Proof of Blog: Where are you, Dusty Springfield?

It's been too long, my friends. In the midst of Thanksgiving, teaching composition, and working full-time at the pet store, I've lapsed. Many sorries. I trust the world has continued spinning, and that we are all more-or-less surviving.

Hard to believe it's December. Hard to believe I've approved final digital galleys for the book, which is coming out in a month. Hard to believe there will actually be a book.

More po'biz stuff: more kind rejections and revision suggestions on the new (a.k.a. not in the book) poems. Still haven't had a bite on any of them, but am always thankful for the encouraging notes. I need to send out a new wave--though, I lost all of my records when my computer's motherboard fried, so I'm not quite sure where to send them. Good thing the book is coming out, as I lost a lot of those poems when the computer crashed, and lost forever some less recent poems not in the book. But all the new ones were on the flash-drive, so they live on and I'll continue to hammer and prune them (mixed metaphor).

I have a twitter, now. Why would I do this to myself?

So much has happened and the important updates will come organically. Let's just resume with our nonsense.

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Industry insiders describe a "feeding frenzy" around the Head and the Heart — bigshot managers and major record labels from New York and L.A. all want a piece and they want it now. The band is in the midst of a make-or-break moment, one that's happened a thousand times before for other bands and will happen a thousand times again, but for these six 20-somethings means the difference between the could-be of this empty dressing room and the definitely-is of Vampire Weekend, one floor below. "Ten minutes to stage time for the Head and the Heart ..." A disembodied voice pipes into the dressing room, gentle but serious.

via Seattle Times

Have seen these guys play maybe 5 or 6 times since moving to Seattle. Every time it gets better. Also residents of this fine, fine Ballard neighborhood. Watch this, if you're not convinced by the article.

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Mentor. The American Heritage Dictionary, the OED, and the other OED—Online Etymology Dictionary—all mention Mentor, the character in the Odyssey who’s a friend of Odysseus and who guides Telemachus in his search for his father. Sometimes Athena disguises herself as Mentor and lends a hand. But all three dictionaries reach further back and suggest that a common noun came before Homer’s naming of a character. If you Google “mentor, etymology” you find either the Indo-European root men,to think; or Sanskrit, mantar, one who thinks; or, my favorite: “an agent noun of mentos, which means intent, purpose, spirit, passion.”

-John Casey writes about mentorship and Peter Taylor, over at Narrative Magazine

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There is a certain apathy among college students today. I’ve noticed the trend throughout my four years in college, and its ubiquity just recently struck me. There are plenty of excuses for it. Call it detachment. Call it procrastination. Call it senioritis.

I call it an inflexible system. Education has a fresh cornucopia of tools that have not been utilized to potential. That is a shame, and a failure on the part of the system to adapt.

via Deborah Ager

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In recent decades, North Carolina, a relatively rural state in the American South, has made a convincing case to be described by the following title: Basketball Capital of the World.

-via the Wall Street Journal

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MULDOON!