Here’s what I read in September. 1. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner As I sit here typing, the Pittsburgh Pirates have just won home field advantage in the National League wildcard game, their first such game since I was 15 years old. It seems appropriate to write about finishing Absalom, Absalom!, an accomplishment that stymied me […]
Here’s where you can read some poems I’ve gotten published this summer. “I Should Have Been a Fighter” in The Squawk Back “The Gorgon’s Last Dream” in The Copperfield Review “Literary Characters that Got Screwed by the Man” in Straight Forward. (Purchase via Lit Ragger required)
Time for some more stupid pictures! (Punk rock patch from an old band of mine.) (Bowtie Tuesday, 1980.) (Senior prank. All these cups are full of water.) (My son is terrible at ExciteBike.) (The first words I’ve read in Hebrew without the aid of vowels: “Rosh Hashanah.”) (Hanging out with my son at the University […]
Visual aids in my classroom, circa 2010. I had to re-read The Great Gatsby for my literary criticism class this year, which I thought was amusing. I taught the book for three years when I was a teacher at the Memphis Academy of Science and Engineering, and there is probably no text with which I […]
Here’s how Dolly Parton promotes childhood literacy in tens of thousands of Tennessee households (including my own) (Before we continue, let me share a few useful links with you. Here’s Dolly Parton doing “We’ll Get Ahead Someday” with Porter Wagoner in 1968, and here she is singing “Jolene” from 1974.) I’ve written before of Dolly Parton’s Imagination […]
Disclaimer: This blog post is about the Pittsburgh Pirates, and as such, deals with themes of dissappointment, misery, and loss. The author, aged 6. Dear Baseball: Please look at this photo to the right. This is who you are hurting. Take a long look at the victim of your inhumane nature: a helpless boy, already […]
Here’s what I read this month. 1. All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy All the Pretty Horses, which won the National Book Award in 1992, was the second McCarthy novel I read this summer, and the fifth (out of ten) of his novels that I’ve completed. This might be his most complete, satisfying, and artistically […]