我的blog好象已经不能免俗地变成了育儿日记, 但最近实在是每天二十四小时对着有劲, 想写点intellectual的东西都不可能.
有劲又生了一个星期的病, 而且把医生弄糊涂了, 搞不清他最近倒底怎么了, 接二连三有事. 今天早上开始有了起色, 虽然还是cranky(从Maria那里学来, 是我最近最常用的词), 但总算是脱离了退烧药. 累了几天, 我终于又觉得生活美好起来.

----胡乱几句, 算是发泄.

Almost surrealistically, I became Dad or Mom in my mind.

"Running a temperature again," I said to L, the third time in the past two weeks. While L tried to feed E some breakfast, I called the pediatrician's office to make an appointment and then to the familycare.
On the way to the hospital, I thought of how years ago Dad would put me on his back and walk to the hospital as fast as he could when I was sick. And how Mom's hand on my burning forehead would bring a cool and comforting feel.

(There seemed to be so much to write, but I become wordless all of a sudden.

Cold? Allergy?

I'm totally confused.

Is it cold or allergy? Will allergy cause sore throat? Why neither cold medicine nor allergy medicine work on me? Whatever it is, it's been on and off for two months, ugh...

recent highlights

--妈妈说他和爸爸在路上看到捐款箱就去捐, 隔天学校有号召捐款的通知, 她大老远专程跑了一趟又去捐了一次.

--发现慈济的工作人员(志工?) 很好, 问题回答清楚, 态度很可爱.

--这几天又是一个人带有劲在家, 还遇状况, 星期天找不到他的医生, 火急火燎赶去"Urgent Care Clinic," 到那儿一看, 全是抱着小孩子的. 拖了几天的症状一大堆, 还是病毒, 被打发回家喝水. 我把汽车冷气开足, 在戴维斯超过40摄氏度的太阳里, 车里怎么都热, 我不停地喊有劲喝水, 从后视镜里看他的脸色, 一边气愤地想如果是有劲自己的医生说不定能给更仔细的判断和更有意义的建议.

--热情的诗人又来了信, 说要给寄我更多作品.

--前阵子参与忙的一个session proposal不行, 今年的MLA没了指望, 这最高级别的会还真是不容易进? 可恨我前几个月太忙, 没办法多投几个abstracts碰运气.

酷暑的开始

我对着天气预报说, 唉呀, 心理准备还没有作足呢, 居然, 夏天已经来了??? 从昨天开始, 103F/39~40 C, 要持续到星期天. 我知道, 这里虽然离SF只有一个多小时车程, 但因为被山挡住了海上的水汽, 陷在山谷里有典型的冬冷夏热的内陆气候, 我知道, 这里六七月的高温可以持续45C好些天, 但是但是但是, 现在才只是五月中啊! 这样的天气, 也太疯狂了!

折腾了一个星期, 终于读完了那本诗集, 给诗人回了信, 斟酌再斟酌, 没有问我觉得很有批评性的那个问题, 只告诉他有哪几首我很喜欢. 职业写诗那么艰难, 评论人家还是应该慎重再慎重的. 面对面接触或直接通信时,　怎么能让人看到自己的不足, 但又不让他/她觉得丝毫不舒服， 批评的艺术该怎么把握?　提问该比直接给意见婉转，但要指向明确又好听好看很难啊．．．

Phrase of the day: "the ugly business of living"

Found this passage by Ted Berrigan quoted by Linh Dinh:

"It seems to me that anybody that writes a few hundred poems ought to be able to write a very good one. Probably should be able to write twenty very good ones. Because the first, if you start writing, the first couple of years you write quite a number of pretty good poems; it's just after that it gets a little hard. And then one wants to see what you do in the next three or four years, and if you're still around after that six or seven years, you're probably going to be around. You're probably going to be a poet. And everybody is rooting for you to do that, but if you don't, it's all right. What the hell. We get ours, you get yours. I mean, it's not quite that brutal, but in a way, it has to be. It's a full-time thing, and particularly the business of becoming a poet."

Everything said here is so true, but in the end I can't help feeling, sadly, what "business" is not "a full-time thing"!

morning reading

--The NYT website again features large disaster photos of China on the opening page, the second or the third times in the past couple of months? What a "good" year 2008 has given us! I'm not religious, but would like to pray with all my heart that the quake-ridden families in Sichuan and the neighboring provinces can get the help they need as soon as possible!

--Last year when Prof G told me he would edit a special "China issue" of MQR for this spring, featuring writings/interviews of Yiyun Li, Ha Jin, Gao Xingjian, etc., I hadn't realized how the 2008 Beijing Olympics would affect culture and media at this side of the Pacific so greatly. Then in the past few months, it became increasingly clear that anything--simply anything-- about China would cause buzz this year. The New Yorker printed Ha Jin's "The House behind a Weeping Cherry" last month and this month gave Yiyun Li's "A Man like Him".
Both these two New Yorker stories are captivating. If Ha Jin's can be predictable in a sense with its description of Chinatown prostitutes' miserable life, Li's is not without surprises in terms of plot, set in contemporary China centering around an old bachelor art teacher. Yet while reading them I can't help wondering if they're translatable, or more specifically if the writing will remain equally good when translated into Chinese. I've always liked Ha Jin and am starting to read more by Yiyun Li after hearing endless praises of her from Americans. But deep inside, I seem to doubt if the stories can appear as interesting in Chinese as in English. Why so? What aspects of the writing make me think so? I've yet to read more closely to put my intuition into reasonable argument. No task for now. or, for ever--what's the point of taking the trouble to prove something is not as good as it appears?

I'm reading this review of a new biography of Richard Rorty at http://insidehighered.com/views/2008/05/07/mclemee

Looks like a fun book to read?

Back to work

it's 1:12pm, and i tell myself to go back to work after such a long vacation (it lasts 19 days already!).

opening poetrydaily.net, i make this pretty interesting poem as a warm-up reading,
and continue i will
on the journey of dissertation

还是书

长周末, 我带有劲去了两次植物园. 因为那几本Tafuri的关系吧, 野鸭子是他现下除了猫以外的最爱. 一大早, 鸭子们都卧在河滩树荫下睡觉, 无奈有劲边在鸭子群里练跑步边大叫"鸭鸭", 还试图去摸它们, 扰了人家好梦, 引来一阵又一阵烦恼的叫声.

还去了趟Borders, 给邻居孩子买生日礼物, 凑巧发现一本很老的书, Make Way for Ducklings, Robert McCloskey 在1941年出的. 图画都没有上色, 只是铅笔素描的样子, 但很生动. 我翻了几页给有劲看, 他立刻对里面 小鸭子们过马路遇到汽车的一幅画有了兴趣, 就不再到处乱跑乱翻, 跟我坐下来等着继续看. 真有意思, 我瞎撞上的书倒都对他胃口, 是不是因为直觉和喜好也是有遗传因素, 他其实是和我一样的兴趣呢?

不过我其实是这样boring的一个妈妈吧, 除了书什么都不会挑.

好些天没正经工作了, 贴一篇几个月前的日记激励自己--

12/14/2007

The huge lights hanging down from the high ceiling doesn't illuminate as much as
the sunshine from the partly blinded windows. why should they--the lights--stay on all day long?
I'm sitting in the main reading room of Davis library, trying to write.
the conversation on MSN just now was going perfectly when i
had to cut it short. time is so limited, and i'm always in a hurry and have to multi-task
these days. While talking on MSN, I got some glimpses of Lucien Freud's portrait paintings
on NYT. They're astonishingly powerful--touching and unsettling at the same time to me.
Looking at them, I feel as if in the middle of reading a novel like A Hundred years of
solitude or Middlesex: the work's power is so tempting that I would wholeheartedly immerse
myself in it for as long as possible.