Cycles
With two weeks of classes left, everybody — students & faculty — are just sort of grinding through. The first half of April has been gray & snowy, which has not exactly lifted people’s moods either. Because I don’t teach until this afternoon, I am sitting in bed with the terriers looking out on the [...]
Foreign Visitors
So far this morning, this blog has been visited from Bangkok, Bucharest, & Atlanta. (And now from Hanoi, Hong Kong, & Bahrain.) Welcome foreign visitors! I see you have been searching for Gustav Klimt. He’s around here somewhere, but I haven’t seen him lately. He’s probably off having a smoke with Mondrian.
My Poetic Lineage (1)
The first poem I remember feeling transformed by is Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” When I was thirteen or fourteen, I could read that poem — half aloud, half to my self in a kind of quasi-religious transformative mumble — that profoundly affected my sense of the world. (This would have been about [...]
Doing the School of Quietude Rag
Note: This post has been edited in response to Tom Morgan’s comment & after re-reading his original blog post. I was irritated (see my response to Morgan in comments) & now see that I mischaracterized Morgan’s intention.
Tom Morgan has two posts [first, second] recently dealing with the history & cultural politics of Ron Silliman’s name [...]
The Very Model of Corruption
Imus say, “I’m not a bad person.” Wolfowitz says, “I made a mistake.” Gonzales has to cancel his regular commitments in order to practice his testimony before the Judiciary Committee. Monica Goodling says she will assert her fifth amendment rights if called to testify about her eager role in the corruption of the Justice Department. [...]
Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut was very important to me when I was a young man, especially his books Cat’s Cradle & Slaughterhouse Five. After that his books became garrulous & somehow both over-written & under-written. Or under-imagined. His last book, Man Without a Country, is an unreadable mishmash of assertion & uninformed bad temper. I can’t imagine it [...]
Swabbing off a Ficus
The title of this post sounds sort of dirty if you don’t know the exact meanings of the words, or take them just as sound. Go swab a ficus, mate! In fact, the post title refers to the fact that I spent an hour this evening with cotton swabs & insecticidal soap swabbing the leaves [...]
Our Tom Paine
I’ve been reading Hullabaloo pretty much since the start. I like incendiary style, so I like Digby. But in this post today Digby’s style achieves a combination of grace & passion I associate with Tom Paine. Prose as combustion.
I Had to Laugh
I know it makes me a bad person, but I just laughed & laughed when I read this:
Charleston Southern is a university of about 3,000 students, and Ward described it as a supportive community, with shared Baptist values. “We all just can’t believe it,” Ward said. “It’s just terrible. We’re completely at a loss for [...]
The Robins are Back
And boy are they pissed. Having to scratch for bugs under leaves covered with two inches of snow does not a happy Robin make. I feel like I should take a rake & clear a few patches in the back yard for them.
Update: There are about fifty goldfinches (the males now beginning to show their [...]
