So, I'm that portion of the semester when there ought be plenty on my mind.  I'm reading (or anticipating) student papers, working on the core assessment revisions,  beginning my plans for the courses I'll be teaching for the first time (a Whitman/Dickinson grad seminar and a Thoreau/Emerson undergrad summer course).

But what I'm really thinking ( Read more... )

(Speaking at Isaac Asimov's funeral)

Isaac is in heaven now, that was the funniest thing I could have said to a crowd of Humanists. God Forbid, should I pass on sometime, may all of you say that Kurt is in Heaven too.

--Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)

So it goes.

When I was 16, I read all the novels of Kurt Vonnegut. It was exactly the right and wrong time ( Read more... )

He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad.  So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God ( Read more... )

I recall in College Station there was a lingerie store called "Romantic Notions"--one of those destined-to-die little local shops with tacky frillyunderthings crowded on bad mannequins around the window, and a bad TV commercial with a woman with some unreconstructed Germanic accent saying, "Do YOU have a ROMANtic NOtion?"

Now I'm knee deep in ( Read more... )

I've finally got a fair grasp, I think, on Poe--insofar as it's possible to without sitting down with all his letters and reading him very closely for ten years.  Or maybe that wouldn't even help--the problem with nailing a reading of Poe down is that Poe himself won't be nailed down--his sense of humor, his love of the hoax, his profound tendency ( Read more... )

I'm currently teaching a whole lot of Edgar Allan Poe.  I'll hit most of the better known short stories, some poems, and some essays and reviews (but not Pym).  My plan (which I'll adhere to until I go crazy or run out of time, which will be soon) is to download all of the stories I'm teaching, and do a line-by-line (almost) annotation using the ( Read more... )

I meant to write / finish a short story over break, write a few poems, and post a few staggeringly good livejournal posts.  That didn't happen, I'm afraid ( Read more... )

My brain, just like- a plastic bag -

Containing Grocery

Stretches where the weight-of cans-

Compels a reverie

First is taut then-ductile-bends

Out of Hanging Shape

It-compelled-begins to tear

A dress-of sheerest Crepe-

Once deformed it never will

Flat-contented be

But Billow if the wind be right

As foam upon-the sea

I'm going through a weird music phase--and have been for maybe twenty years.

My latest favorite:  here

Even if you generally don't listen to odd music, go listen.  It's the coolest thing I've heard in days.

Survivors ( Read more... )