2 Kinds of People

There are two kinds of people, those who like the name Sasha and those who don't.

Happy New Year

Here's what I'm reading as the clock turns over into another year:

David Foster Wallace on water

In lieu of a best of list, I thought I'd just pass along this relatively short meditation from Wallace. I hope everyone enjoys and lives well in 2013!

Photos Yes

I'm no photographer or even picture taker by any stretch of the imagination, but I snapped these photos of an awesome butterfly back in the fall and wanted to share them before 2012 comes to an end:

Happy holidays! Merry Christmas! Happy New Year to everyone out there in blogland!

Poetry & Seinfeld & Community

One of the features that makes Jerry Seinfeld so funny is one of the same features that makes poetry such a pleasurable art.

Seinfeld makes us laugh by talking about everyday things to which most everyone can relate, but about which few people would think to talk: close-talkers, forgetting where the car is parked, puffy shirts, and, of course, shrinkage.

One thing (among many others) that good poetry can do is create moments of "Oh, I know that feeling exactly!" When the cast of Seinfeld talks about someone being a close-talker, we all laugh because we know someone who talks really close to us, and the connection that has been made between us and all the other people out there who know a close-talker creates this new insider group.

It's the feeling, yes, but it's also the community of people who know that feeling.

So, when Robert Frost writes in "Birches" about filling a cup, "Up to the brim, and even above the brim" we go "ahhh, yes!" Maybe you even think about the first time you witnessed this phenomenon, as a kid, perhaps. You're a part of that group, community, nation of people who have seen the water hover above the brim of the cup!

Or when, in "After Catullus," Lisa Jarnot follows the seemingly abstract lines,

there was the promise of

Paris's perpetual pomme

pressed in gold,

with the stunningly-universal,

there was only the hole

in the heel of a sock

Most everyone can be in that moment with that feeling grown out of that image. Poetry is about being together.

A Very Belated Post About Fall Break

My first fall break as a non-student was wonderfully uneventful.

With work:

Without work:

Nothing to complain about. The beach in fall weather is my favorite.

July Reading

July was a great month for reading. It was my first post-dissertation-all-out-read-it-up-for-nothing-but-fun-month in a couple years! Here's what I read and reread:

Gilead - Marilynne Robinson (reread)
Cash: The Autobiography - Johnny Cash with Patrick Carr
The Man Called Cash - Steve Turner
Sag Harbor - Colson Whitehead
Paradise - Toni Morrison
The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
Middle Passage - Charles Johnson (reread)
Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
Home - Marilynne Robinson
The Great Divorce - C.S. Lewis
Candide - Voltaire
The Gospel and the Mind - Bradley Green

So yeah, it was a pretty eclectic and crazy reading regimen. I also read a bunch of articles and essays on literary interpretation and hermeneutics for an article-in-progress.

On My Door - Queen Elizabeth

Queen Elizabeth knocked on my door today.
I answered with an appropriate bow
(not too low, but low enough to show
that I knew what was up),
and invited her in.
She accepted my invitation
and was trailed by two armed guards.
I thought I should wait for her
to speak first, seeing how she's the Queen,
but she seemed disinclined
to state the purpose of her visit.
Perhaps there was something I should
have intuited because we sat there for about
two hours before she nodded to her security
and they all got up and left.

I walked them to the door
and then said invitingly,
"Do please come again, your majesty."