school, again.

bin told us he has a theory of columbo.

he also says:

"the poet has to be implicated in the poem"

and

"yeah, but you still have to trust them" (on peanuts in restaurants)

for workshop we're looking at:

the image of the city, kevin lynch
bird lovers, backyard, thalia field
let the words, yona wallach
for anatole's tomb, stephane mallarme

the swift class:

engravings by hogarth
essential writings of jonathan swift
the fable of the bees, bernard mandeville
i'm doing a presentation on an introduction to the classics by anthony blackwall and a dissertation on reading the classics by henry felton

a tutorial on beckett with brian:

more pricks than kicks
first love and other shorts
the unnameable
fizzles

teaching:

fugue state, brian evenson
the dollmaker's ghost, larry levis
in watermelon sugar, richard brautigan
autobiography of red, anne carson
madeline is sleeping, sarah shun-lien bynum

this is what my life will be like now.

mg came

i got wrecking crew in the mail. i've been trying to purchase it for some time but it was always too much.

now i have it.

here is a poem about running, which is my new favorite thing:

long distance runner

i never know how i'm doing; i just
run it, past
the stilled elm leaves.
once i saw my
shadow in water, and

glanced back, but i was gone.
only the ponds flashed blankly in the sunset,
stagnant with summer.
and so i run
into the mute acres of stones,

hurrying, deaf under the sky,
becoming so isolate
i could be scraped off on a fingernail--
but i slow into shouts,
into the arms that are holding me up.

Dear Students,

The results are in from all of the Faculty, except for Doug.  Doug is currently in NYC and will return to Denver Tuesday night.  He will send his evaluations to me on Wednesday.  If Doug is one of your readers, I'll be in touch w/ you ASAP on Wed.

In all of the other cases, you have ALL passed ALL of your PhD Comprehensive Examinations . . . ! 

Congratulations . . . !!!

have you seen this movie?

at the end he says,

there is more than just a simple collapsing and arrival of material. i struggle to say these things and i can just about get them out but there's a world beyond what words can define for me.

marin trees:

alder
eucalyptus
redwood
bay
california white oak
california live oak
california black oak
madrone

marin wildflowers:

trillium
douglas iris
shooting star
fetid adder's tongue
sun cup
columbine
sticky monkeyflower

marin birds:

marbled godwits
avocets
long necked egrets
great blue heron

today

i spent the day here:

this i sang, and lykidas laughed
again pleasantly, and gave me his stick
in fellowship of the muses,
and turned left, taking the road
to pyxa, but eukritos
and handsome amyntas and i
turned off at phrasidamos's
and happily laid ourselves down
on beds of sweet grass and vine-leaves,
freshly picked. overhead, many elms
and poplars rustled, and nearby
the sacred waters splashed down
from the nymphs' cave. brown cicadas
shrilled from the shady branches,
and far off the tree-frog whined
in the heavy underbrush.
larks and finches sang, doves crooned,
and bees hummed about the spring.
everything smelled of rich summer
and rich fruits. pears lay at our feet,
apples in plenty rolled beside us,
and branches loaded down with plums
bent to the ground.

and here:

my head's aching, but you
don't care. i'll sing no more,
but lie here where i've fallen
and let the wolves eat me.
and may that be as sweet to you
as honey down your throat.

and here:

and soon, in a hollow,
he spied a spring where thick rushes,
and dark celandine, and green
maidenhair, and sweet parsley,
and creeping deergrass grew.

and here:

come to me, then, and you'll lack
nothing. leave the gray sea
to beat against the shore. you'll pass
the night more pleasantly with me
in my cave. there are baytrees
and slim cypresses nearby,
and dark ivy, and sweet grapes
in bunches, and cold water
that tree-covered aitna sends
trickling down to me from her snows--
a drink for gods. who, before these,
would choose the sea and the waves?
but if it's my rough looks
that put you off, i've oak-logs
and banked fires, under the ashes,
and i'd let you burn my soul out,
or my one eye, most dear to me
of all things that are mine.

the cooking show mountain-swimming story

sulphur

these are some things you can have if you want them.

for jen's bday we went to a city called hot sulphur springs. i got into this: a sulphur hot spring. it was very hot and smelled like sulphur and then everything smelled like sulphur, even my hair so i didn't wash it and then it smelled like sulphur for many days. oh, and shakespeare did a small lecture near the pools and one from the tree.

  and then i made s'mores with a lighter and drank george dickel and saw some beautiful things

the other things that have happened:

i spent a week with d'count and he made a new best friend, wriggly

arda made the best meal and christine modeled it

did you see how there were beets?

i have been reading.

so many things.

about being alive.

it is important to observe that aristotle in no way defines what life is: he limits himslef to breaking it down, by isolating the nutritive function, in order then to rearticulate it in a series of distinct and correlated faculties or potentialities (nutrition, sensation, thought). here we see at work that principle of foundation which constitutes the strategic device par excellence of aristotle's thought. it consists in reformulating every question concerning "what something is" as a question concerning "through what something belongs to another thing."

the open, giorgio agamben

i watch this so many times and my love for bill murray grows and grows

kafka

i fell asleep while reading kafka and dreamed something terrible. at the end of the dream i wasn't able to walk and i was saying to someone, sometimes my body just doesn't work and he was saying you know what that indicates, right? and i said no, no, don't tell me. and then i was at a couch and there was a radio on and someone was there and i woke up--i was very sluggish--i couldn't move my face or open my eyes but i was on the couch i'm on now the one i was sleeping on--and i woke and i knew the person there was upstairs and was coming to get me as soon as i was awake so i pretended to sleep and some machine was monitoring my breath and i had to breathe very carefully so they wouldn't be able to tell anything. and then she was there the person from upstairs she was the cleaning lady spraying the windows and i thought it was embarrassing to sleep while someone cleaned everything so i woke up and here i am, alive.

here is another dream

i had a dream about a wet mud town where people would go and pretend to be dead. and then i found out it was a tv show and you got money to pretend to die. but i kept making all of the dead people come back to life (and they were confused about that) and when i found the sound stage i realized i had been there forever.

here is what kafka says:

"out with your stories! i no longer want to hear scraps. tell me everything from beginning to end. i won't listen to less, i warn you. but i'm burning to hear the whole thing."

"spreading his handkerchief over the hollow in a worn step, he invited me to be seated: 'it's easier for you to ask questions sitting down. i'll remain standing, it's easier for me to answer. but don't torment me!'"

"feeling that this required an answer, i put my hand in the hip pocket of my trousers as though i were looking for something. actually, i wasn't looking for anything, i just wished to change my appearance in order to show interest in the conversation."

and this (which is probably the center, for me, of everything):

"what is it that makes you all behave as though you were real? are you trying to make me believe i'm unreal, standing here absurdly on the green pavement? you, sky, surely it's a long time since you've been real, and as for you, ringplatz, you never have been real."

these are all from "description of a struggle"