December 9, 2010

No pretending winter is not yet upon us. Word is for the next week it will just get colder. Global warming? I say, bring it on. If asked “What do you hate most in the world,” I’d say, “being cold.”

The Christmas cactus which Paul gave me at least two years ago is finally blooming the pinkest pink in the world.

Rehearsed with the Reynolds Band “A Bell of Anya.” Dr. Bryant is a remarkable presence in the classroom, full of high expectation that the kids fall over themselves to fulfill, organized just short of the military, able to reduce large adolescent forces to order with little more than a glance. Whenever I hear the call to eliminate “superfluous” arts instruction from the classroom, I think of the Reynolds music program and wonder where a student would get more varied lessons about more varied things in all their school experience. Math and science classes are insular and isolated in comparison. How many students are really going to find logarithms more useful in their life than the clarinet or the ability to read music?

I can’t explain why the piece, which is bubbling foot-thick cheese–is nevertheless very moving. I can hardly get through it without choking up.

It finally dawned on me who Minehaha, my blog-mocker, is. My question now is what it always was, why bother?

Reading at Pulp last night. It was a sweet and relaxed occasion, in a venue previously unknown to me. I read well to an attentive crowd, saw many old friends, and was rushed at the door by a lad named Caleb, a graduate of WCU, who said he had always been a fan of my poetry and how great it was to meet me. If someone paid him to say that, then it was exactly the right Christmas present. Caleb read a long poem about poetry which was really quite wonderful. Everyone was good. The one exception was the slam poet, though she was very beautiful. The Slam apparently still thinks that hysterical self-assertion and self-glorification legitimizes bad poetry. I have missed the poetry scene. It is less insane than many of the orbits I turn in, and the poets, by and large, mean each other well.