Southeast Asian Dinner
My pal Amy found this book on a remainder table at Borders & bought me a copy. The Complete Vietnamese Cookbook appears to be out of print, but I’d recommend it. Even though my tastes run to northern cuisine & this cookbook focuses on the south, I’ve already found its extensive & well-illustrated discussion of [...]
Collage No. 2
This is a collage I’ve made over the last few days consisting of a two-page spread in the book I sewed together last week (with Carole’s help). The first page was not built up very much, but in these I did more layering. I’m still trying to work quickly without much premeditation using [...]
Project Challenge Week 2; or: Three Hours with Eleven Teenagers
Warm-up: Write anything you want but keep writing. Try not to lift your pen or pencil from the page except between words. Let whatever is in your mind out (you won’t have to share any of this unless you want to). Try following the rhythm of the music if you want to, or describe it. [...]
Cold
About 10° below last night. The river is frozen over except for the channel along the far bank where it runs the fastest. Low pearl-colored sky. Only a few chickadees at the bird feeder. Lucky for me, I don’t have to go farther than the post office today & not until afternoon. Friday is my [...]
So How Long Are We Expected to Keep Voting for These Clowns?
Via Talking Points Memo:
The handwriting has been on the wall for some time, but it now seems certain that Senate Democrats will pass a new FISA bill that contains retroactive immunity for telecoms, shielding them from lawsuits over their cooperation with the Bush Administration in its far-reaching warrantless wiretapping program.
Meanwhile, House Democrats have decided to [...]
Modern American Poetry: Openings
In the opening days of my Modern American Poetry class I have been trying to get across three things: 1) What we mean by “modern” in the course title; 2) a sense of Whitman & Dickinson as founders; 3) some basic information about versification, which some of my students have but others don’t — the [...]
Collage No. 1
When Carole was showing my Project Challenge students how to bind books yesterday, I made one too. I’ve decided to make collages in the book rather than write in it. For a while on my old weblog I was posting my paintings fairly regularly, but I haven’t been painting lately, mostly because I’m not a [...]
Winter Birds
Hadn’t seen any finches at the feeder for a couple of weeks until this morning when a flock of more than fifty descended. You often see juncos traveling with the finches & feeding on the ground, but I didn’t notice any this morning. They came in right after a brief snow squall when the sun [...]
Project Challenge
I’m going to spend the next five Saturday mornings teaching a poetry writing workshop to fifteen-year-olds. My university runs the a program for local students in which we bring students to campus faculty teach them something about their discipline. Tomorrow morning, my wife Carole is going to come along and show the students how to [...]
Tillie Olsen
Tony Christini at A Practical Policy notes there is a new documentary about the American writer Tillie Olsen, by filmmaker Ann Hershey. From the SF Gate story about the film:
In the film, Olsen says she started writing about the lives of the working people she grew up with because “it was nearly impossible to [...]
