(1) Black Lawrence Press. Check out their NaPoMo sale this month. (2) Matt Layne. (3) Jermaine Thompson. (4) Ashley Michelle Jones. (5) Thinking about what “meaning” is, and writing about it. (6) Highway 61, and writing (obliquely) about it. (7) Entropic bursts. (8) “Tradition and the Individual Talent” vis-a-vis the AI era. (9) Writing about teaching, mostly how hard it is, and how that’s how you know you may be doing it right. (10) How the young bard, appropos of nothing, just blurts out from the backseat: “I stole my voice from some random saint.” I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again (at least for the next couple of months): he’s six. Is that from a song he’s heard or a book he’s read? Or is it just from some deeper part of his mind or soul or something else? Tradition and the individual talent, indeed. (11) How much he loves languages. (12) And animals. [CORRECTION: Not that he loves animals, per se, but that he loves learning about them.] (13) And, I mean, how much he loves everything he loves. (14) That intricate list J– wrote about him. (15) Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. (16) The stretch run of the school year. (17) That day trip to Tuscaloosa last week. (18) Sugar, the band. Though the substance isn’t bad either. (19) Particularly Copper Blue. (20) How when I tell the young bard he’ll probably like Hüsker Dü too, he says (conspiratorially), “Is it fast?” Yes, son. It’s fast. (21) My new spectacles. (22) When, as it did this evening, the sky makes a spectacle of itself. (23) How a couple of days later, the young bard blurts out from his bedroom: “Grant Hart. That’s his name.” When I go in there, he’s got his Rock & Roll encyclopedia splayed out on the floor, turned to the Hüsker Dü entry. Because he wanted to know the last name of the guy named Grant in Hüsker Dü, and me and my aging brain couldn’t pull it out from anywhere. (24) Australopithecus, who figured out how to dig to and then devour the luscious, fatty termite larvae deep in the nest, and therefore probably that’s why our brains are the way the are. (Even as they age.) (25) Plain soda water with a splash of orange juice in it. More than a splash. (Please see #18 above.) (26) Broccolini, though, too. (27) Virginia Tech. (28) The Blue Ridge mountains. (29) The myth of America. (30) The part about how he knows who Sister Rosetta Tharpe is. And can tell when somebody’s covering a song of hers. Dolly Parton too.
(oblique) References:
- Browne, D. (2025, Mar 5). “‘This is war’: Bob Mould on aging indie, his music’s legacy, and where the U.S. goes from here.” Rollingstone.com.
- Chin, P. (Writer & Director). (2021, Oct 20). Edible insects (Season 48, Episode 16). [TV series episode.] In P. Apsell, D. Chambers, J. Cort, D. Gold, A. Groom, C. Schmidt (Executive Producers), Nova. PBS.
- Ellsworth, E. (1989). “Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy.” Harvard Educational Review, 59(3).
- Gates, B. (2023, Mar 21). “The age of AI has begun.” [Blog post].
- Giddens, R. (2015). Tomorrow Is My Turn. Nonesuch.
- Lange, J. Highway 61. (2019) Powerhouse Books.
- O’Connor, B., R. L. Anderson, and J. Kearns. (2008). Doing Things with Information: Beyond Indexing and Abstracting. Libraries Unlimited.