My Other Country: August - How we're getting down

August... apologies for the dearth of posts here @ MOC... we've gone back to work full-steam. Lily's been in training, rehearsal, and choreographing an opera at the theater (think 13-hour days followed by shoveling leftovers down the gullet before passing out...).

I've spent the month writing a series of poems elaborating on Juliet's "Index of First Lines" - which started as a way for me to get going after the vacation (the task being to write a poem starting with each of the 24 lines) and has turned into a big, wonderful trip of writing and re-writing and finding what's possible starting with a small thing full of energy and blowing it up, allowing it to become something different (and accepting that what it becomes will never approach the condensed gem that is Juliet's poem).

Also been catching up on a bunch of reading suggestions from and by friends:
Inger Christiensen's Alphabet (a tip from Uljana)
Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives (which Pearl hipped me to)
Lisa Robertson's The Weather (a gift from Chris)
GE Patterson's To and From

Eric's new song has me flipping back through DeCarava's photos (and dancing my ass off).

What else?

Yesterday I ran in the Hessenmeistershaft Halbmarathon (the state half-marathon championships)... I was 25th overall on a beautiful, hilly course through the woods near Darmstadt.

But my result didn't count toward the championship because I'm a stinky foreigner who hasn't been here long enough. Next year it'll count because I won't be so new and stinky.

Stumbling on a couple music blogs where I've DL'd scads of free jazz obscurities, rare Krautrock albums, even some live Graham Parsons stuff that had Lily asking when I started liking country and western. Ha! ALWAYS!

As a 1Euro birthday present to myself, I scooped this yellow-mint-forest green Torpedo 18...