Newberry in the Graveyard January 26, 2009
Posted by Jamieson Ridenhour in Uncategorized.3 comments
Neil Gaiman’s beautiful and unclassifiable homage to Kipling, The Graveyard Book, has just won the 2008 Newberry Award. Gaiman, who is doing press right now for the upcoming film of his other creepy children’s book Coraline, writes a pretty funny blog entry about being told he’d won.
I love Neil Gaiman. My wife says I have a man-crush on him. I refuse to ennoble that with a reply. You should read The Graveyard Book.
Weekend January 24, 2009
Posted by Jamieson Ridenhour in Uncategorized.Tags: Dracula, Eva, Helen Chandler, poetry
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It’s been a surreal week. My daughter spent Monday in Intensive Care after being rushed to the ER in the early hours because she couldn’t breathe. The drive to the hospital was the most terrifying fifteen minutes of my life. Eva was panicking because she couldn’t get any air, the streets were snowy and ice-covered. She later told me, in a straight-forward, five-year-old way, that she had thought she was dying: “When people can’t breathe they die. And I couldn’t breathe.” At the time, I thought the same thing. I thought I would be too late, that I’d arrive at the hospital to find her still and silent in the back seat. At the ER, doctors and nurses stabilized Eva with epinephrine breathing treatments and intravenous steroids and then moved her to the Pediatric Intensive Care Ward. Once there, she got her choice of DVDs, a room service menu, and stuffed animals. She was breathing easier by that point: “Hospitals are fun, aren’t they Daddy?” They kept her overnight to make sure she continued to breathe properly, and sent her home mid-morning Tuesday.
Ian ran a fever of 103 or so for much of the week as well. So all four of us were together on Tuesday, wrapped in blankets on the couch to watch Obama’s inauguration. The feeling of hopefulness, because Eva was home and breathing and because we have elected a leader who seems to embody most of my own values, was very powerful. Plus Aretha Franklin’s hat was bold and in the house. I felt weepy and proud, the latter something I haven’t felt about my government in nearly a decade.
The rest of the week was spent catching up with what I missed while I was out of work Monday and Tuesday. Behind in classes, behind in administrative work. But everything is in a little more focus now. Perspective is everything.
Today, we are actually having a weekend. Nothing planned, no pressing projects. It’s too cold to go outside, and the four foot snow drifts glitter magnificently outside the dining room windows. I’m trying to write a sestina about a dead starlet, part of a series of poems inspired by the old Universal horror films. Helen Chandler played Mina in Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula, and quickly thereafter faded into obscurity, alcoholism, and a series of bad marriages and sanitarium stays. She led a hard and relatively brief life, and I’m hoping to serve her well in this poem. It’s much harder than I had expected, but it’s a fine thing to spend a day like today making the attempt.
2009 January 10, 2009
Posted by Jamieson Ridenhour in Uncategorized.Tags: blind mice, books, travels
1 comment so far
Today is being spent with the kids in front of the downstairs fireplace. There’s three feet of snow on the ground outside and we’re snug and warm inside.A good time to reconnect with this blog and being the new year of writing and reading.
The new semester has begun. [insert standard apologies for the dearth of blogging during the end of the last semester here: yada, yada]. Since last here, I put the old semester to bed and traveled to the Carolinas for a two week vacation. It was, as always, so rejuvenating to see family and reconnect–particularly with my brothers Jason, Justin and Alex. Also as always, the trip was rushed and hectic, and the build-up to it required such Herculean efforts of body and mind that Gwyn and I spent much of the trip exhausted. We’ve been back a week now, and are only now feeling somewhat normal. We’re thinking that a revision of the way we do the winter break may be in the works.
I finished Don Quixote over the break. I’ve been working on it off and on for a year and a half, not because it’s not good, but because it requires a concentrated chunk of time and effort. I did roughly half of it during the break. It was very, very good–laugh-out-loud funny and poignant and philosophically and historically insightful. Cervantes ability to take what is basically a single idea (an old man who believes he’s knight out of an old courtly romance) and repeatedly extract new and rewarding situations from it is remarkable. I’m now reading Thomas Mann’s essay “Travels with Don Quixote,” written during a steamship voyage from Europe to America during which Mann read the Quixote. On deck are a couple of short stories by Borges that engage with the novel as well.
2008 was a good year for reading. My reading journal tells me that I finished 29 books during the year. Highlights were discovering Michael Chabon and Kelly Link, and Joe Hill’s collection of short fiction 20th Century Ghosts, along with Don Quixote. Gwyn and I also listened to Neil Gaiman’s new novel, The Graveyard Book, read by Neil himself in several cities across the U.S. Gaiman is one fo my favortie authors, and The Graveyard Book may be his best work (unless it’s American Gods, or The Sandman, or…). I’d heartily encourage all of you to go to your local bookstore and pick up a copy.
2008 also led to me reconnecting to an astonishing number of old and I-had-assumed-lost friends via Facebook. Yes, I’m on Facebook. Shut up. It’s on the whole good to find out what old classmates and college friends are up to. You, kind reader, should pay particular attention to three of my rediscovered friends. First is Sheri Speaks Berry, who has been recording some very fine jazz music recently. The second is Dean Patterson (who goes by D. Byron Patterson these days), who has designs and practices a hard-to-describe cocktail of stuffed lambs, music, wisdom, storytelling, and Christmas carols at www.lambpants.com. And finally, I’ve been really happy to find my old poetry writing buddy Jen Woods, who now works as an editor for Sarabande Books (who published one of my new favortie poets, Matthew Lippman) and as the publisher and editor of her own literary journal, The Lumberyard. I love knowing the people who make beauty happen in the world.
Finally, there’s a new blog dedicated to Blind Mice. There’s not much there right now (though there is a good video of us doing “Chevrolet”), but much more will crop up as we rehears with the new bass player and move towards a bunch of summer gigs. Concert dates will be posted over there, as well as any pertinent news.
