happy halloween

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

design sponge

This is one of the most fantastic design sites on the net. Whether you're looking for trends, inspiration, or just good formatting, design sponge is the place. I'm always visiting for ideas.

betting my (fortunate) on

Jenny Owen Youngs. She is going to be mega. Major.

coming to the end

I'm making some changes to my little weblog world. They have been long coming, but I've been too busy lately. Spending time customizing and working out kinks, but I'm planning to make the move in a week or so.

on the fall road

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

rust belt poets

I've been interested in what this means--to be a Rust Belt poet. It's been coming up more and more lately, and I'm wondering what everyone thinks about it. My students have been reading Mary's book and somehow we got on the topic of Rust Belt poetry, as if I knew for certain what it was and could easily define it's aesthetic qualities for an intro class. And then one of my students raised her hand and asked, "You're from that area right?" And I said yes. And she asked, "Well, are you a Rust Belt poet?" And it didn't know what to say, though I wanted to claim it--Yes, Yes I am!! Anyway, I am just curious what everyone else thinks.

sunday link

I've recently been obsessed with photographers working with the domestic. I can't turn away from Julie Blackmon's work. I wish I could afford one.

tagged

I just realized that Mary tagged me awhile back on this. I hope that I can get the formatting correct. I can't strike through, so I'll just pretend I didn't hate any of these. Here are the rules:

Bold what you have read, italicize books you’ve started but couldn’t finish, and strike through books you hated. Add an asterisk* to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your "To Be Read" list.

Also, I think there is a category missing--carrots around books you scanned the night before it was going to be discussed in class.


Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22*
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights*
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a Novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey*
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad*
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway*
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius*
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man*
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein*
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath*
The Poisonwood Bible*
1984*
Angels & Demons
The Inferno*
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury*
Angela’s Ashes*
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present*
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five*
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye*
On the Road*
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
The Aeneid*
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

burning

Though everyone down south is thrilled that the fall is finally here, there is a major ecological crisis taking place. The Southeast is facing the worst drought in over 100 years. We had hoped that the hurricane season would bring rains that would refill reservoirs, but we only have had maybe 2 or 3 significant coating rains. And now, we are in the dry season. Today, a news release from the Governor said that we are as little as 90 days from Lake Lanier drying out (i.e. major cities actually running out of water).

Obviously this is terrifying and stunning. Especially how it has come on so quickly. Of course, one of the major problems is that we (most Americans) don’t think about water as a commodity. We don’t have to think about the cost of water, especially of drinkable water compared to many developing countries, for example, where people spend up to 40% of their income just to buy clean water.

But now, in the Southeast, we are moving into a crisis where if we don’t get rain sometime soon there will be something similar to rolling blackouts—rolling water outs, in addition to a state of emergency being declared if the “voluntary” efforts to reduce water usage don’t work. And even still, I’ve seen sprinklers going, people watering flowers. It is illegal now, and if you’re caught you get a fine. Wow, big deal. Not that a fine will put out a fire in a local hatchery. Something is tragically wrong with people in this country, and I fear we’re moving into a time when what people have believed to be true, especially their sense of entitlement of natural resources, will be the worst hard lesson learned.

Anyway, all of this makes me really long for the cloudy, rainy rust belt. But being that I am here and I am part of this place right now, I felt like I should write about it.

october evening

The temperature has finally dropped into the 70s here (in the evening), and I've been enjoying sitting on the balcony. We get morning sun, so in the evening the sun is behind us and casts the most soothing lights.

still beating

Experiment in trying to convert imovies to quicktime dvs. Still pretty grainy, but not bad for standard software and digital still camera filming. This is my trip to and from school every day. It's about a two and a half hour round trip condensed into three minutes forty five.

Entoptic Phenomena

Photographer William Hundley gets people to jump underneath sheets and fabrics and catches them in mid-air, completely hidden behind the fabric. Eerily beautiful.

we circle silently about the wreck

Sometime around 4pm, I asked Sarah what time we should try to get to the Georgia Museum of Art for Adrienne Rich’s reading. She said that one of her Professors suggested 30 to 45 minutes early, as the “auditorium” where she is reading is small. When we arrived at 7pm, thirty minutes early, all of the seats had already been filled and people were starting to line the walls. Luckily, we thought, we had gotten a quick parking spot, as we were able to get a standing room spot against the left wall. Five minutes went by, and then ten, and the back of the auditorium was filling more and more. I wasn't even able to move my arms. One woman squeezed in and told her friend, “the entire lobby is packed with people who can’t get in.”

Of course everyone was talking back and forth. This is insane. Why would they host the reading here. Why would they put one of our most cherished poets in an auditorium that only seats 150 people?

Then, the Humanities Department head, a woman who had sauntered in a few minutes before the reading was to take place and took her reserved front seat, got up onto the tiny stage and made an announcement. “If there are any students in the audience who would like to give up their seats, who might not really want to be here, please raise your hand. You can leave. Wouldn’t you like a nice dinner at home tonight? We could use the room for people who can’t get a seat.” Of course no one raised their hand. And when she stepped off the stage people started to clap. Everyone was just looking around in disbelief.

About two minutes later she got back up on the stage and said, “I’m sorry, but the fire marshal won’t allow anyone in this auditorium that doesn’t have a seat. So everyone that is standing or is in the back will have to leave.”

I was absolutely stunned.

As I was walking out slowly with the other people who didn’t get in (probably around 400 people or so between the standing room and the filled lobby), I saw her, Adrienne Rich, with a little walker looking confused. She said to her handler, “What’s going on?” All he could say to her was, “There’s not enough room for them so they have to leave.”

I said to Sarah, “at least I saw her.”

And this terrible sadness came over me. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I also felt enormously angry, a sentiment, it seemed, shared by everyone who was lingering around in the lobby, unwilling to go home, as if someone might say, "we changed our mind, come back in."

In truth, no matter how early anyone got there, there were only 150 seats and at least 400 people who were not able to get in. I am still in disbelief over this, still angry, especially having worked for the Wick Poetry Center (where this would have never happened) where we labored extensively to make sure that everyone that wanted it had access to the creative arts.

Shame on the UGA creative writing department for thinking that they could host the reading in that tiny room. Shame on them for not moving it next door where there are lecture halls that hold 500 people (it’s not like she had a set, or music equipment, or smoke machines to move.) Shame on the head of the Humanities Department for asking students, students who pay fees for lecture series, students who wanted to see a true hero of contemporary poetry, to leave. Shame on the them for turning people away (students, community members, writers) who came to support the creative arts. Shame on them for making it something exclusive, something Adrienne Rich herself has fought her whole writing life against.

where it's sore

Regina Spektor. This decade's Tori Amos. I think she's brilliant. I hope she comes down south so I can see her live. This video has re-released this week, but this is the original video by adria petty. It's fantastic.


I suspect that Josh Ritter could be God. He dropped his new album in August, but I just can't stop listening to this song. I can't upload the song, so here is the next best thing. This is definitely the best song I've heard in ten years. Maybe more.


I love Beth Ditto. Total sass.


Tomorrow Adrienne Rich is reading here so I'm going to try to get some photos or video. Seeing her read is really one of my dreams come true.

can't stop progress

My scores have gone up.

I'm now 65% Dixie on the basic test

And 58% Dixie on the advanced test

little boxes on the hillside

Scenes from the Westlake District of Daly City, California. One of America's first master-planned postwar suburbs, Westlake was the "inspiration" for Malvina Reynolds' song "Little Boxes," which became a hit for folkie Pete Seeger in 1964 and which has recently been revived as theme music for the TV show "Weeds."



A collection of cartoon drawings by Craig Robinson of famous rock stars, called Lollipops to describe their big flat round heads. Mouse over the image to see who is who.