KayBellKnitter

My TBR Lite List, completely crossed off:
1. A.R. Ammons, Garbage

2. Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

3. Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools

4. John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath

5. Mary Roach, Stiff

6. Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

I finished Garbage by A.R. Ammons on October 12. It’s a book-length poem, all written in couplets. It’s about literal garbage (what goes into the landfill) but also about the author’s aging, and more broadly about what at first we value in adulthood and then don’t value anymore as we get older. (Things that are not valued any longer are: garbage.)

The book is short but it too me a loooong time to read. The couplet style, and also the author’s strange punctuation (nary a period in sight, colons sprinkled liberally throughout, the overall effect being that every chapter was one long run-on sentence) were always getting in the way, for me.

Monday morning, I taught the first “open to the public” class of my 4-week Introduction to Viniyoga series. I was expecting 6 people. But when I got to the yoga studio that morning, the studio owner told me she had filled my class! 2 of my 6 people were no-shows, but there were 5 other people that the yoga studio owner had recruited for me … people I had never laid eyes on before … so I had a total of 9 people. So that was exciting.

Only 1 of my 9 students had any experience with yoga, so, on the fly, I ended up cutting out postures that I had planned to teach because I could see that those postures were going to be too hard for this group. I had planned a simple and gentle and relaxing class … but I can see that I need to continue to keep it very simple and easy.

I’ve really hit the wall on this one. I need to rip back again on the body to fix another mistake. But what’s really bothering me is that I carefully planned for the sweater to turn out to a certain size … and the good news is that it IS that size … but the bad news is that it seems to be huge. Too much ease!

So I’m thinking about what the next step might be, if there is a next step for this sweater. Or maybe I will start a new project.