More submissions

After kvetching about the chapbook, and wondering where to send it, I must admit that I have not yet received an answer from the Iyengar's publishing arm. I sent a query letter to them, and told them that my teacher, Denise, is there in Pune right now, with a copy of the chapbook in her possession. Although the illustrator has not responded to my note yet or sent me a drawing or given up or done anything at all, at least the manuscript is out there.
I also got a note in the listserve today about a chapbook contest that was especially interested in hybrid projects, things that didn't fit elsewhere. One of the collections they published was a cardgame/book of poems. I love that idea. It is something I would do. While I found the sample a bit too much reminiscent of fridge poetry, it's a fine idea. I entered the contest, sending the temporary photographs as place holders to give the house an idea what I am talking about. I didn't want to wait till I have drawings. God knows when that will be!

Sick of Waiting

I am tired of waiting for the illustrator to do a yoga drawing. Tired of waiting for just the right chapbook contest to send the collection to. I started sending queries to yoga book publishers. I already got two not interested replies. One wished me luck finding a publisher. The other told me to try poetry book publishers instead. That's the problem with a hybrid; it doesn't belong anywhere. I guess you could say the same of most things I do.
Any suggestions???

Putting on the breaks

Like a heavy piece of machinery, the semester is beginning the process of coming to a halt. Just as a subway train or locomotive takes some time to stop, so does this ungainly beast.

We have two more days to discuss The Metamorphosis and the secondary essay they must use to write their essay. It is not enough, not even for the best students, but would have been had they read the text last week, while they were still writing and preparing to turn in paper 2. But all but about 2 of them did not do that. So now we are left with insufficient time to do the remaining work.
I have given a lot of homework tonight and tomorrow, trying to prepare them to write the essay in class on Thursday, but there were several absences, people who had the ability to do it, and some who were there physically, were obviously not there mentally. I had lots of fiddling with phones, sleeping, dubious looks coming from the class. I pressed forward anyway. Like the train, I have a schedule to keep.

The Ocean

Today I saw Disney's documentary The Ocean at the dollar movie theater. The film was made by the same French documentarians who made the gorgeous film Winged Migrations some years back and also made March of the Penguins, both impressive feats of photography and film-making.
Much of this film offered the same sort of astounding images as those earlier films. I was especially impressed by the footage of the blue whale. I have never before seen an actual blue whale, only drawings of these extremely rare and reclusive creatures, which nonetheless, as the narrator said, take up an entire city block. Hard to hide when you're that big, I would imagine!
I had heard on reviews that there was not enough narration, information about what we were looking at. I didn't really find that to be the case. Most of the time I knew what I was looking at, but Pierce Brosnan, the narrator, did provide information most of the time about this anyway.
It was only at the end of the film when the piece seemed to lose direction and repeat itself, getting preachy and then closing with a horrible piece of music that completely clashed with the sublimity of the previous images in the film. It was as though the film were taken away from the director and patched together at the end. Perhaps the film-makers were spending too much for Disney to stomach or taking the film in an unwelcome direction. One never knows what sorts of investments companies like Disney might have that would be sore spots they wanted to cover up. Perhaps that's what happened. In any case, at the dollar movie, the film was well worth seeing, for the rest of its amazing footage of ocean creatures.

Now We're Cooking

I just came back from a really fun morning of cooking at Xanh Bistro. That's the place where Richard and I had our anniversary dinner at the end of May. I wrote a review of it for this blog a month or so back.
When we were there, I noticed that the owner, Haley Nguyen, gave cooking lessons, so I decided to tell my friend Liz about them, and today we went to our first (probably not our last) one, in which we prepared a menu of street foods, including ground chicken and vermicelli meatballs in peanut sauce, banh mi sandwiches with pickled vegetables we made ourselves, steamed rice rolls with ground chicken and wood ear mushroom filling, and a fruit dessert made from fresh assorted fruit cut up and put into a young coconut.
There were many people, over 20, packed into the small restaurant, and only 6 burners spread out over two tables, so I wondered at first how anyone would manage to get hands on experience cooking this meal, but it turned out that every person had a turn to fix the dishes.
Cooking with other people is always fun. For one thing, any chopping, mixing, cutting, and (horrors!) cleaning up is always light work with so many to help, and the social side of cooking and eating comes to the fore, with people chatting and laughing, introducing themselves, tasting, and debating on what is missing in the sauce or whether the mixture needs more cooking, more stirring.
It has been a long time since I spent any real time cooking, though the activity of cooking and eating and reading food writing (writing it too) has always been dear to my heart. I love to wander in ethnic grocery stores and look at, taste, and try new ingredients, though sometimes I admit that they sit on my shelves forever because I have no idea what to do with them. And cooking is a way for me to relax, not a chore, at least when I am cooking new and interesting things. So this lesson is sure to bring me pleasure in the future when I try the dishes out for myself, and vary them. I can see trying lots of different kinds of sandwiches, for example, from vegetarian, to fish, and perhaps very thinly sliced lamb, though I don't think lamb is a meat Vietnamese eat much.
Despite the large number of people, the lessons went smoothly. Haley came around and helped each group fix mistakes,add more ingredients, or plate the food. She has boundless energy, and explains everything very clearly.
When it came time to eat, we found each dish wonderful, full of exciting flavors, and even beautiful (for the most part) to look at. This is a meal I plan to make again, many times.
I recommend this restaurant and Haley's cooking lessons. Visit the restaurant online at www.xanhbistro.com for the latest information about these cooking lessons or to see a menu.

Amusing

I was grading papers and while at work on the paper a particularly brown-nosing girl in the class had written, I came across a page torn out of a puzzle book that she was apparently working on while in my class sometime, pretending to take notes. She had written in the margins of the puzzle quite clearly. "This class is boring. I am bored in English class." Hello. This is the same student who asks me to spend extra time with her, going over her drafts and explaining what she can do to improve them, which she then does not do.
I gracefully tucked the puzzle back into her folder on the top. Was that mean? Maybe. But now she will know I got the message.

Paper day

When papers are due in a comp class, people often turn up late, rattled, and often are unprepared for the discussion on the next work we are discussing. Today was no different. The students were supposed to have read The Metamorphosis by today. I broke it into two parts, since it is so short, and asked for half yesterday and half today. Only two students had done the reading, so discussion was not possible. So I asked the students to get into their groups and discuss the study questions, going through the book to try to find the answers. The process was somewhat hampered by the fact that the page numbers came from a different edition than the one I was using this semester. Norton critical editions used to publish the book with some very good critical essays, but they are no longer doing that, so I chose a different edition, but didn't have time to change the page numbers on the study questions or sample passage handouts I had made. But some people had used copies of the Norton, so they were able to find the pages and discuss them in groups.
The discussion among the groups turned out to be very valuable, and after a while, we all got back together and talked about what they had found out. On Monday, they should be ready to discuss the book with some more insight than they would have had without this experience.