"Thank you much, for the walking stick."

I suspect this post will lack cohesion. Mainly, because that's the way things have been lately. I realized the other day that I live in a cave. Sure, they called it a "basement studio apartment," but mostly it's a cave. I sleep below the ground. There's a yellow light in my cave. It comes from a lamp I was given by my Dad. He and my mother made it out of a ceramic flower-pot they bought in Jerusalem. It's the only light I carried with me across the country. That sentence sounds more melodramatic than it actually is. The cave smells like freedom.

Things seem to be happening far too fast for me to process them. I have a new job at a specialty pet-food store. It's a pretty great gig and has provided the hound-dog with a treasure trove of upper-crust dog stuffs. He's chewing on a deer antler right now. I've seen the error-free (to my and my editor's eyes) fifth galley of my first book sent off to proofers. I've seen a draft of a friend's exceptional cover art for said book. There is an online teaching position on the horizon, which I'm excited about (as I thought I would, I already miss teaching...). Seattle continues to surprise and delight. Strangely, as I prepare to move and am aswirl with new responsibilities and existing obligations, I finally feel at home in my new city.

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Killer first line of the moment:

"Each day grows old, no minute ever new."

from R.H.W. Dillard's "Without You"

(Sallies, LSU Press, 2001)

(The above is the text of the entire poem, a one-liner.)

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Go here and listen to this NPR interview (or, just the one song if you've got a time crunch) with god-father of bluegrass, Sam Bush.

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So I do this bad thing instead--I write about the objects of my nostalgia. Sometimes I crave familiarity of landscape or face, or picture my grandmother playing organ at the church next to her house, my grandfather growing up in a cabin with no running water. I try to conjure the grandparents I never knew by reimagining their world, one that preceded my own.

But the world I want to return to never existed. It's a soft-hearted pastiche of the Old South, family, the happy highlight reel from my early years--cicadas, Hot Wheels, Atlantic Beach, Levi Stubbs, sweet tea, family stories with the bad parts amplified or buffed out.

--a great blog-post from over at The Plougshares Blog

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The average non-top-50 full-residency MFA is harder to get into than Duke University's undergraduate program.

via The Huffington Post

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The seminar is taking place on the second floor of the Dampkring's forward-looking modern branch, whose decor tends toward diamond plate and brushed steel, in deliberate disdain, the owner tells me, for the hippy-shit aesthetics, smoke-browned Hendrix posters, and Jamaican tricolor of the last-gen Amsterdam dope joint. Despite the ineradicable skunk's-tail perfume leaching from the Sheetrock, the shop this morning is a pretty faithful imitation of a high school classroom—from the distracted bespectacled lecturer (a representative from a nonprofit drug-counseling agency) futzing with the overhead projector to the two icily pretty cheerleader types giggling in malicious-sounding Dutch while stocking their desktops with schoolgirl tackle (moisturizer, makeup, chocolates, tissue packets) to the rearmost dunce row, where I've been quarantined with my translator, who told me to call him Harry Resin. A merry Canadian in his midthirties who has lived in Amsterdam for the past decade or so, Harry was drafted into translation detail by Dampkring management and is not delighted about it. "I haven't been up this early in years," he says.

--Wells Tower writes in GQ about his experience as an Amsterdam coffee-shop barista

via Phil Bost

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