Something odd happened last week. Greenfield held a town election on Tuesday and all the people I voted for won. Well, except for the flyer write-ins. Dan, if they call you saying that you've been elected a trustee to some esoteric local fund, I must have pushed you over the top.

Anyway, Mark Wisnewski won an at-large town council seat, by a ( Read more... )

My friend Grinwis has a poem this month at Verse Daily. It's called "My Flimsy Crew."

We live two blocks from Beacon Field. It's really one of the pleasures of where we live. We like to walk the dog there and back, I enjoy playing on the clay tennis courts there, and it's nice to just walk by and look up and see the Poet's Seat Tower. There is a playground there, but it is woefully under-equipped. There is one slide (bent) and an ( Read more... )

We went to Pine Nook Daylilies today and picked out five daylily plants to fill in our side garden. We were looking for daylilies to complement what we already had there, which were yellow. They all came with fanciful names, like Canadian Border Patrol, South Seas, and River Road Lady. I had also split up some of the Siberian Iris clusters there ( Read more... )

After church this morning in Springfield, we took a drive down Plumtree Road, which was along the path of Wednesday's tornado. It was quite a sight to behold. At one point, while held up at the light at Bradley Road, you could see the path of the tornado, as it had cut a 200-foot wide swath in the woods, with the tops of trees shorn off, and other ( Read more... )

I guess I always thought of "Round Here" as a song about a place. In that half-knowledge you have of songs when you hear them over and over, but you don't really sit down and listen to the lyrics, I thought it was about a place, maybe in the midwest, a small town. When I first heard the song, I was in Florida. I was in college. In my head, I must ( Read more... )

An aspirational list (of future posts?) of things that have swirled through my mind lately, in an effort to put them into words and perhaps spur them into a greater potential for realization:

• I'm interested in reading a biography of Ezra Pound. A good one, that talks about the work and delves into who he was. It should be an interesting biography, ( Read more... )

So I went and ordered a new, fitted, size 7 3/4 Lowell Spinners ball cap. I like it a lot. It actually fits my head. Turns out, I have a pretty big head. Props to brother pkhentz for inspiring me with his fitted Cardinals cap. I think the Spinners cap works for me. I like a ball cap, and I like a team insignia. I'm a Sox fan, but I can't really see myself ( Read more... )

I'll have to come back to this later, but for now, links:

This article on Carl Schurz, titled "Land Pirate," in the NYT's Disunion series is fascinating, for its portrait of a famous German-American and confidant of Lincoln during the Civil War. (The "I run and steal" from the subject title comes from a funny pun on "Iron and Steel" from this ( Read more... )

Quick thought amidst the grading. I'm working on grading student essays on the Shakespeare tragedy Othello today. In one of the options I gave to my students, they examine Othello's speeches in the beginning, middle and end of the play to trace the change in Othello's character that we see in the play. I was reading one essay that observed that ( Read more... )