Forty-nine pounds . . .

. . . is how many books I checked out of the library today. I know because I lugged them to the gym and, as soon as I arrived, weighed them on the scale in the locker room. A friend I ran into on the bus pointed out that if I had tried to take them on an airplane, they would have just barely squeezed under the oversized-baggage cut-off. (Actually, the book-filled suitcase I struggled back from New York with also weighed forty-nine pounds, so maybe the number has some kind of karmic significance.)

New Years' is well-known to those who know me as my least-favorite holiday but I feel pretty okay about it this year. It's hard to be too freaked out when one's cat is so unruffled.

Exciting

You should all check out this news story. It's upsetting and alarming, but also exciting because all this information is only out there thanks to MY SISTER! This report was years in the making and it is really great to see it in the news like this.

Speaking of depressing . . .

... this is a real quote from a student portfolio: "I was always taught that English that is well written and well spoken can get u very far in this world."

Or is it a joke?

Down down down

Between fights, work, and the weather, I've been feeling down all day. I just went to the meeting of the poetry board of a journal, and that was depressing--the poems were bad, the criticisms were bad in the most depressing way--dismissive but superficial--and I couldn't see any point in trying to improve the conversation, since the poems were bad anyway. It reminded me of Lit Review in college. Now I'm skipping my office party--which is not, as it sounds, a miserable reindeer-sweater affair but actually a really fun event with my friends in our TA office--in order to grade papers I didn't grade earlier, but obviously I am not grading papers yet. They are hanging over me, though, so once I'm done I think I'll feel better. Then I'm going to go run. And tomorrow I'm going to read. This week is proving less productive than I'd hoped. And I have approximately thousands of books left to read.

Best Conference Ever

In my reading, I learn that in 1911, Ezra Pound went to Germany to ask Ford Maddox Ford for an opinion on his new book of poetry:

"He recalls the incident in his obituary for Ford. Ford, writes Pound, 'felt the errors of the contemporary style to the point of rolling (physically, and if you look at it as mere superficial snob, ridiculously) on the floor . . . ' The roll 'saved me at least two years, perhaps more. It sent me back to my own proper effort, namely, toward using the living tongue . . .'"

A week later, another take on the same event:

"Ford saw that it would not do. The Incense, the Angles, elicited an ultimate kinesthetic demonstration. By way of emphasizing their hopelessness he threw headlong his considerable frame and rolled on the floor. 'That roll,' Pound would one day assert, 'saved me three years.'" (Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era)