I really have got to stop reading these end of the world books.

Another one from Ward and Brownlee. A “sequel”, they call it, to Rare Earth. I’m going to have to make these extinction books their own category. “How to Ruin a Perfectly Good Day” should be its name.

Earth is a middle-aged woman, run ragged by her hundreds of children, asshole of a husband, and the fact that she’s taken up smoking. Humans are the cigarettes. I haven’t decided who the asshole husband is in my version of Ward and Brownlee’s analogy. They don’t provide one, but I’m sure there must be. There usually is. Could it be the Sun? It’s the one dying in the first place and apparently will get all grumpy about it and take it out on Earth. The Moon? That doesn’t seem right. The Moon has been quite the little helper/worker bee for the Earth since it first settled into orbit. Can’t hardly use it in the role of abusive jerk.

The Life and Death of Planet Earth by Ward and Brownlee book coverThis book uses phrases like “silicate-carbonate geochemical cycle,” which sounds like a good band name. And again, like Rare Earth, it points out all of the chance occurrences and lucky breaks that made conditions just right for life. If CO2 levels hadn’t dropped as significantly as they had, then no oxygen-breathing large animals. But this drop in CO2 wasn’t due just to the rise of vascular land plants and their insatiable appetite for the stuff. That wasn’t enough. It took a geological event. If the Indian tectonic plate hadn’t just happened to collide with Asia 100 million years ago, then the Himalayas never would have been created. No weathering of all that exposed rock means no “silicate-carbonate geochemical cycle” to make more limestone, which got rid of even more massive amounts of CO2.

But no more of this cool, interesting, “let’s create as much life as we possibly can” process. Now Earth is dying. The Cambrian Explosion was it. That was the heyday. Humans showed up just in time and developed just enough intelligence to use and abuse all of those years of carbon fuels and trees and animals.

And what’s so funny is that Ward and Brownlee get a bit indignant about humans screwing everything up worse than it already is.

Really?

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Reading The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker and suddenly I adore poetry.

It’s for a book club. The Radicals book club, I believe it’s called. I don’t know why it’s called that, except to possibly distinguish it from the other non-Radicals book club that the friend who invited me to join also has. (Wow. Was something dangling in that sentence or is it just me? OK. Honestly. Something’s really dangling in that sentence, because I’m certainly not. Dangling, that is. Sheesh. Never mind.)

June and The Anthologist will be my first time in a book club, and I don’t know that much about it. Will I be expected to have brilliant insights because I have an English degree? Can I just sit and listen my first time? Will I have to remember everything I learned about Wordsworth? Because I really wasn’t that good at Wordsworth. Ezra Pound and H.D. were more my style. There’s so much going on in those poems that even with my weak poetry skills I can find the symbolism.

But as I’m reading the book, I’m finding that I’m enjoying it so much that I don’t care any more. I don’t think it will matter because I’m pretty sure I’ll enjoy talking about it. He’s just so funny. Paul, that is. Nicholson Baker could be funny as well. I’m sure he must be since his character has a decent sense of humor. I’ve just never met him, of course, and by now I feel like I’ve met Paul. He’s also genuine. But I like when he’s trying too hard and comes across as a teensy bit annoying. He catches himself and backpedals a little, so it makes him charming.

And all the poems he’s talking about? Naturally, I have to go find them and read them. (Sinead O’Connor singing “She Moved Through the Fair” not so much. Doesn’t everybody know that? Ha!) And that’s not such a bad thing.

Side note:  One of the reviews on Amazon says this is a very bad, naughty book because it’s not a good way to learn poetry. It made me laugh so hard. I certainly would have liked to have had this book in all of my poetry classes. Scansions and what not would have been so much simpler.

So my new favorite thing? Poem Hunter. Any reference will find the poem you’re looking for and bring it to you. Printer-friendly versions and lists of favorites and daily emails, oh my! Yet another thing I can spend part of my morning doing. Reading poetry! But from what I understand so far of The Anthologist, this is a very good thing.

Although it’s going to take me forever to get through this 250 page book if I continue on this way.

 

If you’re writing, you have to stick with it.

No taking breaks, no feeling good about what you’ve accomplished. Not even a little mini-break holiday to have a forbidden Frappucino drink in the back yard to watch the dog herd the chickens.

Because when you come back to it, it sucks!

I have no idea what I was doing. All those notations I made in the margins of my hard copy? Have I made those corrections to the draft on the computer? Because it looks like I’ve also made corrections on the computer that aren’t in the hard copy. So which do I use? They both sound good now.

I clearly started to use my color-coding technique that I highly recommend, but what goals did I have this time? I apparently wasn’t clever enough to write down which color meant what. Perhaps I just thought the brick-colored Sharpie was pretty? Or was the only pen available at the time?

And I refer to some research notes that I made. I’m supposed to go look at them again. I was very excited about it. Lots of exclamation points and stars around the memo I made for myself. But where are these notes? Which book were they in? I seem to have piles of notes neatly organized on my desk by some method that I’m sure made sense at the time, but now completely confuses me. And why was I so excited? Was it really that brilliant? Because it doesn’t seem like it now. Actually seems kind of silly. Am I missing something?

Well… Yes. I am missing something. The research notes!

So valuable lesson learned. Never stop. No matter how bored, annoyed, frustrated, tired… I need to always keep working on writing, even if it is just a little bit each day. I should know better. Honestly.

In other news, I feel like I’ve at least done something good because I took a ten-day trip and still managed to eke out three blog posts this month. I swear. It’s the little things.

And Google Chrome is no longer my favorite browser because they’ve got this annoying new print function that brings up a separate screen and tries to connect directly with your printer from that…and my printer doesn’t like it and says rude things to me.

Yes. This is my life.