Oh happy day! One Story was in the mailbox waiting for me.

Had beer and fries with MP today and discussed the future of the press. Now I have lots of energy and excitement. Having a potential collaborator is invigorating.

I finally got tagged for the “five songs” meme, which had been floating around the poetry blogosphere for days. I was pretty sure I did this when it was in the improv blogosphere, and sure enough, searching the old blog for “five songs” turned up an entry from July 2005. I think, at that time, the meme was more geared towards “stuff you’re enjoying right now.” Here were my answers then:

• The Comas, “Dirty South”
• The Decemberists, “The Bachelor and the Bride”
• Metric, “IOU”
• Son Volt, “Drown”
• Ben Lee, “Ache for You”

The current seems to flip back and forth between your five currently-digging songs and five songs that had significant impact or rocked you hard in some way. I’ll explore the latter this time around:

• XTC, “Dear God”
• Jane’s Addiction, “…Then She Did”
• Cold War Kids, “We Used to Vacation”
• Ben Folds Five, “Mess”
• Sarah Harmer, “Lodestar”

You’re tagged: Daryl, Jessie, Emma, Dan, Chris Fadden the great

I saw in someone else’s blog not too long ago a “poetry mixtape”– a list of several unrelated poems meant to be read in a specific order as a sort of written mix tape. I love the idea. I may have to nab it.

New tinysides are coming soon. That makes me happy.

Copyright law, with respect to K-12 education, is severely broken. I just got an e-mail from a teacher who would like to compose a course that’s made from freely available materials, but how does one put together a broad course using only materials available in the public domain? I think the next step will be writing lots of letters, asking for permission to use this poem and that story. This would not be an issue, except that we want to share the course with other teachers.

Danah Boyd on the death of the English language:

SMS is, of course, taking this to a whole new level. This is pretty
well known outside of the US where SMS-speak has destroyed native
tongues everywhere, but we’re only about a year into massive texting
adoption amongst teens in the States. Now, they’re trying to be
expressive using as few characters as possible. Remember when
secretaries used to learn shorthand? Imagine how fast a teen today
would be at that. Maybe we should train them to be secretaries and give
them phones? Scratch that. But once again, the solution to a
technological limitation is to mess with the English language. Hmm.