They Always Get My Name Wrong
But usually it’s my last name. The Washington Post got that right, but called me James in this piece by ombudsman Deboara Howell. Along with 1,700 other people, I wrote to protest the Post’s sleazy article on Barack Obama’s mortgage. Howell’s article is pretty wishy-washy, but ultimately agrees, I think, that the Post’s story left [...]
BMC Photos
Here is a link to pictures of BMC. I’ll post more to the set in the next few days.
First Week at BMC
To be honest, the first couple of days I just decompressed. While other residents were saying things like “each day is so precious I can’t bear to waste a minute!” I was drinking beer & sleeping, doing some reading & note-taking. Then I flailed around with my work for a couple of days, then I [...]
BMC
Writing from my secret internet connection at the Blue Mtn. Center — which I have because I’m teaching the last weeks of an online course. It is a fantastically quiet & beautiful place. I’ve been sleeping well — did I mention it was quiet? — and have begun getting my work organized: an essay and [...]
Sport as Transcendence
I’m not much of a sports fan, except for golf. It’s probably because I still pretend to go out & play golf three or four times a year. Mostly I’m a fan, though. I never understand when people tell me they find golf boring. But then I find football & soccer boring. I used to [...]
Buying a Chair
I ordered a leather chair today, as a gift to myself for my 58th birthday later this month. A chair for reading. And when I say a chair, I mean a chair — it’s not terrifically large & its lines are simple, but it’s the sort of chair you you have to special order & [...]
Resentful Dreams
Funny how dreams lag behind events. Folk wisdom says that dreams predict the future, but my experience is that they predict the past. Over the last couple of nights I have dreamed, just before waking, about crappy things my colleagues have done to me. The events in the dreams are fictional, but related to things [...]
Summer
I’m used to feeling a major relaxation at the end of Spring Semester each year, but this year the relaxation has only been partial. Partly, this is because I’m going to be teaching a summer course online, which begins next week, but the course won’t really take that much time since almost everything is already [...]
Guillermo Vargas Habacuc
I’m not going to link to the photos / video of artist Habacuc’s work. If you want to see a dog starving to death as an art installation, you can search on the name.
Proposal for funding: An art installation: Guillermo Vargas Habacuc comes to my house & we tie him to a tree out back [...]
A Little Poem During a Cold Spring
Poetics
Here is the world.
It’s a cold place &
There’s not much
you can do with it–
a little shaping or
arranging around
the edges. Pattern
emerges through
accretion of detail.
Denote. Until light
clobbers you hard
in the face, a salt
wave stirred full
of sand & knocks
you off your feet
& nearly drowns
you in the actual.
The world is heavy
it turns out. Hard
with denotations.
You come up sput-
tering. At [...]
