real nice notice... really. encouraging. notice... for fyp paper products... over at fait accompli... thanks nick

What I don't understand is why a dog approaching a pillar with a sense of purpose should be a horror.

I wonder much in the same manner how it was that at 16 I thought driving around for 45 minutes in my neighborhood after work, crying to Def Leppard power ballads on repeat, was ever going to help make sense of why the object of my high school crush wasn't returning the favor. ... a profound insight... of the sort available only to "the grown"

on not enjoying Jacob's Room...

Thank goodness Virginia Woolf is long gone and can't churn out crap like this anymore. I find nothing special about her writing, or very interesting for that matter...her style is just different. Just because something is confusing and you have to re-read to look into the meaning does not make the piece of literature great; in fact, it takes so much time because she writes so poorly - in short, it blows.

Woolf's writing is very circular and tiring. I can't even count the number of times I fell asleep reading this trash of a novel. Though some descriptions are done wonderfully, they unfortunately are like needles in haystacks throughout the book. There was no story or anything remotely thrilling about this - she wrote about ordinary, boring things and gave them less-than-oridnary descriptions. Shame on Woolfe for ruining AP English classes.

where does a teacher begin... where should this teacher have begun... wherever it was, it wasn't the right spot for this student... i have no problem with a student not liking any particular title in the course... but... i guess... it's the "writes so poorly" that gets me...

still... another writes...

But, even if I didn't understand what was happening half the time, I love the way Woolf writes. She has the most beautiful sentences I think I've ever read. Even if I have no idea what they mean, I enjoy reading them. I remember one sentence in AROOO about seeing a goldfish in the pond, which had no consequence whatsoever to the book, but was wonderful to read nonetheless. Her writing feels like floating.

go see suzanne's cool hang-ups...

just arrived... davenport's the hunter gracchus...

on g stein's difficult work... To read it we need to find a part of our brain that we have never used, where the synapses are differently designed.

this of course is true of so much... more... beyond ms. s... the strangeness and ordinariness of being here on any day... for example

Doesn't each poet have to justify his or her own style? ... doesn't he? doesn't she? ... not if he's a lazy poet... like me

does it mean the poem gets the final word on the life...

does it mean the poem is a deep mirror of the life...

does it mean that the poem eventually sooner or later comes to hug the life...

again... The structure of a poem ultimately involves the structure of the life around it.

i like that ultimately involves leaves a lot of wiggle room... which i always need... wiggly me...

birdsong ... and in my mindlessness... i forgot to note the appearance of a robin in the snow... last week... mattered so much for a moment... soon forgot...

poet faces... lots and lots of poet faces (via hotel point... sorta)

On Being Asked for a Love Poem Article by a Cub Reporter for a Student Newspaper about Giving Advice to Undergraduates about How to Write Love Poetry for the Upcoming Valentine's Day ... good advice

and... in class discussion of faulkner's as i lay dying... one student wonders, "will we be reading a book without hicks in it next?"... some hint of The Prejudice Against Country People... in fact, i think the next book will be berry's... (he types with a wicked grin)

interested to find in a re-reading of terrence des pres' essay "Writing into the World" (1985) that he's taking on wendell berry... briefly in a (brief) discussion of carol bly's work... he says

Bly bears witness to the untoward givenness of things nearby; she works to reveal a weave of life and custom that constitutes, to her amazement and dismay, a whole hard world. By contrast, Berry develops a program; he aims to endorse an American version of pastoral complete with noble savage.

and a little later he writes...

Bly's writing, in consequence, possesses a hard-edged dignity not to be found in Berry or Perrin.

i imagine that he found something like an ideology in berry's work... a "program"... which interferes with the seeing of facts... the "noble savage" feels like a crack at berry's "good country people"... i don't know... they aren't all that perfect... and no "hard-edged dignity"? but des pres goes on...

My claim for an aesthetic of witness goes no further than this: Worldly writing depends on the imaginative energy facts inspire--and it goes without saying that not everyone is moved to creation by facts. I should add that one's reaction to factual situations is usually also ethical; depending on the degree of threat of unpleasantness confronted, moral response can be a potent force in the kind of writing that, as I like to say, announces against. And finally, in work of this kind the writer's need to know, to have information at hand, is more than useful; for prose of witness, knowledge is one's job's first duty. To see what is there, imagination must have concrete points of entry.

i can't help holding these thoughts up beside 1) my own apprec iation of both berry's and des pres' work, 2) my own writing at fyp, and 3) a nagging itch to consider what i'm doing at fyp in light of berry's aesthetic... as expressed in his standing by words... it's all a jumble now... but i'm wondering if there isn't some common ground to be found... as when berry writes in "Notes: Unspecializing Poetry"

The structure of a poem ultimately involves the structure of the life around it.

... pause to consider ...

Thomas Berry

We needed a priest who was both a Catholic and a pagan.

& mike's piece down below vibrates with this piece of a poem by carolyn forche posted at chris murray's tex files...

'Your problem is not your life as it is
in America, not that your hands, as you
tell me, are tied to do something. It is
that you were born to an island of greed
and grace where you have this sense
of yourself as apart from others. It is
not your right to feel powerless. Better
people than you were powerless.
You have not returned to your country,
but to a life you never left.

more environmental wisdom from a carmel senior in today's daily herald...

Save environment by recycling more

The blessings of the 20th century created a mentality across America of taking things for granted. This mind-set could now become a curse foreshadowing our doom, resulting from environmental neglect, resource mismanagement and overproduction.

The plague becomes apparent through dilemmas suburbanites now face including coyote attacks, contaminated water supplies and most recently the garbage removal questions described in a Jan. 15 article ("Room for trash wasting away"). The article discussed possible solutions to ease the overfilling of Illinois' landfills, but it forgot to mention why the problem is so bad in the first place and the methods of limiting excessive garbage output.

The amount of waste produced here in the suburbs is a shameful display of disregard for what we have. We abuse the garbage removal service by ridding ourselves of electronics, furniture, clothes, books, appliances, etc. that may still serve their purpose but are just unwanted, as we succumb to the frenzy of buying new. Meanwhile, overseas factories mass-produce more stuff that is again disposed of shortly after arriving in the United States.

And what about our inner longings for convenience and shiny packages? Plastic wrappers, containers, boxes and lids will sit in landfills for centuries before they are broken down. Corporations should make a stronger effort to package products with only biodegradable or recyclable components.

Responsibility rests in the hands of consumers as well. Exerting a little energy by recycling garbage will pay off in the future. Many household items that are still usable can be donated to organizations serving Lake County's needy, who will put things to use much more efficiently than a garbage truck. Home composters also are available for decomposing food waste and paper.

Aluminum cans and other metal can be exchanged for cash at scrap yards, where they are melted down and reused. There are so many options in reducing the amount of trash sent off to landfills. The only excuses for running out of room are our own laziness and carelessness.

Only by becoming more environmentally conscious and less wasteful can we reverse this pathetic trend.

Mike Garamoni
Mundelein

BOOKS2EAT the International Edible Book Festival... (via Crag Hill's poetry scorecard)
The International Edible Book Festival is a yearly event that takes place on April 1 throughout the world .This event unites bibliophiles, book artists and food lovers to celebrate the ingestion of culture and its fulfilling nourishment. Participants create edible books that are exhibited, documented then consumed.

how can we know if the personal is using us?

ha... Heavy metal umlaut ... via Jonathon Delacour

On Paul Violi's "Index"

languagehat.com: FUN WITH INDEXES

lives.

always the teaching life. what is it. you gotta wonder sometimes. but these other lives.

lately the self-publishing life has been fun.

and the wendell berry life has been on a breather after finishing the first round of this individual book title project.

but the index life is kicking back in a bit. from the fyp stuff and more thinking about it.

the murphy family life is some kind of ground swampy and solid. the carmelite life is. a mad mystic trip. the cat life is fuzzy and snowing cat confetti.

the fyp life is resolute. ready to jump into year three pretty soon. wondering what direction. re-reading so much from 03 lately reminds me that try as one might to lose or remake oneself something tougher than will will have its way. if you are only one person there is only one way to say. and say again.

ecritures bleues

Hintergedanke

The Lost World of John Clare...
Despite a variety of endowments and trust funds set up for him by patrons, Clare remained near the poverty level throughout his life. However, he never launched into economic diatribes. Instead, the strength of his 'peasant poetry' is a recurring lament of a different sort, namely, the changes taking place in the countryside of England during his lifetime, as the Enclosure Laws were enacted to eliminate common pasture land, and the fencing and hedging of private property forever altered the rural landscape.

in 2.5 minutes the sophomores will rush in to recite their memorized emily dickinson poem... i will listen and score... listen... and score... remembering that i am eating too much chocolate lately and too much pasta last night... things are bright here at school today for a monday... bright... but why did some ap seniors not read the assignment... why not... they say they have "a life"... whatever that might be... since when does having a life become a reason not to live... more completely... in literature... i just don't get it... last night in the restaurant i turned from the two televisions running simultaneously up by the ceiling and said to dom... people really really like sports don't they... they do... bell... sophomores... dickinson...

Jonathon Delacour: the heart of things

check out the waaaay cool snowode from suzannagig jig... just wonderful