Aunt Walt and Uncle Emily

Hey everybody, just because I'm out of the country doesn't mean you can slack off on the blogging! You know who you are.

I've been to Shakespeare's birthplace and grave, and today I'm where he spent the rest of his life&£151London. Worth a visit if you've never been. I can even remember a hostel to you on Grays Inn Road. It's not particularl quiet, or clean for that matter. But it's cheap!

Somebody give me a holler at my Yahoo! address and tell me how class went today.

Cheerio

Greetings from Birmingham. I've had an e-mail from Cathleen telling me about your discussion yesterday; doesn't sound like you got through many poems but I'm sure that just means you had plenty to talk about, as usual. We'll probably get on a three or four text basis when we start workshopping official-like when I return. I have reasonably good Internet access through the public library here, so feel free to e-mail me (at the Yahoo!) address or post questions here about your assignment for the upcoming week. Although we won't be discussing what you write next Thursday October 2nd, I still want to read it.

The weather is surprisingly lovely here, and Birmingham's bad reputation seems entirely unjustified. Lots of energy, many ethnicities. Even the food isn't that bad. I'll be posting some impressions up at my other blog if you're interested. In the meantime, post something interesting for me to contemplate up at your own blogs.

Notes and an Apology

It turns out the Joyce Carol Oates reading happened last night. My bad.

But you can hear two MFA students read fiction and poetry tomorrow as part of the Lounge Hour Reading Series. It's at 6 PM in the English Department Lounge (Goldwin Smith Hall room 258). I'm looking for about a paragraph's worth of response to each reader that you see on a given evening.

Also don't forget the West End Reading Series at Gimme! Coffee on State Street this Saturday night at 7 PM. It's three poets, as it turns out: Mairead Byrne, Brenda Coultas, and Wendy Walters. Try Googling them for samples of their work. I highly recommend this series

Also of interest: Brenda Coultas will be leading workshop on "Investigative Narratives" from 1 to 4 PM on Saturday in the Mural Lounge, The Clinton House, 116 N. Cayuga Street. "This
workshop would be appropriate for anyone with an interest in experimental writing, the role of artists in community, or writers and thinkers negotiating ideas of genre." I think it's free. I really really wish I could go to this.

Have fun with Cathleen and Theo and I'll see you all again on Tuesday, October 7.

Weekend Round-Up

What does a person pack for ten days in Britain besides raingear? Submit your suggestions.

A cruise around the blogs finds a number of interesting meditations. Emily finds that comparing Ann of Green Gables and recent Pulitzer-winner Empire Falls tells her something about her tastes in fiction. Ari discusses F. Scott Fitgerald and Bret Easton Ellis, who both experienced what it was like to be Wunderkind writers in New York during a time of general excess; we also learn something about "the technological replacement for what was once writing." Brooke remarks cryptically on the "poetic" nature of inertia; tell us more, Brooke! Laura has fascinating things to say about Spinoza and e.e. cummings—they're both dead, but what the hey. I was surprised to find myself thinking of my recent reading of D.H. Lawrence in connection with her meditation on difference versus ideal "oneness." Check out The Rainbow sometime, Laura.... Max needs silence to write and, like so many of us in the age where everyone learns to type, seems to feel alienated from his own handwriting. In between plans to revise the current system for selling hockey tickets, Charles finds different approaches to the animal world in Jack London and James Herriott, and confesses to spending a large chunk of work time fiddling with his WinAmp player. For me, it's obsessively reading blogs.... And Shana gets jiggy with Ginsberg (it's amazing how much rebellious energy still coalesces around that text in spite of decades of familiarity) and writes briefly but suggestively on the sociological perspective on language as a tool for culture formation.

Nice work from you folks. The rest of you need to start catching up; I'm anxious to read more living/dead (or, as the case seems to be, dead/dead) author comparisons. And I hope you're all reading each other's blogs and that some of you will start reacting to each other's posts.

That's fourteen blogs now, I believe.

I'd like to take this opportunity to alert you guys to the existence of some of the other poetry weblogs that are out there. Here are three chosen more or less at random, all of which offer links which will take you deeper into the web of 21st century poetics: The Jetty, Texture Notes, and Equanimity.

Also of note, even of urgency at this moment in history: Baghdad Burning and Where Is Raed?

Please belatedly welcome Shana's Blog. Good stuff there already.

Here's the blog meditation assignment for this week from the syllabus: "Choose two favorite pieces of writing, one by a living author, one by a dead author. What resonance, conversation, or connections do you hear between them? Write about the space in between those two texts." This is fairly open ended. The goal is to try and learn a little bit about what kinds of writing attract you. E-mail me if you have questions.

Welcome aboard, Max. Who's left?

The blogs are great, people. Keep it up! I love how different they are already. I hope you're all making use of the blogroll at right to see what other people are doing--and don't hesitate to link to each other in a post if you want to take up a thread that someone else has started. I'd like us all to cultivate the habit of reading each others' blogs at least once a week.

I regret that we didn't have more time to discuss the O'Brien story, but I'm glad that a couple of you are talking about it in blogland. I think his story might be interesting to think about in terms of Pound's notion of the image as "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." How are each of the "things" that the men in the story are carrying like this sort of image? Are some of them more balanced toward "the intellectual" than "the emotional"? What about the "instant of time"? Why must an image be instant? Can't it unfold in time the way a narrative does?

Nine blogs down, that means at least four to go.

I've read all your "nonsense" by now, and I'm really pleased by the different directions you each took with the assignment—I'm looking forward to hearing some of them read out loud for tomorrow. I'm also enjoying the blogs—more, more! See you tomorrow.

hi guys! My blog is up! journal feel free to check out the rest of my page too... tho its still under construction. =)

here's my blog: Emily's blog

Everyone please welcome Laurel's Blog to the blogroll.

The links at right are a little overbalanced in favor of poetry so I've added a link to a wonderful online fiction journal, The Barcelona Review. Lots of great fiction writers have been featured here—Carole Maso, George Saunders, Juan Goytisolo, and Ben Marcus, to name a few. Many Spanish-speaking writers too, as you might expect, and some interesting interviews. Explore.

Check out Laura's Lit Log, everybody! And keep 'em coming.

I notice that Dave is using his own Cornell webpage for his blog. That's a very sensible (and ad-free) thing to do; I would have done it myself if I'd known about it. For instructions on creating your blog Cornell-style, click here.

Allow me to clarify something: this blog is for announcements, collaborations, and for posts that I or you want to communicate quickly to the whole class. I'd like you to use your own blogs for the assignments, like the meditation on language. It's not wrong to post the blog assignments here, but my idea was to have each of you create your own personal space, with the weekly meditations just acting as a starting point for your own collection of drafts, musings, links to interesting things on the Web, diary entries, or whatnot. Aunt Walt and Uncle Emily is collective property but your blog is your own.

So what I envisioned for this week was a) announce your new blog's existence and provide a link here, then b) do the assignment on your own blog, which the other class members and I would now be able to link to.