It Has a Face

Here we are. Above is the cover art for my first book. It is the work of my incredibly talented friend Patrick Howard, for which I am beyond grateful. I knew Pat's work from his cover art for our mutual friends' Big Something's first album, "Stories from the Middle of Nowhere." They're rock stars. Pat, also, as you can see by his work, is a rock star. I think we all want to be rock stars. How many times can you say "rock star" in one paragraph without sounding ridiculous?

January looms. That verb probably misleads you--I'm not afraid of January. I'm very excited about that first box of books. I've even overcome my suspicion that it's all been an elaborate, malevolent hoax (that last part is fun to say: malevolent hoax). But I've developed a new neurosis: readers. My first fear is that there won't be any. My second is that there will be too many. My third: Sarah Palin. To guard against all of these fears I've done things like created a facebook page for the book, posted information about upcoming readings on the NYQ Books site, and posted another poem from After the Ark on Ink Node.

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At work today, I talked with a woman about coyotes. I asked her if she'd read James Galvin's "The Meadow." She hadn't. I told her how it describes coyotes gnawing their paws out of traps. She said she'd look up the book on google.

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After spending most of my adult life in private higher education, I've concluded that most of our students are unprepared for college. They may be academically ready and emotionally mature, but they don't understand what a college is or what its motives and mission are. Because they don't understand those things, they are often unprepared to meet our expectations. Worse, they are unprepared to receive the gifts we are waiting, and hoping, to give them.

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With the votes tallied, the spin began: a procession of confident assertions about what “the American people”—meaning, in practical terms, the slice of the scaled-down midterm electorate that went one way in 2008 and the other in 2010—were “trying to say.” According to Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, “The message of Tuesday’s election was that the American people want both political parties to work together.” Mitch McConnell, the Republicans’ leader in the Senate, seemed to embrace the togetherness angle, but with fateful caveats. “The American people want us to put aside the left-wing wish list and work together,” he said. But, echoing his pre-election remark that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term President,” he also said, “If our primary legislative goals are to repeal and replace the health-spending bill, to end the bailouts, cut spending, and shrink the size and scope of government, the only way to do all these things is to put someone in the White House who won’t veto any of these things.”

-a piece by Hendrik Hertzberg for The New Yorker

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What hip hop could be.