Author: Brian

One of my Facebook friends "liked" this article from NBC Miami which mentions a naked bike ride to "protest BP." This brings together a number of things I approve of--public nudity, protesting an oil company, and bicycle riding. But I don't know how I feel about the combination of these things. This feels to me … Continue reading Naked Bicycling

Given the number of students I teach every semester, I'm surprised it hasn't happened before now;. I meet, after all, an average of 90 new students twice a year (not including summer classes), and I'm in my fifth year doing this just at FAU, so it would seem likely that, at some point, one of … Continue reading Losing a Student

It's been a while since I did one of these posts, and my reading pace has slowed some since I'm back in the classroom again--I'm midway through my lone summer class. I gushed about Sandra Beasley's I Was the Jukebox a while back, and I just got a review of it this evening. I'll be … Continue reading Reading Update

Right now, I'm standing at the front my summer class while my 33 students scribble dutifully in their blue books. It's an open-book/notebook test, so I don't really have to proctor them, which makes this blogging possible. I still find myself squinting at them every so often--old habit, I suppose. Poets for Living Waters won't … Continue reading Poets for Living Waters

I'm always conflicted on holidays like this one. I don't like glorifying war, and I don't like glorifying the military. I never have. I understand the need for a military, and I even acknowledge that at times, wars can be just, even necessary, but I still don't like anything about them. And it's too easy … Continue reading A Poem for Memorial Day

"Internal documents from BP show that there were serious problems and safety concerns with the Deepwater Horizon rig far earlier than those the company described to Congress last week. The problems involved the well casing and the blowout preventer, which are considered critical pieces in the chain of events that led to the disaster on … Continue reading I want some people in jail over this

I don't expect she'll friend-request me, since we haven't talked in years for reasons I've gone into before here, but I have to admit I'm feeling torn by it. On the one hand, I feel the rejection all over again, even stronger than I imagined I would. The messed up thing is that I haven't … Continue reading My Mom’s on Facebook

Elisa Gabbert noted this review of an anthology of poetry about Barack Obama's first hundred days in office. The reviewer, Anis Shivani, is pretty brutal about the poems themselves, and I don't have any reason cross him on that since I haven't read them, and also because I don't like occasional poems in general, and … Continue reading Poetry, Obama, Dick-Riding, and E. E. Cummings

I've had some interesting snippets of conversation over the last day or so about my dislike of nostalgia, and it's gotten me thinking about memory and the difference between having a personal comfort with our own past versus Golden-Age nostalgia. I still maintain that the latter is a bad thing, and that that's what Keillor … Continue reading A Little More on Nostalgia