tomorrow it will be cold again... but at least it's the birthday of two truly great literary weirdos... donald barthelme who shook my hand once... and georges perec who didn't...

they say we got over 50 today and i believe them.. i saw the sun out my window... and i heard dom washing his car... yes washing his car down there below... and some birds chirp.. and did i mention i saw the sun through my window while i processed student paper... and the cat rolled over to show her disgust that neither of us were out there...

ah... the birth of a most useful word... see suzanne on the wonder of wondersuckers ... a good word for the resistance... up against the wall, wondersuckers!

Henri Nouwen Society

Electronic Waste Recycling Act of 2003 (Sher, SB 20)

Ups N Downs

it feels great to have been read out loud in texas... thanks, chris

Relapsed Catholic... just found via nytimes... expresses some opinions that i would not generally accept... but does seem to be a window into some kind of "mainstream" "conservative" catholic world that a "mainstream" "lefty" catholic like me might want to peek into from time to time...

The New York Times > 'Dr. King's Refrigerator': Thinking Outside the Icebox...
Like ''Middle Passage'' and ''Oxherding Tale,'' nearly all of Johnson's novels and stories showcase African or African-American characters through the windows of slavery, manumission and segregation. But instead of filling his characters' heads with chastening spirituals and dreams of freedom, Johnson explores the meaning of freedom itself, arming his protagonists with doses of Kant, Hegel and the Bhagavad-Gita as he watches from the sidelines to see how they make out.

Infinity: an exhibition of visual poetry and artwork built on/from/around words and letters... via fait accompli

Lexington Herald-Leader | Writer calls corn a culprit in obesity

o spring... loren gives good crocus

Klingon alphabet

sometimes when i'm down in deep grey february i shoot for the light... this usually involves buying something to wake me up... i suppose i could try to pray... walk that desert for awhile... and i do... do that... but i also sometimes turn to books and music for some light... and so today the light came in the form of a big brown box from daedalus books... containing books...

Action Jackson... a kid's book about Pollock making Lavender Mist...
Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence...
The Essential Joseph Cornell...
Hardy: Poems...
Reflections and Shadows... a memoir by Saul Steinberg with Aldo Buzzi...
Ray Johnson: Correspondences...

and music...

Odetta sings Ballads and Blues... over the years i've heard plenty about her... but have never heard her until just... this... minute... and she sounds fine... enough to start a movement...

do actual people really Google in Klingon?

heard in class just now... i can't find my place on earth - i just can't find it...

The Rebellion of E.E. Cummings
But when it comes to the poetry of the twentieth century, perhaps the most useful distinction is the one between parents and children. Some poets present themselves as fathers or mothers -- thoughtful, serious, eager to claim authority and accept responsibility. Others are determined to remain sons or daughters -- playful, provocative, in love with games and experiments, and defiant of convention in language as in life.

Dual Lens - Underground...
One of the worst things they did to me in high school was teach me literature. I'm all for reading and learning about symbolism and synecdoche; what I didn't like was the way we went about applying them. Too often we approached a book like a code breaking exercise, as if all we had to do was read the novel, apply the allusion secret decoder ring and out would pop the book's 'real' point.

... and that's the truth... one of the worst things... and i'm busy trying to undo it... and they find it so hard to let go of... this tendency this... fetish...

"If a good farmer can't make a living on 150 acres of good ground, then there is something seriously wrong with this country."

Verse: NEW! Review of John Ashbery... Selected Prose... which i'm working slowly through not becuase it's a slow and tedious job but just the oposite... it makes me stop to think or look something up every page... and jack kimball writes:

In Selected Prose John Ashbery is self-effacing, continually turning to textual evidence to deliberate over telling details and human ingenuity in the telling of details. Many of the essays take up a poetics of human accumulations, of 'minute observation' and of 'the strange position of elements.'

this morning we began discussion of a place on earth... and i just happened to be seated next to a kid who had a very old very strange edition of the book... turns out it's the first paperback edition of the first edition... i've never seen this one before... where did you get this? in a used bookstore in missoula, montana... (must have been on a college visit)... only cost three bucks... borderline berry completist that i am, i promised ten plus a used copy of the counterpoint edition... i'm supposing that nobody else in a hundred mile range would care to make such an offer...

so... this volume is a bit raggedy but not too bad... and seems kind of rare since none are available for comparison over at abebooks.... the cover... front and back...



a good day for one berry bookhunter

U.S. Copyright Office - Copyright Basics (Circular 1)

The world's curse is a man who would rather be someplace else.
... Jack Beechum in "The Bringer of Water" by Wendell Berry

from a Speech by Bill Gates at the National Education Summit on High Schools...

By obsolete, I mean that our high schools ­ even when they're working exactly as designed ­ cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.

Training the workforce of tomorrow with the high schools of today is like trying to teach kids about today's computers on a 50-year-old mainframe. It's the wrong tool for the times.

Our high schools were designed fifty years ago to meet the needs of another age. Until we design them to meet the needs of the 21st century, we will keep limiting ­ even ruining ­ the lives of millions of Americans every year.

Today, only one-third of our students graduate from high school ready for college, work, and citizenship.

The other two-thirds, most of them low-income and minority students, are tracked into courses that won't ever get them ready for college or prepare them for a family-wage job ­ no matter how well the students learn or the teachers teach.

This isn't an accident or a flaw in the system; it is the system.

Jef invented 'click and drag' and many other methods now taken for granted by computer users. He named the Macintosh project after his favorite variety of apple, the McIntosh, modifying the spelling for copyright purposes.

vendler on ashbery at The New Republic Online...
Unlike many other 'experimental' poets, Ashbery has resisted the notion that poetry need not communicate intelligibly; but he has also resisted tethering poetry to the expository flatness of the assertion of doctrine or ideology.