Li-Young Lee

Yesterday at 6 p.m., J and I went to hear Li-Young Lee, who spoke at the University of South Carolina in connection with Asian Arts Week. He conducted a master class the day before (which I now wish I had attended). This evening session was supposed to be a sort of preliminary to the later Gamilan Concert, and he had been asked to talk about connections between music and poetry. Fortunately, he didn't adhere to that charge too closely. Instead, he talked about synchonicity and its relation to poetry.

He told a couple good stories of synchronous events and then built a connection between that sort of happening (which we all experience on occasion) and what happens or should happen in a poem. He described the best poems as striking a balance between probability and randomness. That is, a successful poem relies on the reader's perception of the probability of certain patterns or forms or themes--some regularity. But the poet must introduce some random, or seemingly random, elements that violate the regularity. A poem can't be too regular (too reliant on probability) or too random. It's the balance that we seek. A good poem gives the feeling of synchronicity, sort of like what we experience when two complementary events come together surprisingly in our lives.

When, after his 30-minute talk he asked for questions, I asked him to read one or two poems and talk about how those principles were evident in the poem(s). He read "The Hammock," from his collection, Book of My Nights. The poem begins:

When I lay my head in my mother’s lap
I think how day hides the stars,
the way I lay hidden once, waiting
inside may mother’s singing to herself. And I remember
how she carried me on her back
between home and the kindergarten,
once each morning and once each afternoon.

He speaks genuinely and thoughtfully in a quiet voice, and his assertions about poetry are utterly convincing. I only wish there had been time for him to read more poems. We bought two books, including his newest, Behind My Eyes. I heard him read several years ago in Daytona Beach, and yesterday's session was equally as rewarding, though much briefer because of the constraints of the schedule.

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Dith Pran, Killing Fields photographer, dies

Davidson Advances

My alma mater, Davidson College, has defeated Wisconsin decisively (73-56) and advanced to the Elite Eight in the NCAA basketball tournament. Davidson's star, Stephen Curry (above), has scored over 30 points in each of the first three NCAA wins so far--a feat accomplished by only 3 players previously. Davidson was seeded 10th in the region and has become the Cinderella at The Big Dance. Let's hope the basketball doesn't turn into a pumpkin.

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Eric Alterman on the fate of journalism

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Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences 25 years later

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Toby Barlow's Sharp Teeth, a novel in free verse

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Hank Williams: 11 number one hits and a lot of back pain

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An inspiring story of a mugger and muggee on NPR's Story Corps

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Penn Faulkner Award Winner and Finalists

Book Choices

This week's intense 3-day campus visit from our SACS (Southern Association of Colleges and Schools) reaccreditation team produced a happy outcome: only several minor recommendations in response to our massive self-study and our so-called Quality Enhancement Plan for improving instruction in the future. Because this process takes place only every ten years, I won't have to go through it again.

Now I can focus my attention on selecting textbooks for the fall. This process is made more interesting and complex because of the lineup of writers we'll bring in for the November Fiction and Poetry Festival: Tom Perotta, Ethan Canin, Valerie Martin, Sara Gran, Robert Wrigley, and Dorianne Laux. That's 4 novelists, 2 poets. I'm trying to decide which books by which authors I want to use for my 2 freshman composition courses. Some of my colleagues are planning to use Perotta's Election, tying it to the fall election season, although the book concerns a high school and not a national election. Maybe I'll order Ethan Canin's stories, The Emperor of the Air--or maybe something by Valerie Martin. She's written a biography of St. Francis that I may use for my literary nonfiction class. I've ordered it and will give it a look. Currently, I'm rereading Canin's stories, which are superb; I just can't decide how freshmen would respond to them.
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I usually avoid political proselytizing on this blog, but today I can't resist exclaiming about Barack Obama's incredible speech on racism delivered March 18 in Philadelphia, largely in response to recent negative publicity about inflammatory and highly controversial statements made recently by his minister, Jeremiah Wright (from whom Obama borrowed the title of his book, The Audacity of Hope). This one is bound to be remembered as one of the greatest campaign speeches ever. Film and text of the speech are available here.
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Are English Departments Dying?

Interview with Janne Debes, Midwife

Brief film by Akane Igarashi: Janne Debes, Midwife

Wendell Berry and Pete Seeger

Interviewed in Shenandoah magazine, Wendell Berry says, "The poet is a wilderness looking out at the wild." He also says, "The music in a song or in a poem is its continuity, what keeps it coherent and alive. It then becomes a sort of metaphor for whatever it is that keeps us alive in the world, all of us creatures together. But what you’re trying to do in any kind of writing is to keep the thing continuous from end to end. You can interrupt a continuity for certain effects, if you want to — you can put a caesura somewhere in the middle of a line — but if the continuity isn’t strong enough to accept the interruption and carry through it, then you’ve lost more than you’ve gained."

Janne and I happened to catch parts of a program on Pete Seeger this morning while eating our Sunday waffles. This was one in a series of extended musical features on PBS to compliment their semi-annual fundraising drive. As I watched footage of Seeger, now 84 and still singing in Carnegie Hall, I felt renewed admiration for him, his life, his music. He was banned from TV for 15 years for his politics but went ahead with his performing anyway. Finally, the Smothers Brothers invited him onto their show, where he sang his anti-Vietnam War song, "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy." The studio cut that song out of the program, a decision that was met with a huge outcry. It was awhile before that song was aired. Along with his dogged commitment to Civil Rights and anti-war activism (through his songwriting and personal performances), he took on the issue of the pollution of the Hudson River and almost singlehandedly mobilized public support for cleaning it up. He never does a performance without having the audience participate. And he continues to favor audiences of children. His life is a manifestation of the credo, "Think globally; act locally." Here is Seeger singing "Guantanamero." And singing "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy."

I admire Wendell Berry and Pete Seeger for similar reasons. Both are consummate artists who have devoted their work to good causes. Berry's causes are conservation, peace, and respect for the work of hands and the virtues of basic farming. His essay, "The Failure of War," is a thoughtful manifesto for peace.

The Man Born to Farming
by Wendell Berry
The Grower of Trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout
to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.
What miraculous seed has he swallowed
That the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth
Like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water
Descending in the dark?

Locavores

Book jacket photo of Kingsolver/Hopp family by Hank Daniel

I've just finished Barbara Kingsolver's book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about her family's move from Arizona to Virginia coupled with their decision to spend a year eating only local produce (or as close to that ideal as they could get). The account unfolds chronologically from one March to the next and details the year's gardening, turkey and chicken raising, and questing for local food sources. The family's motivation was mainly ecological--the desire to minimize their dependence on food shipped from overseas or trucked from afar at immense cost in energy. But Kingsolver also convincingly asserts the old macrobiological principle that it's healthier to eat locally. Kingsolver proceeds with a light touch that leavens the serious principles she espouses and helps avoid any self-righteousness. The family is methodical about their "locavore" experiment but not obsessive. They buy coffee, spices, and occasional chocolate from distant sources, splurge on cranberries for Thanksgiving, and never succeed in finding a good local source for wheat flour. Topical sidebars by Kingsolver's husband Steven Hopp (a biologist) and her older daugher Camille (a Duke student) complement the narrative.

Although I recently read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma (a nice companion piece to Animal, Vegetable, Miracle), I don't remember previously reading an entire book so exclusively about food, covering everything from the problems with agribusiness to a recipe for pumpkin soup. I guess I was pulled in by the scope of it, coupled with the intimacy of family life (e.g., the younger daughter Lucy's establishment of an egg business or decisions about exactly what to serve dinner guests in mid February). We have always eaten conscientiously in our house and have even previously had substantial gardens (something that our fully shaded yard now sadly precludes). But I've never been "into" food--unlike my mom who in her day could pore for hours over recipes (to delicious effect) and--until we started weeding them out--had hundreds of cookbooks in her collection. I admit that I didn't digest every recipe in this book, but I read with fascination about the family's dogged and ingenious back-to-the-land lifestyle.

Obviously, most families could not do this because of the demands of jobs and family, as well as limitations of space. Most of us would encounter far more crop failures and botched plantings than Kingsolver admits to. But she's not trying to convert us all into complete locavores, only to urge us to think more carefully about our food sources and act accordingly.

Spring is the perfect time to read this book. It leaves me longing to dig in the soil and plant something, even if it's just a few herbs or a tomato in a bucket. I do look forward to a future when I'll have time, space, and sunlight for an ample garden--one that might move us a little closer to the ideal of eating locally.

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Claire Tomalin on the greatness of Milton

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MTV "Think" page on current issues

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Poetry videos

Tattoo

I have earned a mention on a web site devoted to "Tribal Butterfly Tattoo Designs." It seems the author somehow tracked down my poem, "The Butterfly Tattoo," and decided it would fit nicely onto this page. You never know when and where your poetry will reach an audience. At least I'm given credit for the poem.

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National Book Critics Circle Award Finalists . . . and Winners

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L.A. Times Book Award Finalists

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"Poetry, Philip Larkin once said, is a machine made of words: The reader puts the penny of her attention into the slot and pulls the handle; out comes a feeling. Which is true of any art form, no?

"But for my money, only a poem can be replicated in toto, no piece missing. We remember overall novel plots or isolated sentences. A movie character or balletic leap haunts you. A tune may stick in your head. These are fragments. Only a lyric poem -- committed to memory in language we all use -- can be activated anytime, anywhere, yielding an artistic experience in its entirety. Pinned in a subway car with arms at your sides, you can call up a poem and enter a cathedral of words that anoints you again in your singular passions. And great poems keep moving in us forever, time and again."

Mary Karr, introducing a poem by Archilochos in the Washington Post "Poet's Choice" column.

Steve and Eric

Several years ago, when my friend Steve moved from Upstate New York to Sicily, he sent me four big boxes of poetry books. We have talked about and corresponded about poetry on various occasions since 1969-70, when we both taught at Roosevelt Junior High School in Syracuse. Steve's impressive collection contains a number of long-out-of-print pamphlets, chapbooks, and heftier volumes, many of them from the beats and other counter-culturists from the sixties and seventies. It contains numerous originals from City Lights Books, such as Ginsberg's Howl and Kaddish. Steve had collected much of the work of A.R. Ammons, his poetry teacher at Cornell. I keep this special collection on a couple shelves in my office, readily available from my rocking chair. I refer to it often and sometimes loan the books to student poets.

The other day I received an envelope from Steve containing Eric Unger's limited edition Just as Form, from House Press, June 2007. This is typical of the stuff Steve sometimes introduces me to and that I would never discover on my own. This 5.5 in. by 7.5 in. thread-bound chapbook consists of 27 untitled poems, few of them over 11 lines, each spare and fragmentary. The blunt stanzas most commonly run 2 to 4 lines. Lots of white space. The collection is filled with elemental words and phrases: tree, moon, sun, eye, wood, water, ice, black, white, star. Here is one poem:

In a black night
sleep deepens
further.

The star out
the window
is the North Star.

Its distant burning
is the only light
in the dream.

The concentration of these 26 mostly monosyllabic words forces the ear toward the repeated "ee" sound, the echo of "night" and "light," the doubling up on "star." The mostly terse lines contrast with the longest and slowest line, "Its distant burning." The repeated sounds and motifs through the book urge us to see the small collection as all of a piece. When occasionally we come across a word like "circus" or "apogee," so out of keeping with the pervasive organic, naturalistic diction, the word stands out, drawing energy to itself. I'm glad Steve introduced me to this Chicago poet.

A Poet Cop

Not long ago, Scott English appeared at my office door. He graduated from FMU last spring and had taken my Introductory Poetry Workshop. He was wearing a neatly pressed shirt and tie. He had a handgun and a badge on his belt. It seems he's now a policeman in Charleston and was on campus to speak to classes about law enforcement. Something of a whiz with computers, Scott started his own computer business while an undergrad and while still working at a local grocery store. He says he continues to do computer work to supplement his cop's salary. It pleases me to know that there's at least one patrolman on the beat who is not only a computer geek but also a poet--and not a bad one at that.
~~~
Roof

The roofing contractor
shows me a bird’s eye
sketch of my house
with its peaks, troughs,
angles, and vents.
The abstract planes
ripple with white
three-tabbed shingles,
giant fish scales
deflecting water.

Twenty years ago
my father and I
did the work.
Now I’m too old
to replace a roof.
When the men begin
peeling off the old,
that will be one more
wide, flat remnant
of my father gone.

K.A.

Debra Daniel

Poetry and fiction writer Debra Daniel paid us a visit at Francis Marion University last week. She visited classes, including my poetry workshop, and read from her work Wednesday night. I've know Debbie at least since 1994, when we were among the eight writers selected that year for the South Carolina Readers Circuit. A Blythewood resident, she taught fifth grade for many years until her recent retirement. Now she's apparently writing more than ever. Also, she and her husband Jack play in a band and every other Wednesday take part in a jam session at Doc's Gumbo Grill in Columbia. I went down and played with them once last fall. Debra Daniel's website provides samples of her work.

~~~

Old Towns

In towns of my past
the streets uncoil
like ropes frayed
with use, scarred with
small slights, past corners
burnished with habit.

I walk them over time,
almost there, whistling
with pedestrian sadness.
I pass hardware stores,
the grills, the pizzerias,
one per town, silent.

K.A.
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Review of Richard Cook's biography of Alfred Kazin

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Obits for William F. Buckley, Jr.: AP, New York Times, Washington Post

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Why do writers drink?

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Russell Jacoby on "the cult of complication"

Eclipse

Viewing conditions were perfect for last night's full lunar eclipse, and the moon hung unobscured above the trees. I set up our Meade mini-telescope, which was about the right power for the viewing. I was watching the Coen Brothers' movie, "Miller's Crossing," on DVD but stopped it intermittently to step out into the driveway and check the eclipse. When it was fully shadowed, though still dimly visible from refracted light, it looked more like an actual three-dimensional ball than it normally does, burnt orange in color. The proximity of Saturn and a couple bright stars added to the strange effect.

The last eclipse I remember clearly was an eclipse of the sun shortly after we moved to Columbia. Janne and I took the girls with us to Greenville, where the view was supposed to be better. A list of eclipse dates tells me there was a solar eclipse visible in the Eastern U.S. on May 30, 1984. That must have been it. Here's a poem I wrote, roughly based on that memory:

Eclipse

Remember how we drove six hours
to see the moon's shadow
forge across the sun and leave
a black hole in our daily light?
Our earthbound bodies
were in transit as we rigged
our telescope and camera
to record the crossing over.

Nothing lasts: our career
among the stars made us reel
with the earth and spin
from the moon's umbra quick
as we felt cool midday twilight,
that hint of how the sun
may go. No way to make
the moon or sun stand still.

We knew the danger
in such darkening:
the corona round the moon's
black disk could seem
a harmless wreath of fire,
while one short glimpse
would ruin eyes
as blue as yours.

~~~

One woman's blog: 200 books in a year

Iowa City

University of Iowa Advanced Technology Laboratories - designed by Frank Gehry
Staircase in the Old Capitol - University of Iowa

I've just returned from several days in Iowa City, where I was consulting with ACT (American College Testing) for the English portion of the college admission test. While in the Cedar Rapids Airport, I saw a wall-sized poster ad for Maharishi University of Management, which is located in Fairfield, Iowa. Its founder, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, recently died. The poster was a reminder that the guru, who has lived in the Netherlands in recent years, was a entrepreneur as well as a spiritual guide. Back in 1971, Janne and I paid the student rate to undergo training in Transcendental Meditation, which was led by a TM disciple traveling through Auburn, Alabama, where we lived at the time. The trainer,actually wound up staying with us at the farm house for a night or two. He wore a neat sports jacket and tie and brought with him a bag of grapefruit. We meditated for several years, and I still think that I'd probably benefit from twice-daily meditation. My mantra--assigned to me during the training and supposedly a secret--surfaces in my consciousness from time to time, and I still chant it to myself when I need to relax.

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David Orr on poet Mathea Harvey
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A reading by Naomi Shihab Nye, who says "We are all born poets. Some of us just keep it up."
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"A writer is a person who would not have written what he wrote if he hadn’t started out to write it." William Stafford

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My essay, "Radiation," is finally available in Drunken Boat

Flannery Tucker Bosher (Annie)

Annie Bosher

Born Wednesday, February 6 at 2:42 p.m.

Weight: 6 lb. 11 oz.

Richmond, Virginia

Parents: Tess Autrey Bosher and Matthew Paul Bosher

Grandparents: Ken and Janne, Bill and JoAnne

Jasper Johns

Update on painter Jasper Johns
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Keep your brain fit.
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Iraq in relation to previous U.S. military blunders

51 Birch Street

51 Birch Street (see web site) is a documentary by New York filmmaker Doug Block about his parents. I rented it from Netflix thinking it sounded interesting, and within minutes of sliding it into the DVD player was hooked. At first it's simply a documentary of an ordinary Long Island family. For posterity, the son decides to record some footage of his parents, who are in their seventies, his mom decidedly better preserved than Mike, his dad. At first, the camera is mostly on Mina, the mom. The son has always felt closer to her, and she has an engaging, voluble manner, as opposed to his dad who was "another story." A cirumspect, introspective engineer who escaped to his cluttered basement shop and seldom interacted with his kids, the father (a "fifties dad") has always been hard to get close to. The filmmaker and his two sisters, who are frequently on camera, agree on the remoteness of their father.
The camera freqently flashes back to photos and film footage of earlier days. It's obviously a well-documented family. And then, rather suddenly, his mom develops pneumonia and within three weeks is dead. This sends him into a tailspin which is complicated not long afterward when his dad becomes engaged to a former secretary who has been living in Florida. Immediately, there are suspicions that his dad has had an ongoing affair with Kitty, who comes to Long Island to help Mike pack up, sell the family house, and move to Florida.
When the family comes across Mina's voluminous diaries and Doug, after some hesitation, begins to read through them, he and his sisters have to revise their assumptions about their parents' marriage. And the the unexpected result is an unprecedented closeness to his dad, who ultimately does move to Florida with Kitty. It's a gripping film, though it's about ordinary middle-class people who spent most of their lives in an ordinary middle-class community. It's finally a commentary on the hidden lives some (perhaps all of us to some extent) live while trying to make everything work out right. This film made several lists of the ten best films of the year.
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K. Silem Mohammed's useful discussion of School of Quietude vs. Post-Avantism
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Song

She was born into music,
and now her disheveled hair
hovers above a keyboard
in a room lit by a computer
screen’s glow, jagged
horizontal lines sounding
out six parts: voice,
background guitar, bass,
lead guitar, snare, high hat.
It comes together
in the phones that cup
her ears like muffs.
She nods to the pounding
beat of the road,
its ravages and bliss.

K.A.

Two 4-Letter Films

Marketa Irglova and Glenn Hansard in Once

I ordered Once from Netflix and watched it last night. It's a wonderful Irish movie about a street busker (Glen Hansard) who works in his father's Hoover repair shop and meets a young Czech woman (Marketa Irglova) who peddles flowers and lives in a crummy apartment with her mother and her child. He discovers that she too is a musician, a pianist, and they agree to write songs together. The two of them actually did happen to meet in life and wrote the wonderful and unusual songs that form the movie's soundtrack. One of them,"Falling Slowly," has been deservedly nominated for an Academy Award. The acting is so unassuming and natural, their attraction for one another so gradual, convincing, and understated, the ending so perfect, that I could easily have watched it through again.

Tonight, Janne and I went out to see Juno, also a pitch-perfect movie with a great soundtrack--not exactly a love story, but something close to it. Ellen Page is phenomenal as a 16-year-old kid who gets pregnant, is never at a loss for words, and from start to finish embraces her own immaturity while proving herself at least as ready for life as the adults around her. J.T. Simmons and Allison Janney are great as her working class dad and dog-loving step-mom. Michael Sera is convincingly gawky as the clueless but surprisingly sensitive father of her kid. The youthful patter comes thick and fast, usually from the smart-ass mouth of Juno herself. As with Once, I just didn't see any false moves. There's some real tension and angst toward the end, and then the outcome feels just right. I'm tempted to buy the soundtracks for both of these gem-like films.

Chelsea Again

Chelsea Clinton, backed by America Ferrara, Amber Tamblyn, and Keyshawn Johnson

The Grille, a student eatery on our campus, was packed with students, faculty members, and a few townies, including the mayor, when Chelsea Clinton and her entourage arrived a little before 10 a.m. Tuesday for a surprisingly long session for Hillary. The supporting cast included actors America Ferrara (Ugly Betty), Amber Tamblyn (Joan of Arcadia), and Keyshawn Johnson (NFL veteran). Chelsea held the floor longest, asking for questions following brief introductory remarks. She was poised and articulate, thoroughly briefed on her mother's positions. When someone asked about an issue (such as health benefits for illegal immigrants) she wasn't intimately familiar with, she went ahead and said, "We haven't discussed that, but I think what my mom would say is...."--and she proceeded with a perfectly reasonable response. The most interesting comments came after personal questions: "What did the three of you talk about at the White House dinner table?" or "What secret can you tell us about your mother?" Her response to the latter was to tell how obsessed with "Gray's Anatomy" both of her parents are. They never want to miss it. I was surprised at Chelsea's wisdom and maturity, but then I remind myself that she's now (like her father) a graduate of Oxford University and is a 27-year-old financial analyst in New York. So she's not exactly a shy and gawky first daughter any more. My colleague, political scientist Alissa Warters, has written about presidential children and so was especially interested in meeting Chelsea. Alissa sat on the front row for the rally, but I don't know whether she broached the idea of an interview. An hour or so after the Clinton rally, Chris Tucker was on campus speaking for Barack Obama; I had to miss his lively talk because of a class. It's a shame when teaching stands in the way of our education at Francis Marion University. The South Carolina Democratic primary is Saturday, so this season's string of visiting politicians and surrogates now ends, and the candidates (those few still in the race) move on to Florida or to the states holding primaries on Super Tuesday (Feb. 5).

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"One Laptop Per Child" extends to the U.S.

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The pollution of academic travel

South Carolina Primary Season

Chelsea to stump for Hillary on campus next week

As my previous post on Michelle Obama suggests, the state of South Carolina is crawling with presidential hopefuls in anticipation of tomorrow's Republican primary and, a week later, the Democratic contest. I have yet to see a credible argument for why the primaries are held on separate dates. Voters may cast ballots in one or the other but not both.

In an effort to plunge my English 112 composition class into the fray, I'm requiring my students to take the candidate quiz sponsored by Minnesota Public Radio, determining which candidate's views best match their own. (Of course, over half of the original candidates are no longer contenders.) Then, I ask students to select one issue mentioned in the quiz and write a position paper in which they explain and document two candidates' positions and then go on to clarify their own view, whether or not it matches that of either candidate.

So far, class discussion indicates that immigration is drawing the most interest (just as it is in among state legislators this term), with health care, education, and social security also attracting some students. Interestingly, only one or two plan to write on Iraq. This seems to reflect the waning of this as a campaign issue in recent weeks. The relative success of the "surge" has, at least for now, quieted critics of the war and taken suicide bombings out of the headlines.

I'm not requiring my students to divulge their presidential choices, but as we continue to talk about the issues in class, I imagine some of their loyalties will surface. Mainly, I just want to urge them to inform themselves, engage in dialogue, and vote in the primary races. Too few college students register and vote.

Rumor has it that Chelsea Clinton and America Ferrara will be on our campus Tuesday on behalf of Hillary.

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The strange life and obscure death of Bobby Fischer

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The 50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945

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Should Vladimir Nabokov's son publish the author's unfinished manuscript?

Michelle Obama

Through some odd blogging convergence, Barak Obama's sketch was the final one uploaded in my last posting (Jan. 5), and now I turn to his wife Michelle, who happened to visit our campus this morning, speaking in the commons area of the Student Center. Pretty close to the announced hour of 10 a.m. one of my former students, a soft-spoken but articulate Katrina refugee from New Orleans named Nadiyah, introduced Obama, and she came striding out like a statuesque fashion model in a shimmering cerulean blue blouse and dark skirt. She introduced her brother (visible above to her left in a lavender shirt) and Barak's sister (to his left) and then spoke with passion and power for about 30 minutes. She didn't miss a beat. I had the impression she was focusing carefully on this audience, half students and faculty, half adults from the community. The crowd was probably at least half African-American. She had much to say about education, the rising cost of college and how not so long ago she and her husband had just finished paying off their loans. She was highly critical of No Child Left Behind, a theme that had a lot of audience support.

She laid out the Obama position on the war, noting that despite the sacrifice of our soldiers and many Iraqis, most of us in the the U.S. haven't been asked to sacrifice a thing. Instead, we've been urged to "keep on shopping." She said that her husband's call for change means not only that government should change but that the thinking of all of us (toward the world, toward the economy, toward the environment) should change. She emphasized her husband's background, his decision to turn away from lucrative job possibilities after graduating from Harvard law and instead to work for social causes in Chicago, his adherence to his principles from the outset. Several times she called up the phrase: "To whom much is given, much is expected." She said, "True, my husband is cute. But his ideas are even cuter."

She makes a terrific spokesman for her husband. Michelle Obama is relaxed, firm, self-assured, and gracious. I can't help but think what a wonderful first lady she'd be. In fact, after her talk, I'm about ready to vote for her. A presidential spouse/attorney with her own drive and ambition? Imagine that.

Mitt Romney will be on campus Wednesday, and John McCain will make a return visit before long. (See McCain on my posting for March 2, 2007.) We're working up to the Republican primary Saturday and the Democratic primary a week afterward. It's a good time to be a political junkie in South Carolina.

Recent Sketches

Recent Sketches (Point and click for enlargements.)

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"Subprime" is linguists' word of the year. But I like "googleganger." (See my blog for 11/12/06.)

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I've just discovered slide.com, a site for organizing photo slide shows and creatively presenting them to others. Here's a brief show featuring family Christmas shots: Christmas 2007. First watch the 7 slides, the click on "original view" to get the "gallery view," an "old movie" version of the slides. Numerous other presentation styles are available.

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Challenge: Write a poem in which each word starts with the final two letters of the previous word. The poem’s final word must return to the poem’s opening word.

Take kettle’s essence cents
Tsavo votive vessel elbow
owner errata table lease see
eel elevate terribly lying
Nguyen entreat at Attila’s
aspirin intake keep epiphonic
ice center errata.