Sarah Wrote That

SW to NE, from the DuBois Library 23rd floor this morning. The gap in the middle is due west, where someone—the nerve!—was using a study carrel.

End of Semester Favorites

I asked my creative writing students (who, damn, I’m going to miss next semester) to chose paragraphs or stanzas from pieces we read that they thought would particularly stay with them. Here are some of them:

Heather Christle, “The Whole Thing Is The Hard Part”:

you have to live where the house lands on you
what else can you do    your bones are all broken
and somebody loves you    who is it    tell me who
loves you     not as much as I do     I mean    I even
built you a house         and found you     why won’t
you live in it

Bradford Morrow, “Rivages Roses for Niels Bohr”:

Late summer, warm. A walk after dinner. I looked for Bohr at the banquet but didn’t see him among the others. Word is he’s putting final touches on his address for tomorrow. The air here along the shores is heavy as pewter and as dark. Lights of the lakeside villas and hotels twinkle and shimmer, reflected on the water. I see a couple in a small boat out on the lake. The wake that tails their craft ridges the watery face of Como like iron filings drawn behind a magnetic charge. I wonder, Are they in love, their molecular hearts thrumming hard? Someone surely should be in love in such an evocative setting as this. Yes, I must believe that they are, and that the reason they are still out there, on the flat back of this mountain lake north of Milan, is because they don’t much want to row back to shore, where they will be forced to reenter the world, the other world.

We are between wars, as I say, because we are always between wars. Between great wars and many of us know it, although this occasion, which the awful Mussolini means for us to celebrate, has nothing to do with war per se.

Richard Brautigan, “The Weather In San Francisco” (the whole thing)

Read on →

"You’re at a party, which has, in the way of some parties, sorted itself according to gender. In one corner, we have Walter Berglund and Richard Katz—a pivotal character, and, fittingly, a musician—of Freedom, and Leonard Bankhead and Mitchell Grammaticus of The Marriage Plot. On the other side of the room, you have Madeleine Hanna and Claire from The Marriage Plot, and Patty Berglund, Lalitha, Jenna, and Connie of Freedom. AND you’re in the mood for conversation—real conversation. Where do you go? Who do you want to spend your time with?"

- Sabina Murray

climateadaptation:

100% accurate! I live in that pink area for “Hippies” and was born in “Republicans.”

citymister:

Accurate to an extent

I’d add a small but loud maroon dot in the east part of “Hippies”: UMASS BROS

Reblogged from Climate Adaptation

lovelyarc:

Vote for Heather Christle’s The Trees The Trees for the 2011 Goodreads Choice Award. It was nominated along with 15 other poetry books.

By happy coincidence, I’d assigned this to my creative writing students this weekend.

Reblogged from The Lovely Arc

Ongoing pedagogical discussion in the ladies room outside the UMass Writing Program.

Today is the kind of weather one moves to New England for, a big, blowy sky, cool, air that feels good going down.

Beyond UMass’s entrance is the Fine Arts Center (shown this week in Architizer’s Kevin Roche retrospective). Outbound past the university farm, I flushed a great blue heron from a reedy pasture corner. The llama herd (middle) was mildly curious, then decided that, as usual, grass was more interesting. On the hill beyond them, hidden except for the high rise dorms of Southwest, is most of Amherst.

ewilcox:

This is the Massachusetts Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, where I spent a gorgeous fall Saturday this weekend at their annual graduate conference. I’d forgotten how much I like Northeast autumns. It’s easy to forget things like that in Los Angeles. The leaves actually change colors, you guys! When you come inside after walking around outside, your nose and cheeks are flushed and cold to the touch! Drinking hot pumpkin spice lattes actually MAKES SENSE (as opposed to attempting to drink them to get in the “fall spirit” when it’s 90 degrees outside).

The conference was great—intimate, unlike so many graduate conferences. Held in the house. Almost everyone listened to all the papers presented. I’d run off copies of a handout for my presentation, but somehow forgot to actually print off the damn paper itself, so I ended up reading from my laptop—but no one cared, and a few people even liked it, I think! Sometimes academic work can feel really lonely, and sometimes I even forget why I’m pursuing certain avenues of thought, or why I thought I wanted to read certain books. But hearing people like me present their thoughts about a wide range of Early Modern topics—not just Shakespeare and Milton, but Kyd and Heywood and some guy named Clement Ellis and Renaissance armor—reminded me why I care about this stuff. I even came away excited to read some new things.

And! Afterwards I met up with Sarah Malone, who is just as awesome and nice and interesting in person as she is on Tumblr. Real-life Tumblr people! They exist!

As is Elizabeth! So much fun! I’m so glad she got the first day that felt like proper New England fall.

The Renaissance Center is one of my favorite spots on the UMass campus. We’ve been lucky to have our start/end of the year festivities here the last few years, looking out over the fields and the valley as dogs run by with their joggers.

(Source: ecantwell)

Reblogged from Line Breaks & Other Violent Crimes

by Michele Lauriat

Michele’s show Amherst to Wakefield opens tomorrow in Chicago:

Friday October 14, 2011
Reception 6-10pm

SM&KK Studios
1932 S Halsted St., Ste 401

50% of sales goes to Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education:

CAPE works toward a future in which young people are empowered, through education and the arts, to fully realize their academic, creative and personal potential. CAPE’s mission is to increase students’ academic success, critical thinking and creativity through research-based, arts driven education.

[see also: Chicago Arts District]

Lake McDonald; Hidden Lake; St. Mary Lake with Wild Goose Island, Glacier National Park
by Abha Eli