RIP

I haven't been keeping up with the news as well as I might. So it wasn't until today, when I saw the article on the front of the New York Times, "A New Chapter of Grief in Plath-Hughes Legacy," that I learned of Nicholas Hughes's suicide.

He was an academic. He studied fish. Ecologies. He lived in Fairbanks, Alaska.

According to the article, he never talked about his parents, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. His life was quite apart from that legacy. He directed dissertations. He wrote proposals for internal grants. Like one for "Video analysis/editing workstation for graduate students and faculty of the UAF School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences (SFOS)." He gave talks for his department: "Developing the Theory Needed to Predict the Migratory Routes and Distribution of Salmon at Sea."

He was an academic. An ordinary academic. And one suffering from a malady not uncommon among academics: depression.

But I would never have learned of his death were it not for his parents. And the sadness from anyone's death seems magnified by the tragedy of his mother's death.

And since he never talked of his mother, who died when he was still a baby, it seems something less than appropriate to bring forth a poem from her. And yet it's what I can't get out of my head. And so here it is, a poem I've taught, in my own academic life. Students have commented that she put too much pressure on the little baby. I've always felt the turn toward the baby is one of the most moving tonal shifts I know of. "Nick and the Candlestick."

I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears

The earthen womb

Exudes from its dead boredom.
Black bat airs

Wrap me, raggy shawls,
Cold homicides.
They weld to me like plums.

Old cave of calcium
Icicles, old echoer.
Even the newts are white,

Those holy Joes.
And the fish, the fish----
Christ! They are panes of ice,

A vice of knives,
A piranha
Religion, drinking

Its first communion out of my live toes.
The candle
Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Its yellows hearten.
O love, how did you get here?
O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses.
With soft rugs----

The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,

You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.

The Sleeper team

I have to tell you, my interest in following men's basketball has waned over the past few years. Like I said below, I just couldn't get into following Missouri. Now SIU, that was a team I could get behind. They constantly surprised people. The players weren't a bunch of stars. No one left to join the NBA after playing a year. They were a mid-major team, and they were fun to watch.

Then I come to Missouri, a place with a whole lot more money, and a coach who nervously met with the public to defend himself against their disappointment. But things never got better, and when they lost against, as one radio announcer put it, "Big 12 bottom feeders Baylor," well, that was it. He was out of here.

So when Missouri hired Mike Anderson, I was kind of hopeful. He came out of a mid-major program, UAB, one that had surprised people. I liked that. But still, I was so jaded from the Quin years, I just didn't pay that much attention.

But, wow. Did you see the game last night? Yeah, it got kind of messy for awhile toward the end, but their energy level was something to see. And there was that shot that they're talking about, that was featured on the front of my Yahoo page this morning, that had the most amazing and beautiful arc. (Reminds me of a shot I saw at the SIU Arena back in the day.)

And so it seems, while I wasn't paying attention, that Mizzou has transformed itself into exactly the kind of team I like. A team's team. Not a team that forms itself around a star or two. A team that believes in itself, that works together. That surprises people. Back in January, a Sports Illustrated writer called them the "Sleeper Team."

Last night's game was pretty spectacular. And I'll be watching on Saturday. Even though I was thinking they can't possible win, that's not what the critics are saying. It should be a good game, no matter the outcome.

Brits say yes to blogs, ho-hum to history

Or, as The BBC puts it in their lead-in:

Primary school pupils should learn how to blog and use internet sites like Twitter and Wikipedia and spend less time studying history, it is claimed.

The British primary school curriculum has undergone review, and the resulting recommendations put greater emphasis on information literacy. The report apparently identifies six key areas of learning:

* understanding English, communication and languages
* mathematical understanding
* scientific and technological understanding
* human, social and environmental understanding
* understanding physical health and well-being
* understanding the arts and design

This is for primary school, but it overlaps quite a lot with what folks like the New London group have recommended for higher education, especially greater attention to design and to ecologies.

It's also significant to remember that British educational innovations have a history of bleeding into composition studies, most notably the work of James Britton and his associates. So perhaps some borrowing might happen again?


(via Heidi on Facebook)

I don't do brackets

But I do take an interest in the NCAA tournament. Comoprozac remarked to me last evening that none of my teams made it to the tournament.

Au contraire.

Let's not forget Butler. A former student of mine was on the team that went to the Sweet Sixteen a few years back. Sure, I taught there only one year, but I have allegiance.

But the biggest surprise (for me, because I wasn't paying attention, I have to admit) is #3 seed Missouri. I haven't been able to generate a lot of love for the Tigers in my nearly 5 years in Columbia, but maybe I can begin to. They won the Big 12 Tournament (beating, bizarrely, my tainted alma mater Baylor)!

The biggest disappointment? Well, that would be the Salukis. They appear to have finished 7th in the Missouri Valley. And there's only one MVC team in the tournament. What happen to the good old days of just a few years back, when THREE MVC teams were on the brackets?

Things change. Alas.

At any rate, I'll be routing for my two teams. And that's really all the bracketing that I do.

A return? Or a last hurrah?

My blogging guru has been posting like a fiend over the last few days.

Maybe that will prompt me to begin posting, too.

Back in the day, he helped me with words of wisdom like, Imagine you're writing on a post-it note. Or, establish a rhythm.

And now he's modeling it once again.

So maybe, just maybe. There could be hope for me.

Autumnally turned

A couple of days ago I wrote an entry in response to a tag. And then there was some malfunction with the blog, and it completely disappeared. I don't feel inclined to recreate it. Instead, I'm offering a poem, because I'm currently undergoing a Rilke revival. Back when I was doing the MFA, Rilke was all the rage. So I bought books of Rilke, and, while I liked them well enough, they seemed heavy and sometimes hard to understand. Now I think I just wasn't ready for Rilke when I was 23. In fact, I ended up selling some of the books, but I kept two: Letters to a Young Poet, a book of prose that has one of my favorite lines in the world, the admonishment to "live the questions," and also a selection of poems edited by Stephen Mitchell. I've been dipping into the poems here and there lately, and finding them all wonderful. Here's one I read today, entitled, appropriate for the season, "Autumn Day":

Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,
and on the meadows let the wind go free.

Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine;
grant them a few more warm transparent days,
urge them on to fulfillment then, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander on the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.

I love the way the poem moves from a pastoral scene, with the wind on the meadows, and then moves to the flaneur, wandering, restless, among fallen leaves.

Technology is not one

JBJ over at The Salt Box offers a nice little reminder that no one technology is "the" answer. Rather, they're all tools, yeah? Technologies of possibility. Technes. Rhetorical. An excerpt:

Anyway, all of this is to say that if you give me a goal, I can tell you why I prefer one form to another. I prefer wikis to blogs for my class notes assignment, for instance, because that assignment focuses on the public, shared work of the class. The collaborative nature of wikis is good for that. In cases where I want students to develop, over the course of a period of time (a month, a semester), a perspective on a topic, or when I want them to roleplay in an interpretative game–well, a blog sounds better for those tasks, since it’s probably going to be organized chronologically. But I cannot tell you, abstractly, why one tool is always better than another.

Now that Bloglines decided the other day that it was time to clean out my feeds, I'm keeping up a little better with my subscriptions. So now maybe that will feed (yes, riffing off yellow dog) my blogging again. Goal: blog more frequently. Tool: RSS feeds.