Last night I found out about another local teen suicide victim… another friend of my children… another child I knew. That’s two in as many days, three in as many weeks. And that on top of a string of senseless accidental deaths that seems to stretch back as far as forever.
It’s not just heartbreaking in [...]

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[photo by Greg Gladman]
As part of an effort at soul-salving, I am resuming my poetry memorizing routine. I’m just going to start with a new list, including some that I already know though I haven’t sat and recited them to myself for a long time. For me, memorizing is a [...]

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The calendar is about to tick over. I spend this New Year’s Eve like the last– and the one before that– alone with my thoughts, some music, and a drink (flowering oolong tea). At the best of times I’m not good company during this time of year, when introspection inevitably leads to introspection… and spurred [...]

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And not just my skin, though we are down to just over 4 hours of daylight and not a lot of that is quality time with The Great God Sol. After a few weeks of rumination, scheduling and unscheduling, re-prioritizing, reading and sleeping, I am emerging from anti-social, introvert Cave 1.0 and re-joining the land [...]

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I’m at a crossroads that I’ve long suspected was coming. A few years ago I made a conscious decision to focus on my work in education and technology at the expense of my writing. I put my notebooks away, gradually withdrew from online art communities, and greatly reduced the amount of fiction and poetry [...]

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A report on the radio this morning about a missing hunter started me thinking (or at least doing what passes for thinking in my case). Why is it that the hunters that get lost always seem to be the most experienced ones? The stories always have a sound bite something like this:
The search resumes today [...]

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Stars, inter-stellar light, quantum entanglement, the sound leaves make in the dark as night sets in, the small hollow at the base of a woman’s neck, hip bones, ruins of Roman coliseums, emotion expressed in the eyes, emerald flaws, solipsism, recurrence, multiple infinities, infinity plus one, ruined and abandoned places I once inhabited, the gathering [...]

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This is a blog. That fact means nothing. It is not a peer-reviewed journal, a final archive of my writing, a sponsored publication, or the product of gatekeeping and editing. That does mean something… it means that while the ideas and thoughts are often vital and the product of a long gestational period, the writing [...]

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I seek change and I fear it. I feel alone and worry about losing friends. I’m tired of the entanglements of so many things while knowing I’ve come this far and gained almost nothing along the way. I know my own insufficiencies intimately. There’s a kind of comfort in them as there is in the [...]

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I’m thoroughly disgusted by the party line Supreme Court decision in the Morse v. Frederick (aka Bong Hits 4 Jesus) case. I’m too angry and frustrated to write a dispassionate, analytical post. But I would like to make a few points.

Frederick was not on school grounds at the time he put the banner up [...]

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If you have even a touch of monkey obsession (as I do), then you must check out the Simiarum et Vespertilionum (follow the Structure link to navigate directly to the plates), one product of a naturalist expedition to Brazil in the early 1800s. The slightly anthropomorphized drawings are fascinating.

I imagine that earlier documents would [...]

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I am stretched too thin. I can’t think. It’s time to wean and weed. I follow many more blogs, sites, and publications than are listed in my always outdated sidebar and it’s become too much. I don’t have time for it and I don’t think I’m getting much intellectual return from most of them.
So over [...]

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David Weinstock has a cocoa conundrum.

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I won’t pretend to be the first to see in the Internet parallels to the all-remembering mind of Funes; a book could be written, if it hasn’t already been, on how Borges invented the Internet.
More on the Internet, memory and forgetting…

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“Bio Mapping is a community mapping project in which over the last three years almost 1000 people have taken part in. In the context of regular, local workshops, participants are wired up with an innovative device which records the wearer’s Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is a simple indicator of the emotional arousal in conjunction [...]

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Every few months for quite a few years I have searched for news of my old friend Rob “Keoni” Boyer… someone I got into trouble (and trouble with) a young child and with whom endured a few years of library work as college students. He was one of the few who left for New York [...]

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At least, not being able to speak, I am spared the need to explain why every film is “overlooked,” or why I wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
I already think Roger Ebert is unfairly dismissed by cinema snobs– he is more insightful than many give him credit for, despite his popularity– but my respect [...]

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It looks like sloth, but it feels like war.
Achingly and all too personally true. via Liz Lawley, whose snippet I am also stealing because I couldn’t find a better one.

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Jon posted this picture and I was thunderstruck. The facial expression of the bride, the way the groom holds himself so that it is almost like a caricature of who he was before he was disfigured… I have to admit that my first thought was “I wonder what she is thinking?” and a narrative was [...]

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I wake from only an hour of sleep with a dream that I’m holding her. It was grey and we were waiting for morning. There was no danger, just time. We went to sleep apart and I woke on my side, cradling her. There was fire where our clothed bodies touched. I could see the [...]

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