"A Light, Damaged and Bruised"

Boone, proud Redbone Coonhound from the Blue Ridge of North Carolina, surveys his new Seattle, Washington backyard.

Things are changing here in the 206, and not just in the expected, look-at-those-different-colored-leaves kind of way. I have moved into a new house. The cave shall be forgotten, to be replaced with above-ground memories, lush and green in their ripe sentimentality (I think that's a mixed metaphor, but it's a blog-post, so there you have it). There are books (mine) for which cover art has been chosen. There are spring readings for said book taking shape across the Mid-Atlantic, as well as hopefully a few readings in the Northwest for Best New Poets 2010 and the book's launch (January 15th, 2011!). I feel abundantly lucky for these things.

Let's hold on to this place, for now.

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Read these gorgeous paragraphs from the Colum McCann novel I'm currently reading:

"Corrigan told me once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He went where He was supposed to go. He stayed where He was needed. He took little or nothing along, a pair of sandals, a bit of a shirt, a few odds and ends to stave off the loneliness. He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery. And if He rejected mystery, He would have been rejecting faith.

What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth--the filth, the war, the poverty--was that life could be capable of small beauties. He wasn't interested in the glorious tales of the afterlife or the notions of a honey-soaked heaven. To him that was a dressing room for hell. Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it. Out of that came some sort of triumph that went beyond theological proof, a cause for optimism against all the evidence.

'Someday the meek might actually want it,' he said."

--from Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin
(Random House, 2009)

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Cat people are people, too.

via the New York Times and Alissa Novoselick

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Killer first line of the moment:

All that I see must in my sight become

from William Jay Smith's "Prelude"
(Words by the Water, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008)

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This band, with this line-up, was the best. I followed them around upstate New York during the Summer of 2003. This video comes from shortly before bass player Scott Palmer passed away, before the horns left to join Slightly Stoopid (the name says it all), and before frontman and band founder Kevin Kinsella left the group. I wonder if I'll ever again be devoted to a band in the way I was devoted to them.