aw gee... i just remembered that tomorrow is MY BROTHER MIKE'S BIRTHDAY... and it's too late for a card or a brand new computer or a picasso or... almost anything...

so long, blue kangaroo... hello OKIR

processing paper... which often carries thought from there to here... need another full day for it... and counting posts and counting posts... and almost done...

gratitude... courage... compassion... vision...

a morning at school thinking about jesus... not bad... now i've just been counting posts and counting posts and... not done yet...

check out ted nellen's ya reading project... And then I read a book... good lists for each month's reading

kurt is clear at The Coffee Sutras... makes good sense... i'd like to practice it, too...

Expectation is the self's way of demanding that reward and insisting on it now, and Mystery can just go take a hike.

this from nick piombino's fait accompli... where he posts his old journal stuff... puts a finger on feelings i get whenever somebody scrunches up a face to ask... "yeah... but what does it mean?"... thanks, nick... i just might memorize this bit for such moments... ("socious" will knock them out)...

As a poet, I am a phenomenologist of the
inner socious- I must leave it to others to discover
what benefit might derive from the strangely shaped
fossils I discover there. They may have significance
for the politician, the political activist, the political
scientist or the political theorist- but as a poet,
I may be the least able to see this in my own work.
When I look at the work of others, I am most likely
toi frantically search through every word for the esoteric
information I am strongly driven to try to find.

Rushdie named as World Writers' president

(via the ever informative poetry hut blog)

check out... Literature Post - Classic books online

seniors are watching an interview with toni morrison... "You can't have marriage if you're going to sell the children."

... thus all this posting here

Russell Edson, Poet

Mr Brain was a hermit dwarf who liked to eat
shellfish off the moon. He liked to go into a tree
then because there is a little height to see a
little further, which may reveal now the stone, a
pebble--it is a twig, it is nothing under the moon
that you can make sure of.

So Mr Brain opened his mouth to let a moonbeam into his head.

gary sullivan at E l s e w h e r e talks about a fact and a film... The Lost Boys of Sudan:

The National Islamic Front, situated in northern Sudan, declared a holy war on all Sudanese Christians and animists in 1989. (Christians and animists populate southern Sudan.) Some 2 million people have died as a result of the war. Five million have become refugees.

see Giornale Nuovo on the Da Costa Book of Hours

What Gets Taught; What Gets Learned at Language Log... prompts Jonathan Mayhew to consider the college-level frosh-soph curriculum...

covering faulkner's As I Lay Dying

shift: we've noticed over the past year that when a student wants a blank sheet of paper he or she will ask "do you have any computer paper?"... once it might have been typing paper... xerox paper... "computer paper" brings to mind those thick wide stacks of linked sheets fed through those old dot matrix machines...

psychomachia: An internal battle between two "sides" or "halves" of a character, usually between ethical social conduct and the selfish gratification of desire.

Spalding Gray. We now know that you didn't wander off into our fantasies where you found freedom in the mountains of Nepal or India.

Luciferous Logolepsy

The name of this project is also its description: Luciferous [adj. - illuminating, literally and figuratively] Logolepsy [n. - an obsession with words], in other words: 'an illuminating obsession with words'.

happy... happy... to greet That Distant Land: The Collected Stories (of Wendell Berry)... a title so new it's not even listed at the publisher's website... but here it is... in my hands... o boy

Spalding Gray found dead... sad... sad... sad...

throughout the day there were some very fine poetry performances... some were simply great... gifts... i hope those students knew/know what a beautiful thing they did... uh... maybe i should tell them?

chs must be dry too... the school's filters won't let me go to the Smith Berry Winery...

found this article from Alternative Farming Archives... info about the smith berrry winery of henry county ky... wb's daughter mary... i didn't realize henry county was dry...

'I'm weirdly connected to people I'd never talk to...'

look more closely at this Film Study Guide for To Kill a Mockingbird... looks good

first period poetry performances were mostly very fine... no total meltdowns... just a few minor glitches... some even managed to capture and express a reasonable/believable tone... which i know is no small achievement... most kept the nerves under control...