And the Brickwork Back of The Lumbering Galapagos Tortoise They'd Set Me Astride at the "Petting Zoo"....

I didn't pursue the doctorate - which I don't regret for an instant - for numerous and varied reasons, most heavily weighted towards my family: I didn't start college until I was thirty-two, and working full-time at Hilltop while taking night classes, I didn't finish both my undergraduate and masters degrees until I was forty, and... enough.

But there was also this: the majority of my teachers in the English Department were not murderers, but almost all were miserable - miserable with tenure-track fighting for tenure, miserable with tenure wanting full-professorship, miserable with full-professorship at Hilltop but not an Ivy, miserable with teaching loads and publishing deadlines and, most viciously, office location. Don't make me cut you for that fourth floor office, motherfucker. Miserable.

Three-four years of classes and thesis writing it would have taken to finish the PhD, I would have been a mid-40s heterosexual white male entering a profession where being a mid-40s heterosexual white male is a distinct disadvantage (that's not a complaint, it's a complement), and then getting a tenure-track job at Northwest Nebraska State (and one starts this profession in Northwest Nebraska State and knife-fights one's way to Hilltops), seemed silly, but more unhappy.

• Elric's last report from Srbija.
• Seeing like a state.
• Seeing like a state.
• I can provide access to an e-version of the above book. Email me and I'll send you the address and necessary alias/password.
• Capitalism.
• Class composition in the age of classless struggle.
• Pwog pwofessions abuzz with indignation!
• Structuralism.
• Party of Palin.
• Dreck Girl.
• Frank Rich calls Democrats pussies. He's right.
• Pigs are .06% pussier.
• New Deal in reverse.
• Republican priorities.
• UPDATE! Sense: Iran.
• Christers scare the bejeebus out of me.
• O! yes they do.
• Bet she's a Christer.
• More slobber from The Dickwhisperer.
• A question about douchery.

• Crisis in Kensington.
• No.
• No.
• Youth revolt in Maryland politics?
• Insights from Fredneck.
• Snow abates, homicides return.
• Table games.
• Benny as coach.
• First United exhibition, 8th minute, McTavish own goal.
• UPDATE! Capitalism.

• Armantrout is to Ashbery as Who is to Who?
• The Transparent Man.
• Is the new global novel dull?
• Decade: a list.
• Stephin Merritt/Claudia Gonson interviewed last week before the show (which has taken deeper seed in my thoughts more than I thought it would).
• Hideous Gnosis. I don't get it; I'd like understand it more.
• Gabriel and Bush.

HOW SIMILE WORKS

Albert Goldbarth

The drizzle-slicked cobblestone alleys 
of some city; 
 and the brickwork back 
of the lumbering Galapagos tortoise 
they'd set me astride, at the "petting zoo"....

The taste of our squabble still in my mouth 
the next day; 
 and the brackish puddles sectioning 
the street one morning after a storm....

So poetry configures its comparisons. 

My wife and I have been arguing; now 
I'm telling her a childhood reminiscence, 
stroking her back, her naked back that was 
the particles in the heart of a star and will be 
again, and is hers, and is like nothing 
else, and is like the components of everything.