A peculiar library

I returned last week to a library I had used once or twice in the early-mid 1990s as a resident of Karlsruhe: the Badische Landesbibliothek. It's the state library of Baden, the western half of Baden-Württemberg (I posted in May about another trip to Karlsruhe). I am researching a German painter, Karl Hofer, who was born and raised in Karlsruhe. My internet search on his name yielded 38 titles in the library's holdings. (I'm working on a novel for NaNoWriMo this month: 25,146 words as of today, headed for 50,000 by November 30th. The painter is involved.)

I asked the young woman at the information desk about the logistics of locating books. She said books newer than 1990 would be physically present. Older books are in off-site storage and must be requested by 4:00pm on the previous day for a user to collect the following day. Still others are in rare-book archives only accessible with a library card.

A few titles on my list were published after 1990, and she invited me to go into the stacks to have a look, no library card required. Remembering that this library had a peculiar cataloguing system, I asked, "Aren't the books here shelved in an unusual way--by acquisition date or something?" She confirmed. Just follow the schematic on each floor to locate the shelf that corresponds with the book's call number in the online catalogue. (Hint: do not expect obvious logic in the layout.)

Shelf A: An out of focus photo gives an idea of the vertigo you can feel

Development of Achievement Motivation * The Modern Short Story
Teaching in Japan * Evil in Modern Thought * America's God 
The Blood and the Shroud * Holy Rollers

Behavioral and Mental Health Drugs * I.V. Drugs 
Nurse's Drug Handbook 2003

Oh, dear. I remember now. In the 1990s, mildly culture-shocked and moderately depressed, I explored this library. Perhaps I wanted a book on textile art. Or something on language. Accustomed to the convenience and inspiration of browsing by topic in systems like Dewey decimal, I was dismayed to find random strings of titles on every shelf I passed. A book on bicycle repair sat right next to my textile book, and suddenly I had a wave of guilt about not taking better care of my bike. A book on teaching English next to a book about the Reagan presidency. The books and their languages were as mixed as individuals on a bus. One by one, as acquired, and seemingly with no other thought than perhaps about the height of the books, they got their numbers and their slots on the shelves.

Exhibit B: (mostly) English books (titles run down the spine from the top)

It's like the Sorted Books project by Nina Katchadourian, only so much less appealing. If you've never seen her book spine texts, take a look.

Exhibit C: German books (the title marches up the spine)

This shelf shows books published in German. Even the travel guide "New York" is a German publication, as evidenced by the type running up the spine from the bottom to the top. Amusingly, right next to it is "Das heimatlose ich" (The I without a home).

Why do German titles tend to run in this direction? To me it makes no sense: the "Anglo" way keeps the title right side up when the book is flat on a table, cover side up. There is even an ISO norm that specifies the "Anglo" way (ISO 6357). Yet publishers here seem to prefer the other, for design reasons or maybe old habit. I attempt to understand this notion, looking at these shelves. Perhaps there's a preference for grounding the titles along the sharp line of the shelf instead of letting them hang like so many awkward icicles from above.

Exhibit D: For a German library, there are a lot of English titles

Moderne Medizin - Chance und Bedrohung * Kopfüber am Himmel * Living Silence

The Death Penalty * Oxygen - The Molecule that made the world

Sicily Before History * Culture & Pedagogy

From Gutenberg to the Global Information Structure * Becoming Mona Lisa

Transitions in American Education * Castles in Medieval Society * By the Sword

An incredibly strange way to experience books. Hang on to your sense of reality.

Published!

Photo: Markus Vodosek

Today is the day: I am a published author!  Objects of My Attention has been published in the 83rd issue of Quarterly West.

My essay was selected earlier this year as winner of the 2014 Writers at Work Fellowship in literary nonfiction. I'm joined on the "page" of Quarterly West by fiction winner Mil Norman-Risch and poetry winner Molly Spencer. Other contributions of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, new media/visual art, and reviews appear in Issue 83, selected by the editorial staff through their submission process.

Quarterly West (associated with the University of Utah Department of English) has gone completely online. When you visit the QW site, you will find my piece in a hip digital layout. The piece itself is conventionally formatted, but the site around it is visually complex (especially in the version that appears on mobile devices). If that's a bit too much for you, especially in contrast to my subject, you might want to print it out to read (your browser should print without the background).

I am grateful to Robin Hemley for selecting my piece as this year's fellowship winner and to Writers at Work for the time-consuming task of running a competition each year. I'm grateful to Quarterly West for publishing the winning texts. So many people engaged with me as I developed this piece. Nicole Walker, Christopher Merrill, Melanie Rae Thon, Matt Kirkpatrick offered sage teacherly guidance. Many have read and commented: Writers in Stuttgart (especially Cindy, Amy, and Jadi), workshop-mates and classmates, the Craigs (David, Julie, Ann, and Norm), Jim Martin, Anne Adams, audiences at readings in Bad Wimpfen, Oberlin, Alta, and Salt Lake City, and Markus, who lived through these times with me. Steve Woodward (Graywolf) and Emma Komlos-Hrobsky (Tin House) offered spot-on editing advice to make the piece sharper and lither. Miriam, my daughter, expects more of my writing than anyone, and she will continue to drive me until there is a book you can hold in your hands. Simon, whose beauty and struggle have given life to my writing, will always have my loving attention.

I finally put the flowers in the compost

A tall vase of chrysanthemums--bright green button mums among fringier-petaled gold, yellow, burgundy, and lavender mums--stood in my living room since the day before my parents left in September. Chrysanthemums remind my family of the October day when Markus and I got married (October 31, 1992). We decorated church, reception, and wedding cake with many colored mums. For a glance back, see the November 3, 2002 entry on Simon's Place. Be sure to click on the wedding photo to open a photo gallery that shows the mum-inspired color scheme in my wedding dress. In 2002, we celebrated ten years. This year we are approaching 22.

I remember the last day of my parents' trip, a Thursday, as a busy one. In the morning, I drove with my mother into Heilbronn, where she purchased a waffle iron as a gift for Miriam's birthday. Along the way, we saw a gorgeous outdoor flower display, and she bought the mums as a gift for us. I arranged them in a vase, remembering the dozens of chrysanthemums I bought back in 1992 to study for color while designing my dress. I even carried them into department stores and held their petals next to bolts of colorful raw silk.

After lunch at our place in Flein, we piled in the car to meet up with Markus' parents in Stuttgart. Then we drove south to the University of Hohenheim for a tour around the Botanical Garden. It was a rainy tour, but we held our umbrellas and kept walking until we reached the end of the garden with Simon's tree. Markus' parents had sponsored the tree in Simon's memory soon after his death. Ten years later, the zelkova serrata (Japanese elm) has suffered some setbacks and lost branches to extreme winter cold. Nonetheless, we found it and looked under the foliage long enough to uncover the sign. It's a spunky little tree. Here's a map of the garden and some photos of our visit.

Botanical Garden in Hohenheim. The purple pin (bottom left) indicates the approximate location of Simon's tree.

To find Simon's tree, you walk south from the Schloß (red pin above). Eventually you pass the lavender labyrinth and continue to an open meadow descending a hillside. At the bottom is a gathering of trees. Simon's is the small one in the middle (below) with touches of orange color.

Simon's tree viewed from the meadow.

Simon's tree

The botanical marker

Four who slogged through the wet meadow to the tree:
Ann Craig, Irmgard Vodosek, Mary Craig
(and Markus Vodosek behind the camera)

Miriam with all four grandparents

Our busy day ended with dinner out at Bella Vista, a restaurant on the top level of a luxury high rise. The view was indeed incredible, even under cloudy skies. A fitting last day for my parents' 12-day trip. The next morning I took them to the airport. Their flight was on September 12th.

And so my brain ticked through things as I snipped the flower stalks today to fit them into the kitchen compost. Just how long had those chrysanthemums lasted? I back-dated from my parents' departure date. The day before, when my mom bought the flowers, was September 11th.

September 11th. How odd. I don't remember thinking this year about the anniversary of 9/11. Not the day of. It was the kind of busy day when I don't listen to the radio, don't glance at a paper, where surely even in Germany the date would have been mentioned. But for me the day passed by.

I guess those flowers lasted about three weeks. I guess one day you notice you haven't thought about an anniversary you'd thought would never lose its power. I guess you can get that busy with your own life.

Deadheading 2 (flash post)

While snipping faded aster blooms, I peered under the foliage. There, in the corner of the planter, lay a shell. A snail, I thought, has crawled its way up here to chew my pretty flowers. Away with you! I grabbed the shell and tossed it toward the outer reaches of the lawn. It bounced once and fell still. The cat glanced alertly at the motion, then lazily looked elsewhere. I continued nipping browned flower heads, hoping tiny round buds still hiding in the leaves will mature and keep my terrace bright with color.

Asters, 2014

The snail shell nudged at my guilty conscience. I had thrown it pretty hard, a punishment for its intrusion. Snails with shells are actually a rare sight in my garden. Usually we see the orange-brown, thick-bodied slugs that ooze along the grass and perilously cross streets and sidewalks. Now and then I find one in the basement, desiccated to a narrow strip of blackish brown.

Wait! Could that be the same snail? The one that inspired my iambic pentameter two weeks back? The planter, after all, is about a meter away from the spot where I saw a snail in the rain. Curious and remorseful, I walked across the yard to the place I imagined the snail had landed. Soon enough, I found it among the wild strawberries and grass. Brown-beige shell, similar to the one I described in my poetry lines. An eerily pale body, the color of puss, exactly as I recalled it. Smudged in dark dirt from the planter. The muscly body made a slight motion, but no head with antennae peered out. Perhaps the creature will survive its sudden flight and rough landing. Perhaps I want to be less careless with the characters that share my garden and offer lyric inspiration.

Snail in the grass.

Ten lines of iambic pentameter or Shakespeare in the morning

In June I heard a writing prompt from poet Ellen Bass: start the day with ten lines of iambic pentameter. You know, the meter of Shakespeare's sonnets (fourteen-line poems following a rhyme scheme and ending with a rhyming couplet) and most of the lines in his plays (blank verse generally without rhyme).

da-Da da-Da da-Da da-Da da-Da
da-Da da-Da da-Da da-Da da-Da

English doesn't always divide neatly into pairs of unstressed and stressed syllables, however. A famous example might be

To BE or NOT to BE that IS the QUESTion
WHEther 'tis NOBler IN the MIND to SUFfer
The SLINGS and ARrows OF outRAGeous FORTune
Or to TAKE ARMS aGAINST a SEA of TROUBles,
And BY opPOSing END them? To DIE, to SLEEP—

The first four lines of Hamlet's soliloquy end with unaccented syllables that exceed the official iamb pattern (short long). Only in line five, on the word "sleep," does metric clarity briefly emerge. I see a trochee (long short) in "WHEther," reversing the stress pattern, and an anapest (short short long) in "Or to TAKE ARMS," giving the passage additional variance that is common to the form. Wikipedia has helpful entries on metrical feet and prosody. I'm somewhere near the beginning of my understanding.

Looking at Shakespeare's sonnets, I'm sometimes unsure where the five stressed beats fall. The same thing happens when I write in iambic pentameter, a task that may be more difficult in modern English than in Shakespeare's time. For example, he makes use of a spoken difference between "rhym'd" and "rhymed" and of truncated words like "wher'er" to tailor the text.

Here are some sonnets that caught my eye today. The final example (CXXIX) was my favorite back in high school English class.

                         XCVIII.

From you I have been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April, dress'd in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,
That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue,
could make me any summer's story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew:
Nor did I wonder at the lilies white,
Nor praise the deep vermillion in the rose;
They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
     Yet seem'd it winter still, and you, away,
     As with your shadow I with these did play:

                           XCIX.
The forward violet thus did I chide;--
Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells,
If not from my love's breath? The purple pride
Which on thy soft cheek for complexion dwells,
The lily I condemned for thy hand,
The roses fearfully on thorns did stand,
One blushing shame, another white despair;
A third, nor red nor white, had stolen of both.
And to his fobbery had annexe'd thy breath;
But for his theft, in pride of all his growth
A vengeful canker eat him up to death.
     More flowers I noted, yet I none could see,
     But sweet of colour it had stolen from thee.

                          CXVI.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
     If this be error, and upon me prov'd,
     I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

                         CXXIX.
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjur'd, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoy'd no sooner, but despised straight;
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallow'd bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof,--and prov'd, a very woe;
Before, a joy propos'd; behind, a dream;
     All this the world well knows, yet none knows well
     To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell. 

And what's a prose writer like me to do with this prompt to write in iambic pentameter? In July I shared one "10-lines" exercise that became a pumpkin sonnet. Any good exercise gets writing and observing and thinking motors to move--a lot like practicing an instrument or looking at paintings. Perhaps "10-lines" is an hour of yoga. Summer vacation turned out to be a low writing time for me--with my focus more on family time, travel and visitors. I got some translation work done and read a bit, but my writing gears cranked minimally.  Yesterday, taking a break from the lesson plan I need to write, I pulled the exercise out again, scooted my chair over to the window, put my journal in my lap, and forged lines. Nothing came easily, but I urged myself line-by-line to come up with ten lines. It worked. I wrote eleven lines. Technically I was writing from memory, but looking out the window at the deck helped me recreate a brief sighting from the day before. The rhyming "happened," and I didn't like it better when I pushed for more rhymes, so I left the text the way it emerged. As ever, I marvel at the possibility in words. Poetry demands awareness on about a million levels. I'm thrilled when I can get a few levels going.

A stately swirl of beige with mauve and brown
adorns a shining carriage, light and round
as a ping-pong ball that’s poised an inch above
the rain-filled rills, appearing not to move
out there across the soggy wooden plank.
Sunlessly pale a narrow tail lies still.
What sign, then, of motion, purpose, life?
Slug-snail, are you crossing such a vast
expanse to reach my garden, munch my plants?
Two rubbery antenna pairs turn right
turn left, turn right, point straight: the creature’s pace.

10,000 page visits! (flash post)

To all my readers, I want to say thanks for visiting and reading my blog! You've come over often enough to push the all-time pageview count to 10,026 this evening. It's rewarding for me to pull thoughts and experience together into a post using words and photos. And it's particularly rewarding to know that people in a number of countries are reading.

To give you an idea of the readership, here's a screenshot of my blog statistics page. This table shows the top ten countries in pageviews since I started the blog in the fall of 2010. The figures for the United States, Germany, United Kingdom, and Canada correspond to places where I know I have regular readers. The others on this top ten list may or may not represent actual readers (they could be web-crawling robots, for example). I know I have readers in Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, the Netherlands, Ireland, Singapore and other countries beyond this list. As always, I'd love to hear from readers who have found me from other countries, too. Drop me a comment on the blog or send an email to chapterthis@umich.edu.