30 Things I Love Right Now: Friday the Thirteenth!

(1) John Berger’s Selected Essays. (2) Reading about the place(s) and time where/when I grew up. (3) #Epiphany (4) Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and, in particular, (5) …discovering how to read it. (Skip the front matter; skip around, even.) (6) Writing a couple of essays. (7) Realizing that this practice (30 Things) is an essaying practice (essay (v): to try), and so it’s a natural course that I might begin shaping such thoughts into other shapes. (8) Practice. (9) Getting word, one reader at a time, that something I’ve written has resonated. (10) This poem, by Ashley M. Jones. (11) Having such talented colleagues. (12) Flow. (13) Also ebb. (14) @reckonalabama. (15) A big bowl of oatmeal with brown sugar and cinnamon. (16) A certain minimalist vibe. (17) J—‘s handwriting. (18) S—‘s singing voice. (19) His laughing voice, counting voice, dreaming voice… (20) His new music class (!) on Sunday afternoons. (21) Ignoring political theater/(blood)sport. (And yet…) (22) …the Franzen thing in the New Yorker, which I took to be an attempt to frame our (“our”) efforts to address the coming climate cataclysm not in terms of opportunity (cost) and large-scale human ingenuity but as a personal and spiritual (ethical, if you prefer) imperative. That Teddy Roosevelt thing: do what you can, with what you have, where you are. (23) Which is to say: several billion increments, roughly concurrent, can channel a version of large-scale genius. Or at least it can meet negative feedback loops with positive ones. (24) Naivete. (25) Primitivism (so-called). (26) Inching (increments!) toward October. (27) Triskadekaphobia. (28) Daniel Johnson. (29) Withdrawing a submission that made me uncomfortable for the wrong reasons. (30) Submitting my work to one carefully selected venue at a time. (Increments!!)