I don’t know what happened to damage Amazing Mike’s sense of consistency—let’s sell incredible cakes from the ugliest storefront imaginable! Let’s have pretty cakes taste like cardboard and plain one’s taste like ecstasy!—but I’m glad it did.

That’s not only adjacent to his English degree, or a case of his “using his degree” in a novel manner unplanned for by its architects; it’s straight down the middle of the plate. Mulaney does exactly the things we professors of English train people to do. But what’s odd to me is that he uses those skills to say the people who gave them to him conveyed no value.

I love every bit of Washington, but my does Oregon have us beat when it comes to beaches. I was not at all expecting such light, such shapes, such arrangements of space.

We were terrified out of silence by the crack of 100 wings lifting suddenly the hitherto slumbering mass.

Since I can be fairly easily impressed upon to dispense advice regarding cultural matters, I hearty yield to the demands of the populus and offer, from the top of my head and in no particular order, some more poets whose work concerns eternal matters and that I have read with delight.

I’ve been translating Ovid’s setting of Jason and Medea on and off for about two years now, when I have time, which is seldom.

Not to trumpet my preferences as to who released the “best records of 2018” but to remember what my life was like year by year, and to do that by tracing its soundtrack.

Lucifer here has just found out the the world is going to end; not someday, but in the next month or so, and is trying his hand at warning people, knowing, through long experience, that they will do nothing to change their lives.

I do think that it is clearer in its final form, and I also think clarity is a noble goal, but, when the edits came back I was a bit sad. To give you a sense of what I mean, here is the opening as I originally had it.

I do this often. Rather than silo-ing my intellectual activity, when I read an interesting bit of theory, be it literary criticism or theology, I think What would taking this seriously look like in a poem? How would I apply this in a classroom?

There’s a whole sub-genre of the internet dedicated to productivity and How To Tie Your Shoes Like the Pros!! kind of articles. Much of it is silly and wasteful or pedantic and unrealistic, but every once in a while, I’ll stumble across something, either from a friend, or on the web, or in an old book, and it will make a tangible difference in my workflow or in my life.