Breaking the Ice

I don’t think I’ve gone this long without posting something since I started blogging almost nine years ago. It’s been a busy semester — I’ve been serving on a search committee and a planning committee, both of which have had to navigate certain controversial issues. And I’m teaching a survey course — American Lit I [...]

Song: On Hearing That the Obama Administration Intends to Cut the Budget for the National Endowment for the Humanities

Song
The fuck you say?
Two hundred million
(or whatever it is)
won’t keep the Marines
in bullets for a day.
The fuck you say?
The Pentagon won’t
deign to wipe its ass
with anything less
than a couple billion.
The fuck you say?
An ancient master
noted: All things
are empty, true, but
differences still count.
The fuck you say?
One does not use
the emptiness
of a shit scoop
to ladle out the soup.

The Poet as Buddhist Computer Geek

Meditation Note

My head is a house
With a hundred billion hipsters
Snapping their fingers
To bad jazz

Vietnam Seems Far Away

Vietnam seems very far away at the moment. It’s below zero here and I’ve been running for ten days to catch up from . . . being in Vietnam. In a few days’ time I’ve gone from the leisurely life of a poet in a tropical clime to being a professor of literature living beside a frozen [...]

Observation

Sitting in LAX waiting for the redeye to JFK. I haven’t experienced any delays because of increased security. Hanoi’s Noibai Airport was not crowded today and everything worked smoothly; Taipei was no problem, either, though they were doing random searches after clearing the gate and before getting on the plane. And LAX was all right, too, [...]

Cafe Nau Nong

I am well and truly here, now that I have had my first cup of cafe nau nong–literally, hot brown coffee–at a cafe beside Hoan Kiem Lake. On my first morning in Hanoi, almost fourteen years ago now, I stumbled out of my hotel and found a small cafe, where I had my first taste [...]

Hanoi

Arrived after a day and a half in transit, my back aching and my legs a little wobbly, but in good spirits. I’m staying in the same hotel as last spring and it feels as if I’ve hardly been away. On the drive in from the airport — through the Red river swamps and paddies [...]

On My Way

I’m sitting in the Syracuse airport waiting to get on the plane to JFK and thence to Anchorage, Taipei, and then Hanoi on Christmas day. It’s snowing, but they are keeping the runways clear and the flights are running on time or just a little late, so I don’t have the sense that I’m going to [...]

Car Slob

I am a car slob. I have a nice new car, but I let it fill up with junk. I’m pretty tidy in general, but the car is a mess. When I drove old junkers it never seemed like a big deal, but with the new Honda, I thought I might change my ways. Alas, [...]

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