Dave and I invited 3 or so people to our Hott Cider Party in our office today at 3. We were very excited, planning our day so that we would be prepared in time to host. Dave gathered up a few mugs for the cider while I tidied up the office and found a good online holiday radio channel. Everything was set. Then nobody showed up. Dave and I just sat there, two little hosts without guests. In our swivel chairs swiveling. We talked for a while, avoiding the obvious. But then, at one point the conversation went like this:

Z: Microwaves are weird.
D: Microwaves are weird.
Z: Yeah.
(long silence...we both sip from our cider at the same time...long silence)
Z: I bet my beard looks different in firelight.

The last one of the semester. C'mon, c'mon. You might win a pie. Probably won't though.

A and I raked leaves today (before going to the library for quiet study time). She took the front lawn and I took the flat roof (rake the roof!). I listened to appropriate music for the activity, made appropriate only by the names of the bands: The Fall, The Clean, and The Decemberists (exact albums pictured below).

Crowd around crowd around. Rabbit Light Movies are now online. Grab a pillow and some snacks. Listen first to the Stephanie Young in Episode #5. Become a better person.

If you live in Missoula, or within some sort of reasonable radius of Missoula, you should listen to the New Lakes Poetry Radio Show on Thursday nights from 8-10 on 89.9. If you don't live in Missoula, you should check this out. You like poems? You like my poems? You like songs? This will get you through the holidays.

Today, at a local sandwich establishment, in order to save a dollar, I ordered a water and recieved the clear and small plastic cup designated strictly for water consumption. When I got to the soda fountain, I decided that instead of water, I would fill my clear plastic cup full of lemonade. The employee who was wiping down the counter and picking up straw wrappers near the machine explained to me that I had a cup designated for water only and that I should not be filling it with lemonade. I told him that I was getting water--just water with some lemon in it.

Here are a couple of books you should buy.

Someone in the English deparment here threw out an LP called Skate Along with the Mighty Wurlitzer: Jimmy Boyce Playing the Famous Alexandria Rink Pipe Organ. I'm pretty excited to take it home. Maybe move the furniture out of the way and go to town in my socks on the hard wood floor. I also want to say Rink Pipe Organ over and over again.

Other stuff I'm currently listening to:

The Earth is not a Cold Dead Place by Explosions in the Sky
EP by Fiery Furnaces
Person Pitch by Panda Bear
Random Spirit Lover by Sunset Rubdown
In Our Bedroom After the War by Stars

(notice that 4 of the 5 band names are fire-ish)

Give me a minute. I'm under here.

Today, on my walk across campus to buy a bunch of tape for Octopus send-outs, a man holding a Ron Paul sign was handing out dum-dums. I appreciate free dum-dums. The dum-dums had Ron Paul information attached to them. The dum-dums then weren't exactly free, but a little more like a sneaky trick. He dropped his bag of dum-dums and it was windy. The dum-dums went everywhere. Maybe about 100 of them. Nobody stopped to help pick them up. Some people stepped on some of the dum-dums. I stopped and helped. I feel that this gesture of mine was equal parts: my love for people especially in a time of minor tragedy (ultimately a selfish gesture perhaps because helping makes me feel good about myself) and my love for democracy. I was thinking about democracy while I was picking up the dum-dums. I was looking at the flavor of each one. Here's a pineapple one. A banana one. I love democracy. I love it like I would love a twin brother. A brother I love as much as myself. A brother who has got caught up in meth, lives in my basement, and steals change from my children's piggy bank.

Today the Octopus Books collective is gathering in the Octopus cave and pounding out all of the copies of our newest and 11th chapbook, Document by Ana Bozicevic-Bowling. We're doing this for you. It is now available for you to buy. These might not last until the AWP bookfair, so don't dilly dally.

Read some poems from Document here

Adam said some flattering things about the reading last night. I believe most of them, but I thought it'd be better for you to hear it from him. I'm also trying to figure out if he called me physical attractive.

If you go to ONE reading this week, go to Harryette Mullen's. Its on Thurday night (11/8) at 7pm, Nebraska Wesleyan University Visiting Writers Series in the Callen Conference center.

If you go to TWO readings, then come see James Jay and I at UNO. 7:30. Weber Art Gallery. Apparently you can listen live to a taped interview I gave to Omaha's own KVNO tomorrow at 8:30 and 5 here. If I remember correctly, I'm quite bumbly and inarticulate.

Also, I am not as intense as I look in the poster. I will not eat your face off.

My sis, K, came over. It's a monday night thing now. We dusted off the 'tari and got down. Beep boop beep.

Ande and Elisabeth are two good reasons to be happy to live in Lincoln, NE. They're here. And because of that fact, No Coast Films is here too. Check out what they did with Mathias' Creation Myths. Which reminds me, if you don't have that, it wouldn't hurt you to buy it. And while you're buying chapbooks, get his Why I am White. And might as well get Thibault Raoult's I'll Say I'm Only Visiting.

Some things I've been into this week:

1. The Translator's Turn by Douglas Robinson. I'm learning to be aware of my somatic responses while translating poems. This is a string of quotes that might show you what I've been milling around in my head:

"To speak a foreign language well you have to feel the words. Ideally, you should feel what the native speaker feels, but that ideal is impossible, since every native speaker will feel the words in a slightly different way. The idiosomatics of words are never universal. But then, pragmatically speaking, universality is not important. The main thing is to feel something" (16).

"Translation succeeds best not when the translator has obeyed every cognitive rule--performed a painstaking textual analysis and planned his or her restructuring out carefully in advance--but when he or she is most sensitive to the feel of both the [source language] and the [target language]" (17-18).

"...instead of controlling the body, explore it. Instead of hiding it away, dive down into it and bring what you find to conciousness. Explore the somatic complexity of real translation. Do not assume that the translator's 'natural' impulses will be wrong and that education or regulation is therefore in order; learn to feel what you do when you translate. The chances are that your body has a fairly good idea of what kind of translation is appropriate in given circumstances; by ignoring your body, by allowing translation theorists and teachers to direct your attention away from your own somatic sense of appropriatenss into the abstract realm of rules and structures, you are alienating yourself from the best tool you have" (34).

2. Lightness by Peter and the Wolf and The Stage Names by Okkervil River.

3. Not shaving. Two days ago was my last shave until St. Patty's Day. It's that time of year. Let's get hairy together.