So I says to the guy, I says,

Here’s a poem I really like!

(Also, I’m about to write my fourth Think Piece of the year, and will be posting it here soon.  In the meantime, enjoy!)

The Two-Headed Calf

Tomorrow, when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass.
And as he stares into the sky, there
are twice as many stars as usual.

–Laura Gilpin

Did you know that the perfect society is unobtainable because of human nature?

Really?  You did not?  Well, allow EVERY ONE OF MY STUDENTS to tell you so in separate (and ostensibly separately conceived) “think” pieces!  They are telling me, right now!  All night long!  Over and over!

Whoever taught kids that human beings are by nature power-hungry, lazy, selfish, murdering, thieving bastards — that it’s individual human frailty that causes injustice in the world — needs to fucking GET IT.  And by “it,” I mean MY IRE.  And by “get,” I mean BECOME INTENSELY AWARE OF. Also, it would be good for them to shut the fuck up.

Oh, did I mention…

…I’m not moving this blog after all?  The blogger one isn’t ugly enough.  Also: blogger.  Bleck.  I </3 blogger.   So you can stay RIGHT HERE, READERSHIP!

I promise I’ll start posting again soon…

I really like my poetry explication and think you should read it!

It’s the file attached to the post just below this one!  DO IT.  I like my notes, too.  I like my writing!  Maybe I should just write poetry explications all summer long.  😛

I like to write.

Boy, do I ever enjoy writing poetry explications — and explaining them — better than grading them.  What teacher wouldn’t rather be a student?  A shitty one, that’s who.  Maybe.

Final Exam Part II–Poetry Explication Example

Moving!

This blog is MOVING.  Maybe.  For now.  I want to try blogger for a while and see if I like it any better.  I have found a suitably ugly format over there, and I can use google analytics, which…I basically just want to know how that works?  I feel an allegiance with wordpress, which is ridiculous, but which might be strong enough to draw me back here, as I sort of hate blogger a little.  I mean, isn’t it kind of dumb?  Really?

Anyway.  That spot on the internet can be found at http://rustleader.blogspot.com.    Check it out, if you want to!  It has all the stuff that this place has, too.  I mean, the content.  I exported this baby.  CHECK IT.

Dead–I mean, DEAD–tired.

I’m so tired I have a headache from it, but I’ve been popping in to my own blog and looking at how disastrously bare it’s been for quite some time and I just LAMENT and LAMENT and MOURN and…I mean, it’s all “Juliet’s DEAD!  SHE’S DEEEEEAAAAAAAAD!”

Of course, neither this blog nor (at that point anyway) Juliet is dead.  Does my unwitting comparison with this faux-tragic scene foretell a truly woeful day in store for my poor neglected blog?  Let us hope not.

I’ve been lamenting other things of late, like how little I’ve been reading and writing and thinking.  I’m in some sort of character stasis right now, and I’m a little worried that I’m becoming completely irrelevant and tired because of it.  What if this is a permanent state?  Panic like this makes me do crazy things, like chuck the entire curriculum of College Lit to replace it with…well, something different.

I mean, I get bored with my classes.  I do!  It’s fine for it to be new and all for the kiddos, but the fact remains that their revelations about what we’re reading and talking about seem rote to me after three years of hearing them–no matter how revelatory they are for the students.  And that’s boring for me.  There are, of course, some fresh ideas still floating aboot, but they’re increasingly rarer.  [No fucking way: “rarer” is a word?  No.   Really?]  So I feel like…I want to chuck all of the books, chuck the lit circles, and start with something completely different next year.  Something like…

• The Sound and the Fury
• Midnight’s Children
• Jude the Obscure
• Cat’s Cradle
• The Left Hand of Darkness
• Song of Solomon
• Something by Edith Wharton or such
• Macbeth or something

I mean, those would basically cover the same ideas we discuss now (I don’t think I can trade out Invisible Man, though) but would be, you know, slightly different.  Something a little fresher.  And I really think maybe kids get more out of their books when we read them together than when I set them off on their own with them.  I don’t know.

I feel like the class needs more structure.  More, like, ENFORCED rigor, rather than the-kids-will-create-it rigor.  Of course, that’s totally contrary to my teaching philosophy and style.

I don’t know.  But that’s what you get today, ever-declining readership!

And again.

This isn’t so much a poll as a BETTING POOL.  Please cast your lots immediately, as this is a time-sensitive issue:

Inspiration

For me, going into my destined-to-be-totally-epic Department Meeting of Major Disagreements, and for anyone else who needs to feel strong as a man who chops down a tree and pretends to be a sled dog in order to prepare to face a sleek, well-funded adversary.

LAPTOPMAGEDDON.

I definitely just dumped a half bottle of water on my laptop.