keeping prefigured her poetry only in that it linked object with word, experience with language. Abit loose that, but I can come back to it. Put in a paragraph about “rough apprenticeship” or something gooky like that.
I drum on the table. Pine. It might be a good idea to use that queer little poem on radishes as an example, not her best poem, not one that’s usually cited, definitely minor, twelve lines of impacted insight of the sort that scholars frequently overlook. I’ll do a close textual analysis, showing how Mary, using the common task of thinning a row of radishes—the most grinding toil I can imagine—was able to distil those two magnificent, and thus far neglected, final lines, which became almost a credo for her life as a survivor. “Her credo,” I toss into the word processor, “found its form in the …”
Noon
There must be something perverse about me.
You are perverse
, I tell myself; and fill up my head with Brownie, the way he winks when he makes a deal, licks his lips, rolls his eyes like a con man, fooling.
The thought is cheering, and so, buoyed up, I make myself a cup of ginger tea and wander off to bed. It looks like the rain’s going to keep on like this all night. I lie on my back and imagine myself applying aggressive kisses to Brownie’s warm mouth. The rain continues, sweet, sweet music on my roof.
16
Enough of this shilly-shallying, it’s time for me to get my paper for the Swann Symposium knocked together and into the mail. Willard Lang in Toronto has been breathing down my neck; a letter last week, a phone call yesterday afternoon, pipping away in his so awfully polite mid-Atlantic squeal, reminding me of what I already know perfectly well, that he’s extended the deadline twice (and only because I’m a member of the Steering Committee) and that November 15 is absolutely (eb-sew-lutley) the cut-off date if I want my paper included in the printed proceedings.
The title I’ve decided on is “Mary Swann and the Template of the Imagination,” not the blazing feminist banner I’d planned on, but a vague post-modern salute, demonstrating that I can post-mod along with the best ofthem. Begin, begin! I take a deep breath, then punch my title into the word processor.
I bought this word processor from a friend, Larry Fine, the behaviouralist, who was trading up. He had a pet name for it—Gertrude. I paid over my fifteen hundred bucks, cash, always cash, cleaner that way, and promptly dechristened it, not being one to stick funny names on inanimate objects. Larry came over one evening and helped me install it in a corner of the kitchen, which is the room where I work best—a dark, fruity confession, but there it is.
So! The counters are wiped clean. It’s Saturday, exceedingly frosty outside. The yellow tea-kettle, a gift from sister Lena, gleams on the stove. Only a sister gives you a kettle. Only an older sister. Get going, I instruct myself, you’re such a hot-shot scholar, what’re you waiting for?
It would be a big help if I had my copy of
Swann’s Songs
on the table beside me, but Brownie hasn’t returned it yet. He tells me he’s “quite enjoying it.”
Enjoying!
Probably he’s taken it west with him. Lord, he’d better not leave it behind in a hotel room or on the plane—but he wouldn’t do that, not a book. Books he holds very sacred. If only —
Never mind, I don’t need the book. I can close my eyes and see each poem as it looks on the page. For the last few years, haven’t I lived chiefly inside the interiors of these poems?—absorbed their bumpy rhythms and taken on their shapes? They’re my toys, if you like, little wooden beads I can manipulate on a cord.
Unworthy that. Settle down. Enough. write!
I’ve already made up my mind to skirt the topic of the Swann notebook. A gradual discounting is what I have in mind. Perhaps I’ll just note —“allow me to note in passing”— that Swann’s journal-keeping prefigured her poetry only in that it linked object with word, experience with language. Abit loose that, but I can come back to it. Put in a paragraph about “rough apprenticeship” or something gooky like that.
I drum on the table. Pine. It might be a good idea to use that queer little poem on radishes as an example, not her best poem, not one that’s usually cited, definitely minor, twelve lines of impacted insight of the sort that scholars frequently overlook. I’ll do a close textual analysis, showing how Mary, using the common task of thinning a row of radishes—the most grinding toil I can imagine—was able to distil those two magnificent, and thus far neglected, final lines, which became almost a credo for her life as a survivor. “Her credo,” I toss into the word processor, “found its form in the …”
Noon
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