laundry to wash away the summer... freshmen come tomorrow... but i don't have any... yet we must be "around" to help them out... & i'll be happy to do it... and then put some finishing touches on the ubd to share in the afternoon... tuesday we get school... at last... for real!

'Soil in the long run is more important than oil,' he said.

Charles G. Bell

i'd like to think i withhold... when i think that people are thinking that i am this way or that because i am a brother... i'd like to think that i withhold comment on spiritual life because it is too closely my self and mustn't be squandered or tossed away... but that's not the case... most of the time there's just this hole...

sports report: our football team played their first game last night on our new grassless field. i did not attend. but many others did. parking was ferocious. after dinner i stood out by pat's car to insure an exit for her. carmel won 41-20... or so...

weather report: a rainy gray morning... humid... we walked into sunrise sprinkles... hard rain last night knocked down my tall purple plant... never knew its name... but it's just that time of year for the garden to get all funky anyway...

taking some time for a double dose of Steve Earle... i'd been overplaying el corazon forever & ever... finally got jerusalem and the new one... uh... the revolution starts... now... seems my ellipsis is catching... & i'm thinking mr. earle is a fine writer... & i don't mind a couple of love songs on a political album...

o wedding pictures! ... at EVENTS... scroll down to Murphy...

ug... i feel like i did nothing all day... just the ubd... i'm all ubd out... and we've only just begun... to ub... d...

Sharp Sand: Teaching Poetry

c/s/iting mr. b.

Polluted fish warnings cover one-third of lakes, one-fourth of rivers... when was the last time a fish pulled from any body of North American water could be eaten with no threat of ill-effect?

today was better than yesterday... while i'm still not burning with enthusiasm for the UbD process, i have managed with the help of patient peers, to get a toehold... my good buddy theresa set aside her own work for a moment and blasted me with a string of insightful, pointed questions... which led to a kind of understanding... which helped me to see that i just need to describe the class i've already been teaching... using the UbD categories... i didn't see how it could work... but now i'm beginning to... see

i'd been stumped by the problem of "the unit" as a self-contained, time-bound, capsule of teaching and learning... now i see that my "units" stretch across the whole span of the school year... my poetry, drama, fiction, and composition "units" run from august to may... aha...

o but it wasn't really all that grim... my pals kept my spirits up... and didn't berate me for being the slacker vagueoid that i am at moments like this... maybe because i shared a bit of my birthday candy...

we were in the library moaning and crying... or i was... the other two sat busy about their work... we were trying to put some finishing touches on our elegant design of the senior world lit class... after the UbD model... which i won't bother to explain here... because i can't... thus, at least in part, the reason for the moaning and crying... this is a painful process for me... and i wish it weren't... but every cell in my body cries out against it... what does it mean when one has such a complete, illogical, and irrefutable aversion to something? i suspect it's something to do with old dogs and new tricks...

Sven Birkerts on little magazines...
Established players come from every geographic and aesthetic region -- some, like Fence or Conjunctions, readily seen as serving a more cutting-edge aesthetic, others, like Tin House, Witness, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, Triquarterly, Ploughshares, Post Road, The Gettysburg Review, The Antioch Review, and two dozen others I could name without much pause for thought, finding their freshness more in the progressive mainstream. Add to these the influential newsprint and periodical-format journals like The Threepenny Review, Speakeasy, The American Poetry Review, and Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope: All-Story, and you get a sense of the volubility and vitality of the scene.

and... fifty-four years ago... today... i was born... much gratitude and love to the wonderful lady who made it all possible... (and i'm reminded by some... would never deny it... that a fine gentle man had some big part to play... as well)

a day of beginning again... teaching... year 29... comin' at ya...