A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.


                                          -Jack Gilbert

When I was unstrapping James from the car seat today I called him Jinx. One more week of babysitting ("child care" sounds more dignified) and then I head back to Indiana to get on with the work of summer. It's starting to get hot in DC, and today we got out "Sprinky" and plugged her (?) into the hose, an octopus like tower of tubes with a face painted onto it that shoots water randomly and in all directions. It was a little cold but fun. This morning James and I drove out to the horse barn in Rock Creek Park and looked at horses and took a walk through the woods. We saw some deer and took time climbing the wooden steps that eased the trail's inclines. Last Friday they took off all their clothes and played in a creek. That is to say we've been trying to get outside as much as possible before the weather gets too hot and the bugs come out. My sister pulled two ticks of James over the course of last week.I pulled a tick off my belly on Friday.

Over the weekend I went to Virginia to visit Erika and John and their daughters Elsie and Rosa. They have land and chickens, a functioning garden, and we ate well and caught up and talked about kids, about being a doula and the story of Rosa's birth. Elsie hosted a "snake party" and so we all sat on a damp bench and talked about the flowers she had gathered. It was cute and entirely wholesome. Not that my experience last week holds a candle to the endurance and commitment required of actual parents (and it's easy for the uncle to swoop in, have fun, and swoop out), but I feel like I have been getting a taste of what it's actually like to have full charge of children, which is helpful in light of the fact that about half of my old friends have kids, and I can relate just a little bit more to the experience. It's also made me think a little bit about kid's toys and books, and how empty we begin when it comes to ways to live and judgments, and how easy it is for a kid to pick up an idea or a habit just from seeing it done or hearing it said. Like how Beatrix picked up the Disney princess thing from other kids at her school, and is now nuts about all things princess, which was not something anybody in the family introduced to her. I think about all the junk that I was into as a kid, and wonder how much of that is still with me. I wonder if any of this stuff really matters in any sense other than aesthetically. Maybe the content of what we pick up doesn't matter as much as our relation to it when we grow up enough to have perspective. Or maybe feeding our kids plastic and sugar is actually a real danger. I'm not sure.

In other news, a few self-promotional items: 1) here's a link to a video that Cole made using a song of mine, as posted on his most excellent music blog Field Mic (there's a link to Field Mic proper on the right sidebar), and 2) here's a link to the Lost Roads Press blog Lines, that I had written a little piece for, about John Cage. Yup. Tomorrow I think James/Jinx and I are going to go to the Natural History Museum and to walk around and yowl.Hanging above the toilet at Erika's and John's house is a poem by Robert Creeley, "Walking"

In my head I am
walking but I am not
in my head, where

is there to walk,
not thought of, is
the road itself more

than seen. I think
it might be, feel
as my feet do, and

continue, and
at last reach, slowly,
one end of my intention.

Washington DC is lovely right now. Flowers are blooming, traffic is flowing, birds are singing and shitting on my car. Granted I haven't made it too far from my sister's house, where I'm staying and taking care of my niece and nephew while the regular baby sitter takes a vacation and gets her driver's license. This week will be a full week of 8-6ish child care and right now, as my nephew is sleeping, I have a little time to read and write and continue the work I started at Purdue to be ready for the Fall semester. He's squawking and squeaking right now and soon I will have to pick him up out of his crib and make some lunch.

Yesterday we spent the morning playing "garbage truck/man" putting pieces of torn up newspaper into a toy garbage truck, napped, made lunch and hung out at the house until 3, where we went and picked his sister up from day care and (oop. i just picked him up, started making lunch, ran around the house with an accordion.etc.(six hours later...)). Okay. Today was a long day. Had an afternoon with James drawing pictures and changing diapers then picked up Beatrix from school, had a snack, and took her to ballet. Meanwhile James and I hung out at the toy store and played with a toy garbage truck. Got Beatrix from the ballet and then went to Chipotle and fed both of them dinner. This was not fun. They would not sit down and kept flopping all over the bench and Beatrix kept getting up to get things and meanwhile I kept trying to feed James who kept laying down on the bench. After we left they both started crying, Beatrix crying over a mermaid doll that she wanted me to buy for her and I don't know why James was crying, but we made it home eventually and had a tea party / birthday party for "elephant" and waited for her mother and father to come home but both were late. It really wasn't that bad but I saw how things could turn south quickly. I made a mental note to meditate tomorrow because tonight I'm drinking beer. Overall though, it was a good day.  

Originally I was going to sit down and write an insightful and sensitive post about my first year of graduate school but I guess that will have to wait. Viva la summer!

A letter I sent to The New York Times a couple weeks ago in response to an article about disgraced public figures and their absorption into academia. I'm still annoyed about how they covered Occupy Oakland...

 

Dear Public Editor,
 

Interesting article on the trend to hire public figures who "flamed out," or however Ariel Kaminer put it. Since there were no comments, I wanted to respond in person:

 

The article seems to suggest that universities are the refuge of washed up sexual miscreants, and does a great job discussing what it's like for the school and teachers and the students who come into contact with these people. That said, many of these public figures were written about in this very newspaper, and you all did as much as anyone to ruin these people's reputations. Mr. Kaminer's article still makes them, and universities, look like fools.

Another way to put it might be that universities are willing to hire remarkable people with interesting experiences. It's a classic second chance, and an acceptance of other view points. Universities get much from them in the form of attention and celebrity status, and of course, money. I'm just saying that it's not surprising that The Times, who are just as guilty of following the heard mentality, reporting exactly what officials tell you, pick a bone with institutions that absorb people screwed over by reporters reporting on other people's reporting. As if sending a picture of your penis, or whatever, to a college girl is really that much worse than whatever we've done at some point in our lives.

While the university system is less than perfect, and headed towards changes, it's an example of a public institution that has fared reasonable well in the last twenty years....Unlike mainstream journalism, which, The Times included has, more or less, been co-opted by conglomerates of politically driven billionaires. If not directly than indirectly in the sense that its the big medias (CNN, Fox News, ABC, etc.) that drive the market for news, and how much attention you devote to each story.

In short, I'm saying you could have just as easily spun this as a good thing, rather than an implied bad thing. Or taken some responsibility for how they got there in the first place. Or better yet, provide critical analysis of things like the Moody's report on the economic state of higher education, rather than just telling us what Moody's says about it.

Maybe I'm just confused about what newspapers are supposed to do, and maybe it's in your every right to call it like you see it (or don't see it). But as a representative of academia, we do a lot of good work, and are a heck of a lot more careful than you guys about what we say and why. Who knows what the future of journalism is, but you all could stand to take some criticism yourself, beginning with owning up to how much influence you have in shaping public opinion, and how much that influence is squandered on politically driven slander.

Sincerely,

Writing a paper about Occupy and found this in my notes. An oldie but a goodie, 2011

Spring breezes sweep the green meadows.
Rains have stopped, but from the oak leaves water still drips
Suddenly a white bird appears on the scene.
He breaks the green universe of the mountain slope. 

                                                     -Po Yu-ch'ien

Ode to an Empty Jelly Jar

You were some good jelly

You laid down on my sandwiches and my toast

I liked to eat you with peanut butter when I was too lazy to cook which sometimes happens when you're living alone and are a graduate student living in Indiana

Back in California I'd probably get a burrito

Anyway, at first I thought you were overpriced 

A dollar fifty more than Smuckers or Kroger
And I thought why not try it? At least I'm not giving those assholes my money

Every time I spread you on wheat bread I could see actual strawberries

And you tasted delicious

O jelly jar, how empty you are

You were really a pretty good tasting Jelly

This last month has been a strange one. About four weeks ago my hard drive stopped working. I took it to the computer shop just up the hill from where I live and they replaced it. Unfortunately they weren't able to recover any of the data. The items of the most immediate importance, documents relating to teaching and all my school work from the fall I had luckily backed up at the end of last semester, but all my creative work from the beginning of the summer; a play, hundreds of music files along with random writings and field recordings are, at the moment, lost. I'm going to take the "dead" hard drive somewhere else and see if they can revive it, and we'll see. It was surprising how disturbing the whole process was, as someone who likes to think that he's not too attached to objects or ideas (there's always more where that came from + we imbue things with meaning, not the other way around), perhaps I'm not as free as I'd like to think. I was talking to a friend about it and he made the connection between a loss of monuments to self (selfish objects? rhet/comp is getting to me...) i.e. art objects, and a loss of parents, i.e. idealized monoliths of people we use to negotiate ideas of self. A loss of identity naturally leads us to search for new ones. Granted the last ten years of writing was not lost, but all the momentum of the last year was. Identity not as an idea, but as a real time indicator of how we spend our time (days, hours, minutes, seconds).

Two weeks ago Monday I took my cat, who had not been eating and was uncharacteristically spending her entire days under the bed, to the vet. She was diagnosed with a fairly advanced kidney failure plus and infection in her mouth that prevented her from eating. It's hard to say which lead to which, as both were feeding off each other (the vet speculates that the mouth infection exacerbated the kidney failure), but everyday of Spring Break was spent taking her to the vet, testing, giving medication, and talking to doctors. The good news is that she's feeling a lot better, her mouth infection is gone, and she's out from under the bed, but she's still not really eating all the much and there's really not much to be done about kidney's that no longer clean the blood and absorb nutrients. Twice a day I have to inject her with saline solution, which as a process means sticking an thick needle into the folds skin on  her back. Oddly, she doesn't seem to mind this nearly as much as when I was giving her oral injections for her mouth infection. In the long term, care for her does not necessarily promise a long life or good quality of life, and I've been weighing options in terms of cost, time and money. Taking care of her while considering that it may be soon for her to move on, trying to enjoy what's left and make peace with possibilities.

The third loss I'm not going to go into explicitly, and it's not a life or death loss, but is still painful. Oddly enough, my spirits are generally good, I've been exercising, meditating, eating well enough, and talking a lot with friends and family about this absurd month, which I think is probably the biggest reason that the bumminess of all this isn't sticking, the fact that I am loved, etc. School is generally good as far as the work, and teaching is generally the best part of my day, as usual. Two quotes from the paper about six weeks ago, the first from an article about education in China, and the second about the meteorite that fell into Russia. The third is from Plato's Phaedrus (line 249c):

"All the parents in the village want their children to go to college because only knowledge changes your fate."

"A meteor fell. So what? Who knows what can fall out of the sky?"

"...the things our soul saw while traveling with god...."

Sunday. Sun Day. The cat lies in it, his body a jackknife his hind legs the blade. Nothing to publicly reports aside from school work, but two poems in relation to rhetoric (the first in relation to Memory, the second on the dangers of literacy as "skill") that have been floating around in my head. The first by Kiwao Numura translated by Forrest Gander & Kyoko Yoshida, the second a section from George Oppen's "Of Being Numerous." See you,

On Prose

Then I
committed to memory everything
I felt compelled to remember

I don't know why I felt that way
but one winter night.
I was driving my car over the limits
along the highway that stretches west from Tokyo
hurrying to see my dying mother
but the traffic backed up
and I lost time
finally emerging from the congestion
a radio tower
crowned with radiant purple light
that eerily stained the night sky as I passed beneath it
my cell phone abruptly rang
I pulled over to the shoulder
and listened to a relative's voice tell me the hour of my mother's end
and then I noticed
that a large tanker truck
whooshed past within inches of my car
and that across the highway
inside the incandescently lit convenience store
a scattering of people were browsing magazines
and their heads looked like fly heads
and that on my side of the highway
inside the driving range already closed for the night
golf balls sprinkled on the grass
looked like mercury drops or something floating in the dark
I committed all of it to memory
compelled to remember
in other words
I lost at that moment the residue of my umbilical cord
and definitively tumbled into the world
or rather into the universe
in other words it was
the moment of my second nativity
and as though it were leaving me behind
a refrigerated truck whooshed past me
followed by a sport car
followed by another truck
then some of my own verses occurred to me:
there goes rust and lichen
there goes the soul's departing shadow
there goes the orgasm peddler again
up through the windshield
a few stars sparkled in the sky
and above all the radio tower
the radio tower
from whose apex
purple illuminations glared fiercely down at me
in a kind of swelling intensity
as if the radiance
ominously announced the calm of tomorrow
or tenderly announced the unrest of tomorrow
the purple singularly purple
thing I committed to memory
I felt compelled to remember 

                -Kiwao Nomura (trans. by Forrest Gander & Kyoko Yoshida)

**

13 (from "Of Being Numerous")

           unable to begin

At the beginning, the fortunate

Find everything already here. They are shoppers,

Choosers, judges; . . . And here the brutal

is without issue, a dead end.

                                            They develop

Argument in order to speak, they become

unreal, unreal, life loses

solidity, loses extent, baseball’s their game

because baseball is not a game

but an argument and difference of opinion

makes the horse races. They are ghosts that endanger

One’s soul. There is change

In an air

That smells stale, they will come to the end

Of an era

First of all peoples

And one may honorably keep

His distance

If he can.

                    -George Oppen

 

Recently I've finished (and by finished I mean stopped working on and set aside) two full length albums. If you, friend, enemy, stranger, whoever, would like a copy, send me an email with your address and I'll send you some CDs.  Regardless of the date you come upon this message, this offer stands until I remove this post. Unlike tomorrow, my brother's birthday.

Too cold to send a text message, a picture of the thermometer that read 13.3 degrees. It's cold here. 13.3 degrees at 12:08 PM. It's 8:16 PM as I write this and its 12 degrees. Week 3 of the semester. Sorry I've been ignoring you. You. It's just that I haven't found myself feeling obligated as I have felt (in a good way) towards writing in this blog. Instead, its obligations towards reading books. And writing for my classes. I haven't wanted to write any emails. And now it's time to get back to reading. Plato and some old Greeks tonight. It's fascinating! I had no idea! Though its not exactly beautiful writing, or else I'd share some of it with you, but it accumulates, as far as ideas. Like snow. Or like Lafayette, where there is no snow but two cats sitting in front of a heater and the Wisconsin game on in the background. Okay. Back at it.

I arrived in Madison around nine thirty last night. The snow had begun to fall about an hour previous to that and the roads were fine. I went out side before I went to sleep, maybe around one, and the snow was about a foot deep and falling quickly like rain and sticking to my jacket and my hat. This morning there was more of it. After some pancakes I went out with my niece and my mom ("grandma") and made a snowman out of the sticky and heavy snow. By now, the middle of the afternoon, I just woke up from a nap and the snow is still falling, the wind starting to blow a little bit. The room where I lie has the blinds down but I'm going to get up now so I can watch it from here. There. Glad that's done. More light but the condensation on the inside of the storm window obscures the details. Oh well. 

Five days until Christmas, eleven until New Years, fifteen until official duties for the next semester starts, eighteen until classes start, and nineteen until teaching starts. Obviously, if I'm writing this I've made it through the trials and tribulations of the end of the semester: two twenty page papers, a take home essay test, grading student projects, revising and rewriting the syllabus and calender for teaching next semester, three presentations, and a few shorter response papers. In comparison to some folks it wasn't that big of a final crush, and I have to admit, after getting done with the first twenty page paper (a short history of expressive rhetoric and some of the roots of English departments, going back about a hundred years) it began to feel like I was already done. The second paper (an overview of the identity approach to second language learning, plus an informal case study of a former student through this lens) was not quite as polished as the first. But it was a lot of writing, based on research that I had been doing for the previous two months or so. Neither paper felt finished but both had reached their limits as far as pages, and I was happy to be done.

Writing in graduate school is a different kind of writing than, say, writing in this blog. It's not like writing an email, and I worry that the more time I spend doing the academic work the less I will be able to do this. Both in terms of consistency of voice as well as motivation. Already, the last two months, the blog or any other kind of 'personal' writing has been a low priority, and more fundamentally, has not been a habit, which is how most of my writing gets done (as opposed to inspiration or request or whatever other reasons exist to write). Is this bad? Am I headed in a direction that I'll never come back from? I don't know. BUT I will say that what I've been studying has been absolutely fascinating, half in world of rhetoric and composition, thinking about writing, teaching and institutional ideologies, and half in the world of Second Language Studies, taking a more empirical and hard science derived approach to what language (including writing) actually is, including how we learn it. I'm not sure where either of them will lead, but have another couple semesters coursework before I need to worry about the answer to that question.

One thing though, that I've figured out, for the time being, and I might be wrong, that has been enormously helpful, has been the difference between a rhetorical approach to writing and a poetic approach to writing, and why it is so difficult to mix the two together. Simply, the rhetorical approach to writing is concerned with what writing can do in the world, i.e. how it leads to action. The poetic approach is concerned with the internal cohesion of a given piece of writing, i.e. the rules that it creates for itself independent of external conventions. James Berlin calls this the action/contemplation dialectic. Coming from poetry and spending a lot of time on the 'internal cohesion' of a poem, line, book, song, drawing, email, mixtape, etc. I find that I am resistant to thinking about writing as a way to act on the world. In doing this, we have to consider audience, their expectations and the conventions we might use to reach them. This blog, generally, has never been concerned with audience hence the six or seven hits it might get on a good day. Yet, audience consideration has little to do with, say, any satisfaction I might get from writing a post (and the motivation this satisfaction brings with it), or how I actually go about writing. I can imagine an audience, or invite an audience in depending on what, and how I write (for example, the audience for this blog is generally people who know me), but all this is apart from the actual act of writing, and audience consideration is more or less a matter of interpretation that occurs after the fact/act. 

(Look at those long sentences! A tangible example of how all this writing and reading is rewriting some of my habits. Who is this person?)

And so it's been a struggle to consolidate a poetic approach with the rhetorical approach, and produce, what I'll call Academic Writing. It's not about the writing itself in academic writing, but the ideas that develop in and from the writing. How interesting! But writing into this 'voice' will take a while and I wonder if this process will create a more versatile writer, or a reptilian intellectual. Or then again, in the spirit of the end of the world says MF Doom, "When the poles shift / it won't matter which crew you roll with / cold and stiff" speaking of which I'm going to get back to things here in wintry Wisconsin. In these next couple weeks, I'm going to post a few short essays that I wrote for the Second Language Acquisition class. Merry ifmass. Happy clueyear.

The sun is coming through the now leafless trees and landing on top of the cats, splayed on the rug on the floor in the morning. The dining room window is now exposed and as I sit there eating macaroni off wooden plates, I can look out onto the street and whoever is out there can look back. I need to get my books and folders together and head off to school in a second,  the last day of the week before Thanksgiving. It's been much more relaxed these last couple of weeks, especially this week and the next. Relaxed in terms of urgent class work, and so I have time to read and research for the two twenty page papers I have due at the end of the semester. It's strange, different subjects ranging from identity approaches to second language acquisition, to investigating the roots of composition and where it split off from creative writing, to the work I do with my class, working on discourse communities and remediating work for different audiences. All of it's different, but it feels like it's part of the same project, and each subject or class is bleeding into each other. I guess I am the constant, and naturally, it all flows through the one making sense of it. I wonder if it would even be possible to hold all these things in mind separately. 

Meanwhile, a cat gets up and walks to another patch of sunlight, WWIII gets underway in the middle east, and Jack Gilbert, the poet, dies. Here is an excerpt from "A Brief for the Defense." Have a lovely weekend:

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies

are not starving someplace, they are starving

somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.

But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.

Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not

be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not

be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women

at the fountain are laughing together between

the suffering they have known and the awfulness

in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody

in the village is very sick. There is laughter

every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,

and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,

we lessen the importance of their deprivation.

Response to Carl Herndl

Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s connection to sustainable environmental policy and academia's trouble with communicating what it does to the outside world? Carl Herndl’s lecture on the myth of Latour’s connection to reality. Carl Herndl’s lecture on bringing back reality into discourse. Carl Herndl’s lecture on bringing back reality to Latour’s discourse. Carl Herndl’s lecture on bringing Latour back to reality. Carl Herndl’s lecture on bringing Latour back to Carl Herndl’s lecture on reality. Carl Herndl’s lecture on bringing Latour back to Carl Herndl’s lecture but arriving a few minutes late. Carl Herndl’s lecture on arriving late to reality and Latour’s lecture on arriving early for Carl Herndl’s lecture. Carl Herndl’s lecture on arriving late to Latour’s lecture or at least, arriving late to Latour’s ideas in Carl Herndl’s lecture. Carl Herndl’s lecture on fact vs. artifact, anti-representation vs. anti-real, Tyler Carter vs. Carl Herndl. Tyler Carter’s lecture on Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s reality vs. Latour’s lecture on Tyler Carter’s lecture on Herndl’s reality. Carl Herndl’s lecture on historicizing Tyler Carter’s reality using Latour’s construction of the modern. Have we ever been modern? Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s translation of reality including the process of, the research of, the writing of reality.

Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s critique of a perfectly circular reality. Carl Herndl’s lecture on unmodern ideas of reality as odd shapes and lines below the second dichotomy. Latour’s lecture on the unmodern ideas of reality as the odd shapes and lines below the second dichotomy below the two circles below Carl Herndl’s lecture. Below Carl Herndl’s lecture below unmodern ideas of reality as the odd shapes and lines accross the first dichotomy between humans and nature. Below Latour’s reality of Carl Herndl’s lecture beyond the first dichotomy we pretend to exist. We pretend to exist above the second dichotomy above the unmodern ideas of reality as odd shapes and lines. Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour pretends to exist above the second dichotomy above the unmodern ideas of reality as odd shapes and lines.

Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s Relationist Realism was difficult to understand. Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s Relationist Realism was difficult to understand because Tyler Carter was unfamiliar with the ideas of Latour’s Relationist Realism. Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s Relationist Realism was difficult to understand because Tyler Carter was unfamiliar with the idea that "nothing is reducible to anything else." Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s Relationist Realism was difficult to understand because Tyler Carter was unfamiliar with the idea that “an entities identity is determined by its articulations with the other entities and its consequences.” Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s Relationist Realism was difficult to understand because Tyler Carter was unfamiliar with the idea that "things are true because they hold." Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s Relationist Realism was difficult to understand because Tyler Carter was unfamiliar with the idea that “the real is that which resists and perturbs other entities.”  Carl Herndl’s lecture on Latour’s Relationist Realism included a definition of sacrifice: to give up one thing for another thing you value more.

Today is my birthday. I am 34 years old. It is 17x2, or 29+5. When I turned 33 I felt happy to be 33. Turning 34 feels like one year away from 35, and 35 seems much closer to 40 than 33. An in between number. Not on the other side of 35, but not a comfortable distance from it. All this a strange measure, when we live in moments and make it through days and do our planning by the week. If we're lucky we look forward to the break, as I do as a teacher and a student. Yet I set my alarm to the minute, stay under the covers for an extra fifteen, feed the cats, piss, meditate, cook and eat breakfast and get on my bike, and depending on the wind and the traffic lights and the song in my earphones, get to class with a few minutes to spare. Onward.

  

Wow. I'm busy! Last night I had a dream where one of my cats encountered a skunk, sniffed its butt, and then bit it on the back of the neck. For some reason I was proud. I'm not sure if there is any meaning to be gleaned from this.  The other day I was walking down the street in Lafayette and came across a pumpkin bowl that was filled with cough drops, sitting on a stoop. But it had been raining, the the bowl was full of water, and the twelve cough drops were all floating at the top. The meaning of this too, is uncertain. Happy Halloween. I have to get back to work now. Daylight savings time here we come.

Forgetting this morning's dream I was plucking weeds.



-Hosai Ozaki translated by Hiroaki Sato, from Right under the big sky, I don't wear a hat

Sunday morning. October 14th. It's fixing to rain. Rained yesterday afternoon and then got humid, low sixties but lots of warm air. The wind is blowing hard but it's a warm wind, a weird wind bringing something, probably rain. Eight weeks have passed in the semester and there are seven left. All the busy business has continued but the pressure has subsided. I'm getting to a be a faster reader, more focused and getting more comfortable with the idea that not everything is going to be relevant, and that I can be selective as to how to spend my time, what to read and what I want to know. I'm finding a rhythm to the work, one based in the week and knowing how much time I have to spend on what portion of the week. Ah! It's raining now, and the leaves are turning colors and falling off the trees. In front of my apartment there are piles of dried leaves that crunch when we walk through them, and on the well traveled parts of the side walk it's not leaves but flakes of the leaves that have been walked over, and these don't make as many sounds.

Last weekend, the "October Break", last Monday and Tuesday off, Dara came to visit. We tooled around Indiana, saw a couple of movies ("The Master", "The Thin Red Line"), made dinner, made a pie. It's stopped raining and the sun is coming out. At four I need to meet a member of my group for Second Language Acquisition and continue to work on our presentation for Monday. I'm nervous to be responsible for presenting so much material (80 minutes) on the subject of "Young Learners and Age" which, before a couple weeks ago, I knew very little about. I guess that's what I'm doing, that is, "learning" which there's been a lot of lately. I wonder if I'll forget how to write poetry, which actually, might be a really good way to write poetry. But more so, I wonder (read: am worried) if I will lose the impetus. The rhetorical mode is all about what our words "do", which poetry is not so much interested in.

Colouring of Pigeons

I've really been into this song, by The Knife and a few other musicians and made for an opera about Charles Darwin, a scientist who discovered a really big and useful idea through bit by bit accumulation of scientific observation. Is inspiring. I believe most of the lyrics come from his journals and when the opera singer starts singing his observations of birds at the end, O! For more context, this youtube version is narrated and shows the lyrics, which I would of put here on the blog but for the Swiffer ad that comes first. In other music news, I've uploaded a short little downloadable collection of songs (of my own) to my soundcloud page that I've added a link to on the right. Happy Fall.