COROT-7b

There is a recently-discovered planet
permanently oriented to its star:
on its near side, rock boils. The far side is near
absolute cold. It's not a matter of choice:
I will not turn.

Digging Yourself Deeper [revised]

It's surprisingly difficult
digging yourself in deeper;
bigger holes
require serious effort.
Rocks figure increasingly.
Rendering edges steeper
becomes onerous.
Dirt collapses inward
past measure.
Water spurts
from opened fissures.
The shovel hits treasure.
Passing six feet under
is no easy undertaking;
earth hardens
past the depth of gardens,
remaining unforsaking,
holding us
at its barrier:
the hole
in every failure.

Museum Of Answers

Please Do Not Touch
reads the placard
beneath a canvas
wholly lacquered

in black acrylic,
Why there's evil,
which captivates
most people—

save a child
by the drinking faucet
trying vainly
to exhaust it.

I'm Not Ashamed

Answer the Following Questions using only the song titles from one artist.

Pick your Artist: Newsboys

Are you a male or female?: Forever Man / Simple Man

Describe yourself: Everyone's Someone / Who?

How do you feel: Gonna Be Alright / Sing Aloud

Describe where you currently live: Strong Tower / Belly of the Whale

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: Secret Kingdom / City to City

Your favorite form of transportation: The Tide / Hold On Tight

Your best friend is: Listen for the Shout / When the Boys Light Up

You and your best friends are: We Come Together / Where You Belong

What's the weather like: Taste and See / Shine

Favorite time of day: Last One Turns the Lights Out / Breakfast

If your life was a TV show, what would it be called: This Is Your Life / It Is You

What is life to you: Something Beautiful / Real Good Thing

Your last relationship: The Way We Roll / Lord (I Don't Know)

Your fear: Dear Shame / The Orphan

What is the best advice you have to give: Choose Life / Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus

Thought for the Day: Be Still / Sing Aloud

How I would like to die: One Shot / Truth Be Known, Everybody Gets a Shot

My soul's present condition: Way Beyond Myself / Spirit Thing

Most Faithful Companion: Reality / My Friend Jesus

My motto: Love, Liberty, Disco / Woohoo

15 Books

These are fifteen books that have "rocked my world." I take that to mean books that changed my living and thinking or marked out a new path. I don't take that to mean books I'm only proud to have read, or books I aspire to like or to be changed by. I also tried to make the list in fifteen minutes. The list is ordered chronologically by my first contact with them, beginning the summer before college. I include brief, fairly non-specific descriptions of the respective encounters.


1. Selected Poems (Robert Frost)
First book of poetry I read, and it connected with me.

2. In the Palm of Your Hand (Steve Kowit)
Bought because of the previous; insight into poetry, drive to write it (starting a year after I read the book).

3. God's Passion for His Glory (John Piper & Jonathan Edwards)
Includes Jonathan Edwards' essay "The End For Which God Created The World," the first text of any difficulty I ever tried to read deeply. It made me want to challenge my mind. Along with Piper's Desiring God a year or so earlier, it also re-energized my spiritual seeking at that time.

4. Blue Like Jazz (Donald Miller)
Freshness that reinvigorated my faith.

5. Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (Douglas Hofstadter)
Still perhaps the most interesting book I've read; with its structural, linguistic, and logical play as well as its wide-ranging subject matter (and connections and analogies therein), it felt like it was designed just for me. It gave me a sense of awe and intellectual curiosity that I needed and have carried since. It's also influenced my ideas about life, God, the universe, and everything.

6. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
The first (and perhaps only) real magnum opus I ever read. Some of the ideas and themes have stuck with me: "In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. ... And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal."

7. Franny and Zooey (J. D. Salinger)
In many ways the beginning of a literary, ideological, and spiritual journey that I'm still on. When I first read this in the fall of sophomore year, I knew my life was about to change, possibly for the worse, possibly for the better, possibly both; and here I am.

8. The Essential Haiku (Bashō, Buson, Issa)
If imitation is truly the sincerest form of flattery, I hope my praise of these writers (and Simic and Ryan, later on the list) is well-received. I didn't know words could do this.

9. A Generous Orthodoxy (Brian McLaren)
A significant fort along that spiritual journey; my first formal contact with emerging Christianity, which I'm still trying to discover and, even more difficult, articulate. It's hard to remember the kind of spiritual fatigue I was feeling before I came in touch with this book and others like it, but more importantly with the people and communities I know who bring it to life, whether they realize it or not.

10. The Voice at 3:00 AM (Charles Simic)
My first encounter with Simic, my first major poetic idol. I ended up buying twenty of his books (reading most of them) and again relearning what words do, what words are.

11. Silence (John Cage)
I wrote a paper about "The Philosophical Writings of John Cage" sophomore year for my 20th Century Music class. It ended up paving the way to a major change (a change of major) in my academic path.

12. Jesus and the Victory of God (N. T. Wright)
I first encountered these ideas in The Challenge of Jesus, and maybe before that in The Secret Message of Jesus (McLaren), but combined with some other related influences, Christianity hasn't looked the same to me since. This is also the first serious work of theology/scholarship I've read, although I'm only halfway through to date.

13. You Must Change Your Life (John Lysaker)
A book about the philosophy of and in Charles Simic's poetry. This was my first formal exposure to serious (post-18th century) philosophy as well as another major contributor to my switch to Interdisciplinary Studies.

14. The Niagara River (Kay Ryan)
Poems with love and hope in them. That makes them sound sappy, but far from it; real hope can never be sappy. Those things aren't as visible in Simic, and the wordplay, wit, and depth in these poems is still tricky not to mime.

15. The Call and the Response (Jean-Louis Chrétien)
This book is representative of my contact with postmodern philosophy during my spring semester Junior year: namely, more intellectually and spiritually challenging than anything else I've read. Other books just seem boring in comparison. I choose Chrétien in particular for eliciting the highest concentration of marginal asterisks and "!"s, and because his work will play a significant part in my interdisciplinary thesis as well as, hopefully, my artmaking, spirituality, and living.

Double Dactyl #2

for M. H.

Wavicle Gravicle
Erwin R. Schrödinger
Quantum entangled his
Cat to Life Five.

Uncertain whereabouts.
Currently wanted for
Superpositioning,
Dead and alive.

Double Dactyl

Piggily Wiggily
Old J. D. Salinger's
Radio silence makes
Publishers balk:

Why can't he be a good
Vivekanandian?
See the bananafish;
All else is talk.

ants crawl through

ants crawl through

his name—

my father's grave

father's grave

father's grave—

ant climbs out

to my hand

lying down

lying down
between storms
snow angel

kneeling by lilies

kneeling by lilies
bending
toward sunlight

Digging Yourself Deeper

It's surprisingly
difficult digging
yourself deeper;
bigger holes
require serious
effort. Rocks
figure increasingly.
Rendering edges
steeper becomes
onerous. Water
spurts from
fissures. Dirt
collapses inward.
The shovel
hits upon treasure.
We imagine
six feet under
fast affords us,
but earth hardens
past the depth
of gardens.
It marks
a lasting barrier,
the hole
in every failure.

The Late Bird

Pecking
regardless, he
seeks what can't
await. He checks
his hardest. The
order of patience
he demonstrates
is unique. Is
it outrageous
to hope the first
was careless?
Is it ungracious
to guess she kept
head only
and the rest
squirms on
unknowing, when
this requires
showing? What's
as yet unseen
is left alone
extremely rarely
by those who need
it dearly. They
ever search
beneath, beyond
their reach, where
their worm
does not die, not
surely. They're
caught short
early.

Subterranean Forces

Deep in the heart of the earth

There is a chapel

Where someone prays

Day and night

That things be corrected.

Somehow

The world turns and turns

And we barely notice

The slight upward tug

This generates.

I still can't cut it [draft]

I still can't cut it
as straight—
inherited lawnmower

Mom warming mine

Mom warming mine
as her own plate
goes cold

crowded shelf

crowded shelf—
              the book
                     stuck

Bedroom Pictures

I have four reproductions of paintings in my room:

• Picasso's Guernica
• Michelangelo's Creation of Adam
• Picasso's Old Guitarist
• A portrait of Albert Einstein

In the last semester I debated whether the gruesomeness of Guernica is really something I want to hold near, see when I rise and retire, etc.  I think it works, though, in conjunction with the others:

     the suffering of humanity 

  + the verge of coming to life
  + the suffering of art
  + the ending of a life devoted to humanity and art
  = my four walls.  

[Edit: just noticed that bedroom, boredom, and broomed contain the same letters - apparently wordplay mode takes over after midnight]

lonely red flower [variant]

     lonely red flower
picked
     by the red-haired girl

Pardon (I'm Sorry)?: On the Just Said

One always writes in order to confess, to ask forgiveness.

— Jacques Derrida

It seems as though, when you write, you are asking forgiveness for a number of different things:

• For presuming to speak and thus to presume you have something worth saying as well as to impose labels and meanings on others by what you describe; for requesting that others sacrifice their own time and meanings for the sake of yours, and that they sacrifice this particular opportunity for them to speak in order to listen to you instead.  You are also asking forgiveness for those who do spend (and possibly waste) their time reading what you have said, and those who may come to believe or live what you have said in all its shortcomings.
• For your life; by trying to make sense of your life and world and communicating that to others, you are seeking to justify yourself.  You may also be asking forgiveness for the selfishness of this process of self-justification.  We all face death and feel we need to "have something to say for ourselves"; that could fall under this category.  Additionally, in the sense of memes and cultural evolution, you are apologizing for your life by trying to pass your ideas to others and to future generations; you are hoping to make restitution for yourself by planting these seeds, and again you are presuming that the seeds are more worth receiving than certain mutually exclusive words written by others.
• For offering forgiveness to others within one's writing (as well as to one's own culture and world or others foreign, past, or future).  To grant forgiveness, you must also ask forgiveness for granting it imperfectly and incompletely; forgiveness is always in process.  This is necessary even if your writing only says, "Then neither do I condemn you.  Now go, and sin no more."  You are asking forgiveness for offering it where you shouldn't or can't or won't as well as for where you haven't offered it but should have.
• For sacrificing all the other things worth saying to the particular thing you do choose to say in that moment.  Anything you write is implicitly an apology to everything else, which is denied an opportunity to come into being and to be said; other truths and phrases are put to death.  Also for choosing this moment to say what you say rather than another; i.e. for not having said it before, and for not waiting until later.  Also for sacrificing all other activities you could have partaken in; thus, sacrificing friends, third-world orphans, and other noble causes to the words you write by giving time and energy that could have been directed elsewhere to your writing.  Kierkegaard says, "The moment of decision is madness"; you must ask forgiveness for that madness.
• For being unaware of the many dimensions in which you transgress, including the above; thus, for not being aware that you are asking forgiveness and thus imposing on those who could possibly offer it without you realizing that you do so.
• For what you write being always and forever incomplete and in many ways unloving.

It's a little like offering condolence to someone.  Anything you would choose to say is the wrong thing to say—a stale platitude, an attempt at humor, trying to distract the one in grief or pain by talking about something else or about yourself, sharing an "insight" into the situation (which you cannot possibly feel or think about in the same way as the person to whom you speak) with the intent of offering comfort; but it is also wrong to say nothing, and to do so would perhaps be saying something about the situation as well.  To avoid guilt is impossible; we are always asking forgiveness.

This isn't to say that we don't also do good things, and that there isn't something redeeming in the things we do choose to say or write.  We are, however, obligated to others to extend the same kinds of forgiveness we ask for and to be at least as gracious as we are grateful.  "Forgive us our trespasses, as we also forgive those who trespass against us."  We trespass in that we (presume to) forgive, and we forgive in that we (presume to) trespass (by being willing to incur the guilt involved in offering forgiveness and in all the aforementioned ways of writing, in which we ask to forgive).

I say all of this because (in addition to the aforementioned reasons) I am going to try to blog more this summer.  A few reasons I'd like to do this (who doesn't love bullet points?):

• A few friends are trying to get back on the blogging track, and I'd like the shared experience and solidarity as well as to encourage them to do it, be encouraged to do it myself, and to partially justify my benefiting from their venturing to say things by being willing to do so myself.
• I'd like to do a better job remembering and synthesizing what I read; hopefully part of this blog will include summaries or reflections on things I read, and I may also write some formal reviews to be posted elsewhere.  In general, I think maybe I should seek more balance in my proportion of reading versus responding.
• I think it's worthwhile to try to present my thoughts before at least an imagined audience rather than simply in my head or in a personal journal . . . in some ways it's almost cheating to write only for myself in that I can make certain leaps and assumptions that I really ought to examine and consider.  It's like talking to someone who will always agree with you; you aren't being held accountable for what you think.  With an imagined audience, I can't always assume they want to hear what I want to say, or that they want to hear me out.  I don't really like to argue, but I do like to explain, and I think blogging could encourage me to do that.  Audiences also bring out certain kinds of things to say and ways of saying them that wouldn't occur to me if I wrote in a private journal: humor, transitions, vocabulary choices . . . inspiration is always at the mercy of conditions, restrictions, and circumstances; I think of things because they're apropos, so I need to put myself in certain situations if I want to get certain results from myself.
• If I really believe the things I am reading are worth reading or that some of my thoughts are worth thinking and preserving, I will probably believe it's worthwhile for other people to hear them and interact with them as well; blogging is one way to answer to what I've read inasmuch as it calls me to share it with others.  It's like how part of the Gospel call is to share the Gospel; I'm hearing the call singly, but it's calling to many (to all), and I'm responsible to answer for the other potential hearers inasmuch as I've heard that call (which calls to many).  This isn't only true of the Gospel, but of anything beautiful.  There's a lot more to say here, and when I get to blogging about Jean-Louis Chrétien's The Call And The Response I'll try to say more.
• Also, knowing I may end up writing about something I'm reading causes me to read it differently.  It certainly did this past semester when I knew I'd be writing philosophy papers to read aloud to my class; I'd like to retain something of that level of attention in myself.
• Writing can, of course, be just for fun, a creative outlet to blow off steam.  I'll be helping Freddy manage his blog (and Facebook and Twitter) this summer, too; sometimes he insists on typing his own entries, but other times he would prefer not to bother with the menial aspects of maintaining a blog (all the more menial since he doesn't have fingers).  Both of us might be writing for The Poptimist soon, too, so keep an eye out.

Enough!  Away with thee!  There's living to be done!  For a heads-up, though, I'm currently reading Graham Greene's The Quiet American (which I might let slide by without much public comment, although I'm enjoying it; sometimes it's better to pleasure-read without the pressure of having to say anything about it, but I may decide to later) and will soon be reading Peter Rollins' How (Not) To Speak of God and, when I can find a copy, Jesse Ball's The Way Through Doors.

This has been pleasant and professional.  Good luck in the coming business year.

fallen petals

     fallen petals
caught
     in my typewriter

kettle hissing

     kettle hissing
just as the kitten
     passes

First Picture

out of myth
strange beast

features scribbled green
with alien shape

out of pleasure motion verve
no thought of erasure

alone to the four corners of the paper
easily rustled easily bent

its face a smile

mounted admiringly with fridge magnets
long ago

long since removed
lost forgotten

others too
piled back to back

pressed against the whiteness of pages
frozen in it

many upon many
an ice age of them filed away

tonight in the stove it burns

after years a thaw
yet the ice does not melt

Rorschach In Reverse: Cha[r]les Simic's Selected Early Poems

by Daniel Leonard

Watermelons

Green Buddhas
On the fruit stand.
We eat the smile
And spit out the teeth.

     "I once sat for hours signing my name before I realized I'd been misspelling it," Charles Simic told me before handing back my copy of The World Doesn't End. I have acquired twenty of his books in the year since because such moments saturate them: the times we stare at a word long enough to rob it of sense, the one or two mornings a year when the mirror takes us by surprise. In them our account of the world shows its seams, and we realize it has always been past explanation. Things are only familiar in the way of family: we are among them, we are of them, we are in need of them. The everyday remains strange in ways we cannot place.
     Charles Simic is a self-proclaimed insomniac: "The hurricane century tossed my bed around." Raised as Dušan Simić in war-torn Belgrade during World War II, he managed to escape bombings and military strikes, but not without witnessing the requisite atrocities: "My travel agents were Hitler and Stalin." He only began to learn English at age fifteen, and moved with his family a year later to New York City. Simic quickly acquainted himself with the sights and syllables of America (with an outsider's insight into both), but continued to speak in his native Serbian tongue of riddle, myth, and legend, and to think in cruelties and the inscrutable. This sensibility earned him a MacArthur Fellowship, a Pulitzer, and the US Poet Laureateship: "Have I been made the official match vendor / Of the great dark night of the soul?"
     In Simic's view, we are tirelessly subject to apparent meaninglessness, “History practicing its scissor-clips / in the dark”. But how does one move beyond chaos? Start from a beginning. In Richard Howard's introduction to Dismantling The Silence, he writes, "When we speak of writing as original, as I am bound and determined to do in speaking of Charles Simic's writing at all, we mean that it has to do with something very old, not something very new—it has to do with origins, beginnings, sources." In his oeuvre Simic follows an evolutionary timeline: stones, wind, and grass populate his first poems, followed by dogs and mice, and eventually people. A handful of these early works are "object poems," inkblot tests in reverse in which the commonplace sheds its intimacy and suggests something alien and uncategorizable:

Fork

This strange thing must have crept
Right out of hell.
It resembles a bird’s foot
Worn around the cannibal’s neck.

As you hold it in your hand,
As you stab with it into a piece of meat,
It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:
Its head which like your fist
Is large, bald, beakless, and blind.

     In later poems, ordinary images and tropes come in contact with one another, forming "tribes"; here it is the interplay which baffles. Simic compares these to Joseph Cornell's sculptures, three-dimensional collages of found objects arranged in boxes. The displays have an effect Simic calls "dime-store alchemy," a fitting description of his own work. What we call ordinary, we have ordered according to our contexts and purposes, but seen differently by way of juxtaposition it can subvert our usual thinking, even creep us out. One could criticize Simic's more recent work as formulaic, many versions of the same unsettling poem, but only as a side effect common to many artists who find a path and follow where it leads. As for his early volumes, they consistently surprise because they remain in search of a stride and can only look to themselves for advice.
     "Poetry is an orphan of silence," Simic says. By some miracle one escapes from speechlessness, suddenly finding words. They come out of nowhere, but cannot go back: their tracks are covered. Though they arrive ex nihilo, this very act destroys nihilo, the preceding void. Ask anything about this prior state, and you disable an answer; one backward glance, and home becomes a pillar of salt. Simic's poems watch themselves happen in an attempt to recapture through reflexivity the breath one loses by saying a word, the whiteness of the page that literally underwrites every scribbled glyph that covers it. It is the sound of one writing implement clapping, to mix a metaphor, and this self-consciousness lets a poem not only alter one's view of a particular subject—say, the possibility of love, or what to think about a war—but reconstitute one's sense of sense, that which colors all, the way in which one "chew[s] on the bitter verb / 'To be'."
     If this phenomenological attitude toward poetry intrigues you, John Lysaker's book You Must Change Your Life: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Birth of Sense explores the way Charles Simic realizes Martin Heidegger's poetic ideals. It is perhaps better exemplified than explained; for this, look to the poem White (followed by What The White Had To Say) in Selected. It is the only long poem I have ever endeavored to memorize (I made it about halfway), and according to Lysaker it is "part and parcel of every Simic poem." It and the rest beg to be internalized, or rather entered; they will not let you out unscathed. I can testify to this, having spent many hours reading them aloud, taking them in by breathing them out. I have even set a few to music (most recently Stone) in an effort to hear them differently, to gain intimacy with the poems and ultimately with my own life, to learn to spell my name, to "go inside a stone":

[...] perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill—
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.

February 7, 2009

It is SUCH a nice day.

Clerihews

Barack Obama,
an Oxford comma:
some prefer, some attack,
plus it’s black.

---

Joe Biden
needn't widen.
Cheney post-campaign?
Skip that train.

---

John McCain
ended up in the drain.
Don’t know where he went wrong—
fundamentals are strong.

---

Sarah Palin
beat the nail in,
glad to shelve
‘til 2012.

---

George Walker Bush
is out on his tush.
Hope it won’t throb
when he can’t find a job.

Reading Railroad

Holler.  It's a new year--did you notice?  Something in the air.  I'm packing my things up for Wheaton right now, and I figured this would be a good time to put a list of the books I received for Christmas before they get mixed in with all the others.  A few other noteworthy presents: a subscription to Paste Magazine (from Laura), a subscription to Poetry Magazine (from my mom), a nice cardigan sweater, sweatervest, two t-shirts, and two nice pairs of socks (Mom), nice gloves (Mom and Katie, separately), Wall-E DVD (Mom), Bill Evans DVD (Mom).

A neat addition to our Christmastivities this year: my mom decided to participate in the "spend less, give more" attitude Life Church is propagating by spending less on our gifts and letting us choose charities and worthy causes to give to instead.  I hope this is more in line with the true meaning of Christmas than Freddy's idea that "baby Jesus got nice presents and we are supposed to be like him."

Anyway, the books (many of which I found online used or cheap, hence the quantity):

Simply Christian (N. T. Wright) - (read) The best general-consumption book about Christianity I've read in a long time, maybe ever.  It's unfortunate that the people who would benefit most from this (everyone) probably won't read it.  I think it surpasses Mere Christianity as an explanation of the overall story of Christian faith, particularly to those living in a postmodern culture.  I can't say enough good things about it overall, and would gladly lend it to anyone who'll be at Wheaton this semester.  I'm hoping to keep it off my shelf.

Outliers: The Story of Success (Malcolm Gladwell) - (given by Laura) (read) A really interesting account to place side-by-side Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book Creativity, as it creates a broader picture of success that includes not only personal characteristics but systemic aspects, heritage, opportunities, etc.  This was a quick read, and many of the ideas and anecdotes are still on my mind.  Two of my friends got this for Christmas as well, so I'm looking forward to discussing it further and figuring out how it's relevant to my own life.

Say Uncle (Kay Ryan) - (read twice, flipped through many times) A great book of poems.  I find myself drawn deeper every time I read them, which is a good sign.  How can her approach be so original/unique and so compelling at the same time?

Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language (Douglas R. Hofstadter) - (about 1/4 read) From the author of Godel Escher Bach, a book about poetry and the idea of 'translation' as it ties into intelligence and human connectedness.  He is a nerd's nerd, and this is right down my alley; the title alone is a pun about five times over.  My honeymoon is over with him, though: he doesn't understand contemporary poetry, music, or philosophy, and seems a bit more opinionated and hypocritical than I remembered.  Regardless, he gives me plenty to think about, and sometimes you pay better attention when you're looking for an argument.  He makes me want to learn French at the least, and apply myself more generally and passionately to intellectual tasks.

Homage to the Lame Wolf (Vasko Popa/tr. Charles Simic) - A book of poems by one of Simic's favorite poets, translated by the man himself.  I've only read a little of it, but it seems meditative--images that come together and mean not necessarily after lots of "piecing together", but after much reflection.

The Horse Has Six Legs: An Anthology of Serbian Poetry (ed. & tr. Charles Simic) - Again, learning from the master how he master learned.  These are poems with teeth.

Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell (Charles Simic) - Simic sees himself as the poet arranging found objects in little boxes.  A good follow-up to my ekphrastics class, and possibly a good complement to Art Survey this semester.  I probably wouldn't have bought this one on my own, at least not for a while; Merry Christmas to me!

Orphan Factory: Essays and Memoirs; Hotel Insomnia; A Wedding in Hell; Night Picnic (Charles Simic) - Filling out my collection.

Free Verse: An Essay On Prosody (Charles O. Hartman) - an explication, analysis, and legitimization of the tradition of free verse poetry.  Recommended by Charles Simic.  Douglas Hofstadter needs to read this (as do I; I think it could help with my IDS project).

Elephant Rocks (Kay Ryan) - These are poems that give you the feeling that they are good poems.  Simic's are more deeply philosophical and reflexive than sonically playful and overtly abstract.  Kay's are also more openly empathic, encouraging, and hopeful, at least sometimes.  Maybe a cross between Simic and Miranda July?  KR & CS are good poet-parents for me right now.

New Selected Poems (Mark Strand) - I kept picking up his books in the bookstore and getting floored, but not getting to know him in private.  Now I have the chance.

The Harmony of Bill Evans (Jack Reilly) - A collection of articles analyzing Bill Evans' compositions.  From the back cover: "Evans's compositions must be studied and played.  They are rich and full of wondrous invention and genius.  I get much pleasure from playing Chopin, Brahms, et. al. [sic]  From Evans, I get a great deal more.  His music is a synthesis of all western classical music plus the many years of jazz.  He is America's Chopin."  He's some kind of something, that's for sure.

New Years Resolution #31: Read these.

New Years Resolution #32: Still manage to apply yourself and be devoted to every class, especially the philosophy ones.

New Years Resolution #33: Learn to fly.

New Years Resolution #33A: Not on US Airways.