To say I’m disappointed in Obama so far is an understatement. I list my complaints, in no particular order, as follows: inability to adequately fill cabinet; silence on the black and white morality of the Blagojevich scandals; and, of course, a completely uninspiring non-response to the economic crisis. Force the banks to acknowledge their holdings [...]
Still Hating Memoirs
Lovely piece in the Tribune today via the Los Angeles Times on yet another memoir that turned out false. The author, Meghan Daum, asks the question whose answer has me banging my head against the wall every day:
why don’t these authors simply present their books as fiction? After all, many novels are truer than their [...]
Induction junk-tion, what’s your funk-tion?
Just finished reading Wittgenstein’s Poker. It’s something I had wanted to get around to doing for awhile now, but it was easy to put off. That is, until Mr. D Smith mailed it to me. The gesture, I felt, deserved a prompt reading.
Once, long ago, a friend asked me if it would be [...]
The Ancient Geeks
Last year, I had a lot of success with struggling students using audiobooks to help increase comprehension and stay focused on their reading. Despite all the TV watched, apparently being dictated the English language in sitcom format doesn’t trigger the same neurons as being read to, because many of the same problems continue to recur [...]
Antiversaries
As much as I want to think about myself today and all the irony that entails, I can’t.
Except for how hungry I am, because life goes on, but we’re running out of food and our volunteer budget is not keeping my stomach full.
A moment of reflection on the half-mast flag brought to mind a poem [...]
I Learned This 550 Years Ago, Thanks
Today is our first of many faculty meetings this year. I will always long for the days when I saw “teacher in service” on the calendar and felt my heart leap at the chance to squander my afternoon freedom on dating shows (Elimidate, The Fifth Wheel, Blind Date, we hardly knew ye). Now, I grumble [...]
That Little Something
Reading Charles Simic always forces me to confront my beliefs about poetry, what it is, and what it should be. Familiar mostly with his later work, I have to hack through compliments of thick and repetitive smog to get at the fresh voice—sometimes I’m left wondering if Simic is really as “influential–or as inimitable” as [...]
Something New I Learned Today
After much prodding, and eventually having the book mailed to me by my loving grandmother, I am reading Devil in the White City. It’s fantastic–I forgot the joy of non-fiction. Well written, it’s like a roller coaster in that it’s on rails and you could stand back far enough and see the whole thing [...]
“Not Another Day”
I guess people like to say that Slug, MC of Atmosphere, is now in a ’story-telling’ phase. I’m not really sure when he wasn’t in a story-telling phase, but it is certainly true that the latest releases, When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold and Sad Clown Bad Spring are heavy on [...]
Meditations in Green
I’ve made it a bit of a personal goal to read more fiction. You are what you eat, and you write what you read, in a certain sense, and I’ve let myself get way too caught up with philosophy, criticism, and spirituality and drifted much too far from fiction.
To reinvigorate myself, I decided to [...]
