December, Life and Death and Everything Else

With blogs, as with email, the more often you write, the more you can get away with the quotidian details: what you had for breakfast, who called, the weather, what you are wearing, your recipe for French Provincial vegetable soup. If you only blog every once in a while, your posts seem to have more portent. You start getting shyer. Is anyone going to want to read this? Do I really have anything to say?

Twenty-seven years ago today John Lennon was murdered. Other bloggers were talking about What They Were Doing then. I remember I brought in the SF Chronicle and there it was in the headline. I remember friends being pissed off that I didn't want to stand outside on a prayer vigil. But what was the point? He was already dead. In any case, if you want to know what I was doing then, I was having a miscarriage. Well, a long time ago, wasn't it?

So holidays. Grinning and bearing it here. At this stage of my life, I've done more than my share of cooking and all, and so sometimes I'd like to just hide under the covers and wait for all of it to pass. Not going to happen, so deep breath, and deal with it, Diane. (At this moment, I'm sitting on my couch with my sweet dog Greta snuggled up against me. You know everything seems fine when your dog loves you.)

Meantime, thanks to Jilly Dybka's blog, I read this and following in the New York Times Book Review:

No contemporary poet is famous, but some are less unfamous than others. That’s because the poetry world, like most areas of American life, has its own peculiar celebrity system — and if the rewards of that system rarely involve gift suites filled with swag from Jean Patou, they remain tempting enough to keep grown writers hustling. The problem is, poetic stardom is an unpredictable business. Good writing doesn’t guarantee a reputation; bad writing doesn’t guarantee oblivion; nor can grace, money or nimble careerism entirely explain why Poet X reads to overflowing auditoriums, whereas Poet Y reads to his cats. Maybe it’s simply the case that, as William Munny remarked in “Unforgiven,” “deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”

Anyone who knows me the least little bit knows why I identify with the above.

In other news: my niece in Texas just had a baby. Hurray! A girl named Sydney. And we are making plans to go to Port Clyde, Maine, for another niece's wedding in May. A week on the Maine coast! I'm really looking forward to it.

Cold here. Don't you Midwesterners and Northeasterners laugh, but it has been in the 40s. I don't deal well with cold, so that's quite enough.