National Book Critics Circle '04 nominees...

Fiction
Edwidge Danticat, "The Dew Breaker" (Knopf)
Alan Hollinghurst, "The Line of Beauty" (Bloomsbury)
David Mitchell, "Cloud Atlas" (Random House)
Marilynne Robinson, "Gilead" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Philip Roth, "The Plot Against America" (Houghton Mifflin)

General Non-fiction
Kevin Boyle, "Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age" (Holt)
Edward Conlon, "Blue Blood" (Riverhead)
Diarmaid MacCulloch, "The Reformation: A History" (Viking)
David Shipler, "The Working Poor: Invisible in America" (Knopf)
Timothy B. Tyson, "Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story" (Crown)

Biography/Autobiography
Ron Chernow, "Alexander Hamilton" (Penguin Press)
Bob Dylan, "Chronicles Vol. 1" (Simon & Schuster)
Stephen Greenblatt, "Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare" (Norton)
John Guy, "Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart" (Houghton Mifflin)
Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, "De Kooning: An American Master" (Knopf)

Poetry
Brigit Pegreen Kelly, "The Orchard" (BOA Editions)
D.A. Powell, "Cocktails" (Graywolf)
Adrienne Rich, "The School Among the Ruins" (Norton)
James Richardson, "Interglacial" (Ausable Press)
Gary Snyder, "Danger on Peaks" (Shoemaker & Hoard)

Criticism
Richard Howard, "Paper Trail: Selected Prose 1965-2003" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Patrick Neate, "Where You're At: Notes From the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet" (Riverhead)
Graham Robb, "Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century" (Norton)
Craig Seligman, "Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me" (Counterpoint)
James Wood, "The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

beard watch

AFT - American Educator - Winter 2004-2005 - Reflections on the "Problem Novel"...
What does someone just starting out in the world need to take? If I were to stand in the street in my slippers and call after him now that he is 12, as he descends the steps, what would I call?

"Be brave."?

"Seek adventure!"?

("Come home at three."?)

What book in his knapsack might help him along his way?

The New Republic Online: Well Disguised...
Bush's critics can and should challenge how he'll translate his poetry into policy. But meanwhile, they ought to mimic, not mock, his invocations of democratic values. In public debate, those who speak movingly about democracy have seized the high ground.

Nothing good can come of tolerance. ... dowd in the nyt (free registration)

Emerson
The Snow-Storm

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hill and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farmhouse at the garden's end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

Come see the north wind's masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hiddden thorn;
Fills up the famer's lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer's sighs; and at the gate
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.

last weekend i caught a chunk of Blue Note - A Story of Modern Jazz (1997) on i think it was the sundance channel... but maybe not... anyway... boy o... it made me... remember how much this jazz does... to me... so i went to my favorite local online music club and blew all my free music credits for a hearty infusion of stuff like...

the best of eric dolphy (d. 1964... in my ears right now...)
black fire (1963) - andrew hill
the sidewinder (1963) - lee morgan
the shape of jazz to come (1959) - ornette coleman
it's me (2003) - (age catches up with) abby lincoln (but she moves me... anyway)

i know most of this is old hat to big jazz cats... what! yr just hearing this stuff now? yeah... guess i'm a bit behind the times... but i'm grateful to find it now... i wonder if there's any jazz on the other side... wouldn't be worth much if there weren't... (which reminds me... i should make that list of stuff i'll be needing in the next life... but there's no rush)

Artfacts.Net - the international gallery guide for modern, contemporary and emerging art

Tolerance.org: Teaching Tolerance: Books Under Fire...
So it was with full awareness of the history of the civil rights struggle that the 63-year-old retired nurse's aide in 2004 asked Hillsboro High Principal Larry Stall to remove Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird from the 9th-grade English curriculum.

this bush inauguration

happy birthday, suzanne

... and many many more!

some copies of still. harmless enough. ... selected A poems from fyp03... are available and ready for shipping. click [[here]] and give me yr mailing address if yr interested. (suzanne, patrick, chris of texfiles... yr already on my list... for better or worse... i've got yr number)

REVIEW: Life is a Miracle

Maria Damon & mIEKAL aND at Fieralingue... via crag hill's poetry scorecard...

System Alert... nope... down...

er... maybe not down... just dead dog slow...

the senior difficulty with virginia woolf's jacob's room... she jumps around... uncertain transitions... sentences that lead to uncertain places... she confuses me... she throws in all these unimportant characters...why can't she just tell the story... i hate her...

i felt it necessary to say that she was consciously writing against the traditional (19th century) novel... against the convention of monolithic narrative authority... because she felt it was less true than another approach that would value multiple perspectives and recognize the impossibility of ever getting "the whole story"... wherever i seat myself, i die in exile...

just now i was trying to get to readings to catch the echoes... if any... of today's quick session... but the damn thing is down... it would seem... harrumph

EnviroArts...
This site is home to the best of the Environmental Arts, featuring essays, poetry, interviews, and portfolios gleaned largely from the pages of the award-winning magazines: Orion and Orion Afield.

Illinois Technology Conference for Educators

... but the overall methodology when it comes to introducing students to poetry is more biological or anatomical than anything. This is that and it serves to do this. If you apply this there, it will come seeping out here. That appears here and is dependent on this functioning correctly. There is where you'll find this most often, but at certain times it will migrate to there*

boy... i would have said "mechanical" too... but that's the truth... i'm at a loss when it comes to these forty or fifty minute periods... and poetry... the other day i introduced some seniors to gertrude stein... and what did they think... what did they want to do after that... i know a poet poem poetry has worked on me when i want to do something after meeting it... but i don't know what they wanted

what the cat made...

PBS airs Bob Dylan documentary...
Can Martin Scorsese unravel the enigma that is Bob Dylan? The esteemed director will try in No Direction Home. Part of PBS's American Masters series, the authorized, four-hour portrait of the '60s music icon isn't scheduled until July.

Ironic Times