note to self: more nasturtiums next year...

click this picture for another one...

i read that arnold the govinator said this past week: "If you believe that government should be accountable to the people, not the people to the government--then you are a Republican!" ... well i do... and i ain't... (and this will be the last political insinuation here for awhile... i'm not liking this campaign... neither side... not one bit)

Why wouldn't a blog that calls itself a blug not appreciate a typo that might deserve to become a manifesto... o nick... dude... i totally appreciate it... and if i was a dog-person i'd be all up one side and down the other... with a pupifesto... but i'd worry what the fl-arfers might make of it... they may have already marked some of this territory...

Lexington Herald-Leader | 09/04/2004
Saving pieces of the past: The National Trust for Historic Preservation is accepting registration for its 26th annual National Preservation Conference, Sept. 28-Oct. 3 in Louisville. The conference is the largest national forum to discuss the preservation and enhancement of America's diverse historic resources. Wendell Berry will be one of many featured speakers.

seen the cat lately?

The Thoreau Society

WORDCOUNT / Tracking the Way We Use Language /... (via Sharp Sand)

funny... i'm listening to the lester young trio do "i found a new baby"... which just sort of mentions the original melody at the start and then goes somewhere else... so i remember that squirrel nut zippers also cover it on The Inevitable... long-lived gift of yore... pull that out for a listen... and see that it's put out by "the mammoth recording company of carrboro"... north carolina... home of a notable recent poetry festival... funny... got me in a whirl whirl whirl... saturday mornings are fine by me...

delightful typo at fait accompli... alll forms of arf (at least indirectly) refer to all forms of media... if i had a dog...

this morning's walk... fit for postcards... but i never bring the camera... fog does it... up close and far away... look at that web of diamonds... look at that swirling line of clouds down low... red sun in the trees... these yellow flowers... some goldenrod... something else without a name... ducks huddled on the edges of the pond... geese off on the hill... plastic bottles and t-shirts tossed aside by (probably) our mindless track kids...

crumbs should come last after it's done... but the classroom's full of fragments here at the start... fragments of intentions, plans, identities, worries, expressions... hesitations... the trick is to work some spell of coherence, congealing, commingling...

The Threepenny Review: Adam Phillips, Nuisance Value...
"Interesting philosophy," Richard Rorty writes in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, "is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things...it [the half-formed new vocabulary] says things like, 'try thinking of it this way'- or more specifically, 'try to ignore the apparently futile traditional philosophical questions by substituting the following new and possibly interesting questions.'

i like what i'm doing lately... it pleases me... it puzzles me...

Sharp Sand: Five Exercises for Beginning... thanks for these, mr. duemer...

writing... is it true of most of it that the farther you get from it... in time or some other dimension... the less you care for it... or so much of it... instead of the rich burnished glow you read a pale musty furze...

michael dirda on... Madame Bovary...
If one were to ask, 'World, which is the most perfect novel ever written?,' the world would immediately answer: Madame Bovary. There are novels of greater structural complexity, such as Lord Jim and The Good Soldier, or of a broader social canvas, like Anna Karenina and In Search of Lost Time, or of more stylistic dash -- Ulysses, Lolita -- and many far more beloved (Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, The Leopard), but Madame Bovary still stands as the most controlled and beautifully articulated formal masterpiece in the history of fiction.

From Homer to Hip-Hop
The Jesuit scholar Walter Ong studied the evolution of human consciousness via the history of communication.

Diotima: Women & Gender in the Ancient World

I would like to see a poetry magazine that accepts only anonymous submissions.

end of the century... (via pseudopodium... via equanimity)

The Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors

kinda crazy these days... a balancing act... getting the head back in the game... suddenly there's this room full of students... looking at me... expecting me to do something interesting, useful, challenging and entertaining with them... and i only get 50 minutes to do it in... three periods of seniors in the morning... two periods of sophomores after lunch...

seniors are working with v. nabokov's essay on "good readers and good writers"... connecting it to their reading of midnight's children... sophomores are describing themselves as readers and writers, learning the ins & outs of the message board, beginning amlit with some native american myths...

august was the month of more than one marriage... We did it. We got married. ... much happiness to this couple.

first day... good... second day... coming at me... relentless

a good article on csa's... Chicago Tribune | Neighbors buy `shares' in local family farms, partake in harvest ... (free registration required)

lots of action over at r e a d i n g s... where summer readers of rushdie's midnight's children are battling a midnight posting deadline... we procrastinate... and then the clock tolls...

my own procrastination has cost me... literally... that message board is due for renewal... if i'd renewed last week it would have cost me 60 or 70 bucks... two days ago: 92... but yesterday it cost me 104 because... as i learned.. the price is set by bandwidth usage over the past thirty days... and so because we all have procrastinated we've driven the price way up... yesterday the board saw over 4,000 page views and almost 400 posts... if i had waited to renew until today, i'd be paying more than 120 bucks... o sacred seller's market...

Haring Kids

Visual (and Other) Poets against the War
Swirling around us into an ever-decreasing vortex is a war, one not fought to protect a people, one not fought to save a country, but one fought to show that we can fight a war.

to avoid sleep on the night before the first day of school... find a handful of paper collected from your school mailbox a week or so ago... but unread... and notice that one of these sheets is a report on one of your classes that was observed by an administrator last spring... read that report... grind your teeth and cuss... the administrator (was such brutal honesty necessary?)... the teacher (how could i have been so stupid?)... the students (how could they have been so evil?)... now try to sleep... reconstructing each detail of that one class four months ago... jump into bed fuming so much that the cat reads yr anger... the cat thinks it's all about her... the cat gets very very aggressive/defensive... oh yeah? ... try to convince the cat that it's not about her... fail at that... replay the class... what you might have done... don't sleep...