1. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins. Seeing as how it’s the school year again, my reading brain has returned to a state of near collapse. To counter this effect I am rereading The Great Gatsby, which is beautiful but does not force me inexorably toward the end, because I already know the [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘books’
2 September 2008
A journey back in time
Because I don’t think Jeff and I have enough books in our house, I brought another big box of books home with me the last time we went back to Pittsburgh and Ohio. Oops. A lot of them are headed into my classroom library–The Secret Garden, Farenheit 451, a bunch of VC Andrews and Joan [...]
6 August 2008
Playing with the Truth
I’ve noticed a trend in the books I’ve been reading recently: though they are clearly fiction, they like to suggest that they are, in fact, true stories. Not all the strategies for pulling this switcharoo are very successful, but at least one is.
Specimen 1: The Pigman by Paul Zindel. Before even page 1 [...]
16 July 2008
absorption pt. 2
Continued from here.
If Herbert is consciously involved in the play and pull of history and morality on an obviously macro level, Tomaž Šalamun engages with those things on the level of pure consciousness and his own awareness of the mind at work. Šalamun’s mind at work is the framework upon which his poetry is [...]
16 July 2008
absorption pt. 1
In his first daybook (ca. 1963-64), George Oppen wrote the following:
At least two kinds of devotion. The devotion to art, a sort of pragmatism of art which refuses to think anything that will not contribute to poetry. The other is a devotion which tries to makes poetry of what the mind, the free and operating [...]
11 May 2008
Notes on life
My ass has been solidly roundhouse kicked by my job, but I am still up and fighting! There are only about five teaching weeks left. I can totally do that! Yeah!
Anyway, here’s a short list on what’s been going on in my intellectual life, which has been a little meager the past couple [...]
20 February 2008
On the language of Edna O’Brien’s Night
Teaching has done strange things to my intellect. Every once in awhile, I’m feeling my intellectual oats. I’m either dishing poetry with Jeff or Joel, or a student asks a question that I can knock out of the park. Just this past week, while teaching poetry (I don’t even want to talk about [...]
28 January 2008
because i haven’t been able to figure out how to write about anything recently
In a seasonally-unprecedented move (at least for a good long time), I have been digging me some songs–not compositions, not improvisations–actual, honest-to-goodness songs. Lots of good old Dischord bands, Smart Went Crazy, Lungfish, Shudder to Think as well as the golden age of mid-90s midwest indie rock–Rodan, June of 44, you know, that sort of [...]
3 January 2008
We love Michael Pollan, but . . .
“Michael Pollan, I really do enjoy that Michael Pollan teeters on the edge of being a douchebag for me. But he really hasn’t gone over the edge yet. For me.” -Jeff Boyle, on Michael Pollan’s shortlist of book and music recommendations for Borders. Admire it here. Truly, go look. It includes Walden and Neil Young’s [...]
31 December 2007
Bodega Dreams, thank God my class has finished that book.
Had I the chance to do it over again, I’m not sure I’d pick a modern noir as the first novel I taught to my students. Add a labyrinthine plot and dialogue written in reference-heavy urban dialect to a class of sometimes disgruntled, more likely than not learning disabled students and the result [...]
