Things That Matter and Things That Don't

If you are reading this, you are probably a friend of Dean Young and/or a friend of poetry. And you may have heard that our friend is in a precarious position. Dean needs a heart transplant now. He also needs your assistance now.

-an open letter from Tony Hoagland, on the very sad news regarding Dean Young's health. Please spread the word, and if you can, give. One of my favorites: Poem Without Forgiveness.

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We have different ideas about things. Specifically we have different ideas about what a person is, or should be. I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate. Perhaps Generation Facebook have built their virtual mansions in good faith, in order to house the People 2.0 they genuinely are, and if I feel uncomfortable within them it is because I am stuck at Person 1.0. Then again, the more time I spend with the tail end of Generation Facebook (in the shape of my students) the more convinced I become that some of the software currently shaping their generation is unworthy of them. They are more interesting than it is. They deserve better.

-Zadie Smith reviews The Social Network

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So this idea that MFA students are in some way ‘pampered’ or ‘insulated’ from economic reality is just false on its face and, I believe, pernicious because it masks another assumption that people have adopted but are less willing to voice: that there’s something wrong about wanting to be a writer and wanting to take 2 or 3 years of your life and focus on your writing.

-rant-tastic

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In my clearest memory of her, it’s spring, and she is walking towards me, smiling, her lipstick looking neatly cut around her smile. I never ask her why she’s smiling—for all I know, she’s laughing at me as I stand smoking in front of the building where we’ll have class. She’s Annie Dillard, and I am her writing student, a 21-year-old cliché—black clothes, deliberately mussed hair, cigarettes, dark but poppy music on my Walkman. I’m pretty sure she thinks I’m funny. She walks to class because she lives a few blocks from our classroom building in a beautiful house with her husband and her daughter, and each time I pass it on campus, I feel, like a pulse through the air, the idea of her there. Years later, when she no longer lives there, and I am teaching there, I feel the lack of it.

The dark green trees behind her on the Wesleyan campus sharpen her outline. She is dressed in pale colors, pearls at her neck and ears. She’s tall, athletic, vigorous. Her skin glows. She holds out her hand.

Chee, she says. Give me a drag off that.

-via Ru Freeman

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Hip-hop fans: go download this free EP from Seattle's own Macklemore. I haven't blasted a CD like this in quite some time, not since Hi-Tek and Kweli has a disc been so stuck.

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Went skiing this past weekend. My first Pacific Northwestern ski experience. Now: way stoked for ski season, for La Nina snowfall, and for continuing to shred that gnar pow.

[scattered flurries] from felt soul media on Vimeo.