Facts

Electric eels aren't actually eels. They're a type of fish called knifefish.

News Bulletin

Please read, my children (or...the seven people who may choose to ignore all of these odd posts I author...). Important and fun stuff ahead!

Bulletin One: Great news! The Madre, Denise "Mom" Hinson, has successfully contacted Laura Bliss Spaan. Spaan directed a documentary in 1995 called More Than Words... about Chief Marie Smith Jones and her quest to preserve Eyak as a language and a culture. Facebook has made all of the difference: Ms. Spaan has an account and responded to let us know that she will reply with more details next week. This is exciting news! There's no guarantee that this will pan out into something, but I have faith. Woot woot!

Bulletin Two: Moving ahead, I am working on a jacket for Darfur. It's a blazer. Medium blue shade. Once it's finished, it will be up for sale, so please, ask about purchasing it. All money will go to Save Darfur. Though the t-shirts are out (no capital- and we can get more art out of a blazer than a t-shirt: blazers with decorations stand out more than t-shirts with messages), but I will also be making stationary, posters, and a song, which I'm rather excited about. The song will be without genre or set lyrics- everything is subject to change. The purpose is to play the song, then have anyone play it- play it at your house, to your students, add your own lyrics about Darfur and hopefully the song can spread to a few people. Music does wonders, especially music that we all contribute to. I think the base of the song, which I'll start and pass on, will be either jazz or more dream-pop or international folk. Hip hip hooray!

Bulletin Three: There are fewer props than I realized for my show. An ungodly amount of costumes and a freakish about of sets...but six props. I went over my list twice, was nonplussed, too. Herman was surprised as much as I was. Herman, below:

Bulletin Four: Jet and Atticus finally have appointments to see the vet. They'll be thrilled. Atticus will, no, seriously, be thrilled as long as food is involved. Jet will wear the Cone of Shame. He will not be pleased.

Bulletin Five: I still like lists.

Eyak Exhortation

Ishu!

I am in need of help, cherubs. I have scouted the murky edges of the internet. I have researched, shoveled through countless empty results on Google, and have not found a guide to studying Eyak.

Thus far, I have received a few gems, but not the gold I was hoping for. Here are said not-gold gems:

Redzone
Eyak Language Restoration Group*
Eyak Language Project
Review: More Than Words...**

According to Redzone, there is a set of materials for those who wish to learn Eyak. However, I can't get any information on them. I can't find where to study this language anywhere. Do you have any suggestions? I'm running out of options, I think. Please help, cherubs. This is incredibly important.

Everyone should learn an endangered language. There are one hundred forty-one languages with fewer than five speakers- last time that I checked. But a language goes extinct in this world every two weeks. About eighty of these languages are based in Australia, where Aboriginal languages are facing a massive decline. Eyak's last native speaker passed on in 2008, sadly, though I'm not sure how many speakers remain. Evidently, in Alaska there are workshops and the tribe is trying to revive its culture: there are roughly one hundred seventy-two members in the tribe, which is native to Alaska (the village is today called Cordova, on the Copper River- this is where much of the workshops are located, apparently- plane tickets anyone?). In 1995, the first potlatch in over eighty years was held- that's the most recent potlatch that I've heard of. The Eyak tribe is, as of 2001 (my information is a little dated...), the smallest tribe in Alaska.

Please help find resources on this culture and on this language! Or please learn this language yourself. Or study an endangered culture and language from another part of the globe.

I'll continue gathering information and do a series of posts on this topic, starting with Eyak. Please do read, cherubs. It means everything.

O'wa'a'ta.

*Thanks, Facebook
**A documentary about the fight to preserve Eyak

Writing assignment #4 - Poetry

Caprice


My world reclines at the mouth of the Chihuahua desert

in the shade of Franklin mountain

sustained by the russet ribbon of the Rio Grande.



Just below that dirty hem

like the ragged stockings of worn out charwomen

shanties crawl up the hillside

pushing against each other in

circuitous anxious support

casting out children

barefoot into the ferocity.



They shake their tiny boxes of despair

like maracas keeping frantic rhythm

as mothers howl

in voices without echoes

disappearing in the heat

rising from the desert floor.

  _____________________________________________________________________________

 
Not One More

Writing assignment #3 - creative nonfiction

Here’s the thing. They aren’t showing up. I would expect them to appreciate their role in this enterprise, to understand that without them, the job just can’t be done. Ironic, really, that I’m in a position of authority over them, yet I’m powerless to make them show up and work. They’re a rogue bunch; I’ve known that for a long time. But I thought after so many years together we had an understanding.


How dare I presume.


Anyone who writes knows this fragile relationship. The words decide the art. For some writers, the images are there, but the words to form them refuse to present themselves. For others the pesky little devils choose to clomp about and pout like surly children who won’t behave until you give them money to chase down the ice cream truck.


And what must I sacrifice to coax them onto the page? Really, I have nothing they want. They run the show, they know it, and that’s that.


It’s small comfort to know other writers—great writers—have struggled like I do. Borges laments, “What a writer wants to do is not what he does.” Faulkner nods his wise head in agreement, adding, “The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with.” And, like a tight game of poker, Flaubert raises with “I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sounds he hears within.” With the masters showing such hands, I find myself wanting to meekly fold and crawl under the table to sit at their feet.


Some call this battle of wills writer’s block. I think this a tragic misnomer. It’s much truer to call it word’s block; after all, it’s the words refusing the writer, not the other way around. They get together, decide on an embargo, and the writer is left with a notebook she cannot fill, or entire passages that serve little more purpose than a great pair of red heels on a jungle expedition. Why keep trying? Why struggle every day in hopes the words will give me even a nutshell of hope, a thimble of gold? Well, because, as the cliché goes, I don’t know any other way.


The poet Marie Ponsot, who at 89 years old recently suffered a stroke, finds herself searching for language—the words to poems she wrote, poems she loved, words that have disappeared inside her broken mind. She says it was, for her, an experience of “explosive astonishment—realizing that language is everything in the egg (tapping her head)…You take it for granted.”*


So words are not separate from me. They are me. Without words I cannot form my place in the universe with any real assurance. Perhaps the struggle isn’t that words won’t work with us, but that we fear the power they posses. We fear the heights they can take us, fear suffering a fate like Icarus,’ our own vanity sending us plunging into the depths of the sea. But words were made to fly close to the sun, so we best gather our courage and fly with them. If we refuse, they will simply go on without us.


*quoted from “After Stroke, a Poet Hunts for the Language Lost” by Jim Dwyer, printed in the New York Times June 25, 2010.

Writing assignment #2 - flash fiction

Becoming the Sea

I hear Momma crying before I reach her door. I find the nurse trying to comfort her, but Momma is inconsolable. “Hey, Momma,” I say. “What’s wrong?”

She turns her puffy face to me. “Cindy,” she whispers. Her nose is running. I reach into my coat pocket for a tissue. “Cindy, they’re being mean to me!”

“It’s okay, I’m here now.” Cindy is my aunt, Momma’s older sister. While wiping Momma’s face I smile at the nurse, who is new and perceptibly uncomfortable at the accusation. It’s okay I mouth, nodding my head. I think, You think your job is tough? Try no longer existing in your own mother’s mind. The nurse returns my smile and leaves us alone.

I rub Momma’s back, gently, feeling each vertebrae of her spine through the light gown. Too much pressure is painful and I must be careful not to rub the same area too consistently. Some time passes this way until her tears finally slow and the hiccups stop. Then it’s time for indignation. Momma has always been a stickler for routine.

“Cindy, these people are crazy!”

“Are they?”

“Yes! I heard two of them talking in the hall just this morning.” Momma turns her thin body toward me, motioning me closer. I lean into her. In a low voice she tells me, “They’re going to turn my bones into buttons!”

Her hair hasn’t yet been combed, so I pat her flushed cheek and go find her hairbrush. There’s no need to remind her that she’s quoting Gregory Corso. Momma lives in some other time, a time parallel to the one we are sitting in right now, but her time doesn’t include the past of her I know. In her past there is no daughter, no grandson, no students watching her grow animated as she discusses her beloved Beat poets. Yet, it all still exists somewhere inside of her, and from time to time it comes out, confused but beautiful.

“Look,” I tell her, “I brought you something.” I go to my bag and pull out two bottles of soda. The bottles are glass, identical to ones I remember from my childhood. That morning I had found them in the grocery store in a display meant to provoke a nostalgia purchase. Momma’s face erupts into a smile as I hold the bottles up for her to see.

Growing up, there were two things I could always count on to be in the refrigerator any time I pulled open the heavy metal door—a gallon of whole milk, and bottles of soda. A soda addict for the better part of her life, the height of it was, perhaps, when we lived in the little house on Sycamore street. It’s a green house with brown trim now, but in my childhood it was a brown house with matching brown trim. Shaped like the boxes Dunkin’ Donuts put Munchkins in, it sits across the street from the First Baptist Church at the end of a long driveway held down by giant cottonwood trees.

Those trees are gone now, and the church has grown eastward into a mega complex complete with a contemporary sanctuary sporting giant video screens displaying the words to the hymns for the convenience of the congregation. The old chapel, however, is still used; it’s where my mother’s funeral will take place sooner than I am ready. Her casket will set just feet in front of the baptismal where I was baptized at fourteen and just yards from the front door of the little house.

The retro soda bottles present me with a minor problem—how to get the metal caps off. They can’t be twisted off like today’s plastic lids, and I don’t have a bottle opener. In the house on Sycamore there was a metal opener attached to one of the cabinets in the kitchen. I would bang into the kitchen, pull our sodas from the refrigerator, put the lips of the metal caps into the mouth of the opener, and shwock, pop the tops. Momma and I would go into the back yard and lounge in the shade of the willow tree, listening to the noise of the highway and watching Trixie stalk beetles, peering at us from the edges of his emerald eyes to see if we were sufficiently impressed by his, as Momma called it, phenomenal feliness.

A nurse’s aide opens our bottles for us. I take that first big swallow—the one that burns so good that it makes my eyes water and expands to fill my stomach. We don’t rush —there’s nothing else competing with our time, no urgent activities or errands wait. Even the cancer taking Momma away from me is on hold. For a short while, just for a moment, I beg, let all our pasts and presents align into one bright curve, let me be allowed to bend time to my will. The universe is kind enough to say yes.

I turn my empty bottle sideways and peer into it as I would if looking for a ship in a bottle. But instead of seeing a clipper with sails fully rigged questing into adventures unknown, I recognize a little brown house on Sycamore street, its front door open. I see Momma, tranquil now, standing in the open door and smiling at me, holding her soda bottle in her beautiful, slender hands.

Writing assignment- meet Dilly

Dilly James saw her first ghost when she was six years old. She tells me this in our third meeting, a startlingly confession from a child who refuses to make eye contact with me.

I'm not sure how to react. We've only known each other for three hours-- technically, two hours and fifteen minutes, as our third session has only just begun-- with long two-week breaks between. Those first two hours were marked by long silences as Dilly scanned my office, her green eyes resting the longest on a jade funerary mask I brought back from Singapore. It sets on the bookcase behind me, peering down on the ten year-old girl. As she watched the mask, Dilly had willingly answered any questions I put to her, but her answers remained short, unadorned.

Today I notice she has a habit of pushing her ginger-colored hair behind her ears and then brushing her index finger over the bridge of her nose, as if trying to wipe away the constellation of freckles there. I am suddenly struck by how much Dilly looks like Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap. I can only hope she has a brighter future in store. But then again, that is what we are suppose to be working on in these sessions.

"Tell me about this ghost," I prompt. She shrugs her shoulders, which are peeling from an early-summer sunburn. "Was it in your house?"

She shakes her head. "No. She was crossing the street."

"Outside?"

"Yes."

"Was it late?"

"July, I think.Maybe August. It was hot."

"Oh! I meant, what time was it?"

"Before lunch. I was riding my bike."

"Really? How interesting! Most people see ghosts at night." She shrugs again, pushing hair behind her ear, swiping at her nose. I wait.

"I was riding my bike, and this woman was walking on the sidewalk in front of my house. She was really old, and she was wearing this long black dress, really long sleeves, and one of those things on her head-- it covered her face--"

"A veil?"

"Yeah, but like--like a Spanish one--" Dilly's hands become animated, illustrating her words by wiggling her long fingers in front of her face. I notice she bites her nails.

"A mantilla?"

"You know, lacy. Black."

"I think so. She must have been really hot, wearing so much black in the middle of the day in the summer."

"She was a ghost. I don't think she noticed."

I smile. "So tell me how you knew she was a ghost."

Dilly pauses for so long that I think she isn't going to answer. Then she takes a deep breath and pulls her feet up into her chair. She has slipped off her sandals. She wraps thin arms around her legs and rests her chin upon her knees. There are small bruises running down the ridge of her shins.

"Cause she went across the street, to the house across from my house. It was falling down and no one had lived in it for a really long time. And then she walked through the front door without opening it."

Dilly keeps her chin on her knees as she tells me this, and I realize she has locked her green eyes on mine.

This is going to be interesting, I think to myself.