no lions or tigers... but at least one Cougar in Lake County...

Cougars are long, slender, felines with smallish heads and long tails. They are light, tawny brown and can weigh up to 160 pounds. Cougars were once common in Illinois, experts say, but there are none left in the wild.

...the following definition of the chiastic novel: "//a novel can be composed chiastically, or with chiasmus as a 'structuring principle,' imparting to the work a 'conceptual centre' or thematic fulcrum on either side of which the text ebbs and flows, toward not the 'beginning' and the 'conclusion' as much as one end or the other.

Web sites that contain collections that are copyright free (via twists & turns)

might have something to do with al green... "i can't stop"...
might have something to do with ali farka toure... "niafunke"
might have something to do with five piles of paper...
might be the coffee... or the clear blue... morning

might have something to do with calvino's strange towns...
might be dylan's rolling thunder... or an old cat...
but i'm feeling pretty good today... hope you are... too...

from fait accompli
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

'Maybe I oughta get stuck into something.'

from Arthur Miller
Death of a Salesman
Penguin, 1976;
first published by Viking Penguin,
1949

since April is National Poetry Month i gotten into the habit of sending poems to everyone in the building every school morning throughout the month... this has me thinking about the two kinds of poem... 1) the kind you'd send to a vast, diverse (though not faceless) group... 2) the kind you would not...

the kind you would should be easy to read, short, with some kind of emotional punch or insight...

the kind you would not should be... mostly... the kind of poem i like to read and sometimes write...

and so... i am divided

a very cool calvino site: Italo Calvino: Outside the town of Malbork

and based on hints in the "central city" i wondered if the chiastic structure might have something to do with earth air fire and water... but nothing comes of it in an early search...

world lit begins a reading of Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino with some close attention to the Table of Contents... we note the patterns... the rolling categories... the mirroring... 5 dominates because it has a perfect center at 3... is this a chiastic structure? the inversion of sections 1 and 9 suggests that possibility... will the substance lend credence to any of this? time will tell...

senior kid here in yearbook just said "there's only twenty-three days left of school" and i said "no, it's a lie"... but now i've just counted and the kid is right... the kids are always right in these matters...

Mangalesh Dabral

Tempered in the sociopolital turmoil of late 1960's and early 1970's, Mangalesh represents a sensibility that links him to the classicism of the older Indian literatures as well as the left radical modernism. Although he has always been highly regarded as a poet by the literary establishment but he has the instincts that have told him to keep his distance from it.

thanks to nick for noticing...

his leader... impractical instructions from
his self-esteem... our attention reduced to
his poetry... conditional lamentations in
his nerve... exceptional subversions of
his room... uncertain sanitation of
his wardrobe... suspicious origins of
his past... our puzzling adherence to
his bidding... lost in the clouds over

kind of surprised by that one myself... it's fun when they just bushwhack you...

just back from a long exhausting a pretty fine day... capped by a visit to Splendors of China's Forbidden City: The Glorious Reign of Emperor Qianlong... story and pictures of the easter weekend mom's birthday cat adventure museum trip coming... soon enough... right now i need to think about five classes for tomorrow (but boyo is that cat happy to be home)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MOM!!!