Sexy Cow and Lines Lost Among Trees

My co-worker Beth who's truly a Drama Queen (she teaches drama) has a line she uses with her sketch comedy class:

"If you're going to put a sexy cow on stage, you'd better be prepared to f--- it."

I first became aware of this quote when one of our mutual students put this quote in his end of the quarter reflection letter, where he was supposed to discuss what things he'd learned over the quarter, blah, blah, blah. Now he wasn't the most articulate of writers so I didn't quite get why he used Beth's quote but later on, I asked her about it and the situation was that she had Daniel in her sketch comedy class and in one skit, some of the students put a sexy cow on stage but were too shy to do the dirty deed on stage. They begin going off stage when Beth screeched the unforgettable sexy cow line.

I recently read in a NY Times article entitled "Sexy Ruses to Stop Forgetting" that the best way to help with memory retention is to visualize whatever it is that you are trying to remember. And "exotic, erotic, and exciting visualization is best" says author Joshua Foer.

So as we were again discussing reflection letters at the end of this quarter and the importance of following up on one's ideas, a decidedly unexotic, unerotic, and unexciting topic, the sexy cow came to mind. Students would drop lines like "This is not the first college I attended. I also went to Walla Walla University for awhile before going to work at Taco Bell. Then I came here" and not follow up. Now I'm not sure if they just weren't aware that telling your audience you dropped out of college was an idea that needed development or if they were afraid to get too personal or detailed. But, if they want to put a sexy idea like dropping out of school in a paper, then they'd better be prepared to explain it. Just like if you're going to put a sexy cow on stage, you better be prepared to screw it. I think they were impressed. And one student used the term in the next day's writer's workshop to mean "develop your ideas," which just goes to show that Foer has a point. I need to start using this analogy earlier in the quarter....

On a marginally-related note, here is a lovely poem by Billy Collins on forgetfulness:

Lines Lost Among Trees

These are not the lines that came to me
while walking in the woods
with no pen
and nothing to write on anyway.

They are gone forever,
a handful of coins
dropped through the grate of memory,
along with the ingenious mnemonic

I devised to hold them in place-
all gone and forgotten
before I had returned to the clearing of lawn
in back of our quiet house

with its jars jammed with pens,
its notebooks and reams of blank paper,
its desk and soft lamp,
its table and the light from its windows.

So this is my elegy for them,
those six or eight exhalations,
the braided rope of syntax,
the jazz of the timing,

and the little insight at the end
wagging like the short tail
of a perfectly obedient spaniel
sitting by the door.

This is my envoy to nothing
where I say Go, little poem-
not out into the world of strangers' eyes,
but off to some airy limbo,

home to lost epics,
unremembered names,
and fugitive dreams
such as the one I had last night,

which, like a fantastic city in pencil,
erased itself
in the bright morning air
just as I was waking up.

--Billy Collins, Picnic, Lightning

Old School

A Phone Call to the Future

1.

Who says science fiction
is only set in the future?
After a while, the story that looks least
believable is the past.
The console television with three channels.
Black and white picture. Manual controls:
the dial clicks when you turn it, like the oven.
You have to get up and walk somewhere to change things.
You have to leave the house to mail a letter.

Waiting for letters. The phone rings: you're not there.
You'll never know. The phone rings, and you are,
there's only one, you have to stand or sit
plugged into it, a cord
confines you to the room where everyone
is also having dinner.
Hang up the phone. The family's having dinner.

Waiting for dinner. You bake things in the oven.
Or Mother does. That's how it always is.
She sets the temperature: it takes an hour.

The patience of the past.
The typewriter forgives its own mistakes.
You type on top sheet, carbon, onion skin.
The third is yours, a record of typeovers,
clotted and homemade-looking, like the seams
on dresses cut out on the dining table.
The sewing machine. The wanting to look nice.
Girls who made their dresses for the dance.

2.

This was the fifties: as far back as I go.
Some of it lasted decades.
That's why I remember it so clearly.

Also because, as I lie in a motel room
sometime in 2004, scrolling
through seventy-seven channels on my back
(there ought to be more — this is a cheap motel room),
I can revisit evidence, hear it ringing.
My life is movies, and tells itself in phones.

The rotary phone, so dangerously languid
and loud when the invalid must dial the police.
The killer coming up the stairs can hear it.
The detective ducks into a handy phone booth
to call his sidekick. Now at least there's touch tone.
But wait, the killer's waiting in the booth
to try to strangle him with the handy cord.
The cordless phone, first noted in the crook
of the neck of the secretary
as she pulls life-saving files.
Files come in drawers, not in the computer.
Then funny computers, big and slow as ovens.
Now the reporter's running with a cell phone
larger than his head,
if you count the antenna.

They're Martians, all of these people,
perhaps the strangest being the most recent.
I bought that phone. I thought it was so modern.
Phones shrinking year by year, as stealthily
as children growing.

3.

It's the end of the world.
Or people are managing, after the conflagration.
After the epidemic. The global thaw.
Everyone's stunned. Nobody combs his hair.
Or it's a century later, and although
New York is gone, and love, and everyone
is a robot or a clone, or some combination,

you have to admire the technology of the future.
When you want to call somebody, you just think it.
Your dreams are filmed. Without a camera.
You can scroll through the actual things that happened,
and nobody disagrees. No memory.
No point of view. None of it necessary.

Past the time when the standard thing to say
is that, no matter what, the human endures.
That whatever humans make of themselves
is therefore human.
Past the transitional time
when humanity as we know it was there to say that.
Past the time we meant well but were wrong.
It's less than that, not any more a concept.
Past the time when mourning was a concept.

Of course, such a projection,
however much I believe it, is sentimental —
belief being sentimental.
The thought of a woman born
in the fictional fifties.

That's what I mean. We were Martians. Nothing's stranger
than our patience, our humanity, inhumanity.
Our worrying about robots. Earplug cell phones
that make us seem to be walking about like loonies
talking to ourselves. Perhaps we are.

All of it was so quaint. And I was there.
Poetry was there; we tried to write it.

--Mary Jo Salter

I love the point this poem makes that oftentimes the past seems more bizarre than the future. When we look back on those gigantic cell phones that people used or 8 tracks and any number of old school technology, how can we help but feel it was the past that is unbelievable?

This week, I had my own brush with old school technology . First, I received a couple of aerograms from my sponsored Kenyan child Lydia. Seeing the light blue envelopes with these elaborate stamps on them in my mailbox was such a lovely surprise. After all, who gets letters anymore much less aerograms from Africa? Slitting them open carefully and seeing the handwriting brought me back to when I was a kid and my parents would always get those aerograms with the red and blue borders around them from relatives in Asia.




I also broke out my dad's old school AE-1 Canon, thinking I might take it on a road trip I'm going on. He bought it in 1984 and it's in great shape. He still had the original box and manuals that it came with. Unfortunately, it wasn't as easy as it looked to use. First off, I had to find a new battery and that took some searching around. Then loading the film was a bit tricky and I was never quite sure that the film really was winding. Of course once I started snapping photos, there was no way to be sure that the photo was clear or that the light was right. There was no instant playback button. Finally, once I finished up the roll of film, finding a place to develop it also wasn't easy, not to mention that developing the roll of film was about $10-15 depending on if you wanted the images converted to a CD. And much like Salter's poem recalls the loudness of the rotary dial phone, each click of the shutter with this camera was far from subtle. The duck I took a picture of turned to look at me after I took it's picture as if to say, "Sheesh, that was loud!"

It would've all been worth it had I came up with some stellar shots but sadly, the photos didn't come out so great mostly due to my not-so-hot skills with this camera and my accidentally exposing the film (or perhaps it was because the film was quite old as well) when I was changing the lens.




Though I enjoyed the heft and feel of this vintage camera, and I definitely felt a connection to my dad and the past in using it, I decided I won't be using it on my road trip. Too many unknowns when I just want to take the shot. So I will be getting into my spaceship to catapult back into the present, leaving the world of science fiction behind again for now.

A Sieve Like Mine

My father is prone to fits of forgetfulness. For example, I will ask him a question and in mid-reply, literally, he will stop talking and turn around and do something else, as if I had never asked him a questions. I used to get extremely perplexed about this. Had he just gotten distracted mid-sentence and was thinking of something else before replying? So I would wait an appropriate amount of time before prompting him with a sometimes impatient, "Yeah?!?" to which he'd often reply with a completely blank look. The odds are not good that my memory will be much better.

As such, A Sieve Like Mine will be my attempt to develop a virtual steel-trap mind to compensate for the sieve-like one genetics and environment has bestowed upon me. Interestingly enough, my co-worker who is one with the ability to recite long lines of poetry and scientific nomenclature from memory has remarked that he found that having virtually a photographic memory was more a curse simply because he is unable to forget the bad along with the good. So I suppose I can count my blessings in that way.

I plan to take note of the various things I observe and learn along the way in this life. As such, A Sieve Like Mine will probably be as random and associative as our experiences, memories, and lives tend to be, hopefully wonderfully so.