Daily Musing

Fuck you, Rajon Rondo.

Daily Musing

You're planning on making a meal later this week. It calls for an ingredient that you currently have in your fridge. You have enough of this ingredient for the recipe, but only just enough. And what happens? You begin to crave this item. A voice tells you to sample it. Indulge your craving.

The half a pack of shredded mozzarella doesn't stand a chance. It'll be gone before noon tomorrow.

Jarron Gilbert

Meet the Bears' new DT.  He can jump out of pools.  Hopefully, this will help him sack opposing quarterbacks.  Like, when the Bears play the Russian water polo team in week 12?



Coin slot!

Vincent

We've been reading the Dobyns book all semester for Form & Technique in Poetry, and one of the (many) ideas that gets repeated is how art needs to communicate something to its audience. That idea reminds me this song, which I think is gorgeous.  So I thought I'd post it, here. 

Ramblings: thesis tracker, project stuff

Number of Stories: 6

Current Page Count: 68

Current Word Count: about 20,200

It's a rough 20K words, but I know what needs to be done in order to finish these up.  In addition to my proposed project, this summer will be all about generating new material.  I've got three pieces in the works right now that are a mess.  Once I chisel away the raw materials, (hopefully) the stories will emerge that should be connected, thematically, to the others.

As for the project, I've been mulling over tentative blog titles.  They all seem lame.  Here are some of them:

Clean Spine

First Printing

Book Shed

Secret Sidewalk

There were others whose titles had less to do with the intended theme, though I wonder if that theme comes out in any of these titles.  Intended theme: promoting new books from young writers through reviews; basically, I want to make friends and fellow readers aware of good works from relatively unknown writers.  We'll see where it goes.  The site is still in the development stage.

Jackie Robinson Day

Get ready to see a whole mess of 42s, today.  Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier on this date, 62 years ago.  To commemorate the event, all players and personnel in jerseys will wear Jackie's number during play.  Jackie Robinson: greatest athlete ever.

They are bears, you know

Did you see this?  A woman in Berlin jumped into a polar bear habitat and got mauled.  She survived only to realize that jumping into a polar bear habitat is a bad decision.

More Grapes

Cub had grapes on sale--red ones the size of ping-pong balls.  I gave them the squeeze test.  They were firm; I was sold.  When I got home, I washed a handful of them.  Which amounted to about three grapes, since they were huge and my hands are not.  I couldn't wait to demolish them.  You know when get one of those plumpers that keeps its shape after you bite into it?  That's what I was anticipating.  

Instead, I felt a shocking crunch.  Turns out these were not seedless grapes.  I've never had grapes with seeds in them.  I thought they went the way of the slap bracelet or the jelly shoe.  Apparently not.  The problem with seeded grapes is there can be up to five seeds (from what I've gathered, so far) per grape.  One or two seeds will be huge, the rest will be like shards of shrapnel.  They're unavoidable.  You can't nibble your way around them, and you end up wasting most of the grape meat trying to spit them out.  

My question: how do you eat these fucking things?

If this were a daily musing, I'd probably say something to this effect: "Make sure you read the signs in the produce section when purchasing fruit.  You may end up with seeded grapes, which get caught in your teeth and stick in your craw."

15 Years

Kurt Cobain

Huh...

This makes so much sense.

The Onion knows how to drive 'em in

This Onion article is quite fitting, especially after the Cubs strapped on their knee pads, assumed the position, and played catcher all afternoon for the Yankees.  

And if you know about Mark Prior, you might laugh as much as I did the first time I read this.  Classic.

Let's go, Schaumburg Flyers!

Robert Wright/Andreas GA

Congratulations to the winners of the 2009 Robert Wright Awards (with comments from the judge, Leigh Allison Wilson):

First Place - Amanda Schumacher (fiction/creative nonfiction)

Judge's comments: "Whether Amanda Schumacher is writing fiction or nonfiction, she is an author who investigates the mysterious interstices between life and death, mystery and manners.  That she does this with a fine intelligence and originality makes her prose a memorable experience for her readers."

Second Place - Lesley Arimah (fiction)

Judge's comments: "Lesley Arimah's fiction takes characters in extreme situations and, somehow, renders their emotional states into feelings we all recognize as a mirror to our own.  These shocks of recognition occur whether Arimah is writing about the adult grief from losing a child, or the child grief from the manipulations from a horrendous mother."

Third Place - Heather Elliott (poetry)

Judge's comments: "Heather Elliott is a poet who clearly loves language and often regrets its slippery meanings.  She is, in other words, a poet's poet and the range she shows in these twelve poems both delights and sobers her readers.

Honorable Mention - Seth Calvert (creative nonfiction)

Judge's comments: "Ancient Greek may well be 'hard' but it is equally hard to write an intelligent contemporary English essay about learning it.  The wit and humor of this piece meshes astonishingly well with the arcane complexities of what J.R.R. Tolkien called 'that brutal seductress' of a language, Greek."

Also, let's here it for the 2009 Nadine B. Andreas Graduate Assistant: Jorge Evans.

Well done!

Summer Project

In the next month, I'll be launching a new blog on WordPress.  My goal is to write a book review a week over the summer, concentrating on new works from emerging writers.  I might throw in a review of a book by some more established writers, or novels/collections that were written in the past few years, too.  It depends on what I can get my hands on and what I feel like reading--I've got a whole case of books that still need to be read.  The aim is to spread the word about lesser known books to those of you who enjoy reading.  

In a way, they're not necessarily going to be book reviews.  Instead, they'll be a way to promote good writing.  I'm loosely modeling this after the EWN site, created by Dan Wickett. And who knows, maybe some of the writers will come across the page while googling themselves, and they'll link it to their personal site--I intend on providing links to author websites, if they're available.  

Here are some books I would like to review:

The Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer

Once the Shore by Paul Yoon

The Turtle Catcher by Nicole Helget

The End of the Straight and Narrow by David McGlynn

In the Devil's Territory by Kyle Minor

I'm Sorry You Feel That Way by Diana Joseph

Fakers: Hoaxers, Con Artists, Counterfeiters, and Other Great Pretenders by Paul Maliszewski

Captive Audience by Dave Reidy

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

The Slide by Kyle Beachy

Now, I might not get to all of them, and there might be more titles released this summer that catch my eye (like this, this and this), but I've already finished a few of these books and am in the process of writing about them.  At the very least, I've read something by each of these writers, so I know what I'm getting into.  Again, the focus will be to spread the word about good, young writers and their work.  Once I get the page set up and running, I'll post the link here and let all (10) of you know it's alive and breathing.