For those playing along at home:

Oct 1 – House With Chimaeras
Oct 2 – Expert Advice for Your Flight from Dallas/Fort Worth to Chicago-Midway
Oct 3 – Expert Advice for Your Televangelism Ministry
Oct 4 – While Jobless, I Eat Snack Foods With Famous People
Oct 5 – Bayside
Oct 6 – Shit-Town
Oct 7 – Actaeon
Oct 8 – Box and Whisker Plot
Oct 9 – Falsely Accused of Being a Terrorist
Oct 10 – The Dog in Me
Oct 11 – Dumpstering
Oct 12 – Long Knife Night
Oct 13 – Claudius
Oct 14 – Ghazal Without Repeated Word
Oct 15 – Sick Herd
Oct 16 – Houses On the Street Where It’s Sunny
Oct 17 – Things I Tried to Forget You
Oct 18 – Owner of a Lonely Heart
Oct 19 – Expert Advice for Your Day at the Track
Oct 20 – K-I-S-S-I-N-G
Oct 21 – Christian Radio
Oct 22 – three poems– Lossless Audio, If Only I Could’ve Considered Machu Picchu, There Has Never Been a Famine in a Democratic Country
Oct 23 – The Dog in Me II
Oct 24 – Catbird Sleep
Oct 25 – Neurotic Friend
Oct 26 – It’s Barely Living
Oct 27 – Dinner Party with Co-Workers
Oct 28 – Man, Exploding
Oct 29 – Ocean Quahog
Oct 30 – Penalty Minutes
Oct 31 – Halloween
Nov 1 – Flu Shot
Nov 2 – Idiot Plot
Nov 3 – A History of Deaths in the Colony, Complete to 1656
Nov 4 – Daylight Savings Time
Nov 5 – Birds in the Colony
Nov 6 – People Skills
Nov 7 – Endodontics
Nov 8 – How We Came Upon the Colony
Nov 9 – Spitting Images
Nov 10 – Natural Law Firm
Nov 11 – Teenage Girl in Supermarket Freezer
Nov 12 – Facts About Early America
Nov 13 – Taxidermy and Living Things
Nov 14 – Morning, Beachside
Nov 15 – crappy joke haiku which should have counted as a day off
Nov 16 – Q
Nov 17 – Last We Checked, Alacrity Was No Sin
Nov 18 – Power Suit
Nov 19 – The Dog in Me III
Nov 20 – Getting Things Done
Nov 21 – Turbulent Flight
Nov 22 – Man on Ski Lift Passes Reindeer
Nov 23 – The Oldest Workable Wood
Nov 24 – Back of the Bus
Nov 25 – Mid-Sentence, I Lose the Thought
Nov 26 – Mole Man
Nov 27 – Rosebuds After Romance
Nov 28 – The Devil Made Him a Cat
Nov 29 – day off
Nov 30 – Not If You Were the Last Man on Earth

With one of those rare clear days on my calendar, my priorities in decent shape, and only a few things that were pressing on my to-do list, I shut down e-mail for much of the day and did some writing and editing. But instead of concentrating on poems, as I was sorely tempted to do, I wrote most of a two-part series on social networking for Instructify.

And, as with a day or working on poems, I’m bushed now. To reward myself for my hard work, I hopped over to iTunes and bought Pearl Jam’s cover of The Who’s “Love, Reign O’er Me.” Say what you want about Pearl Jam– Eddie Vedder has some pipes. Fuhrillz.

I’m about to head home from work and write the last poem in my two-month grind. I took last night off– I was allowed four days off in November, and ended up taking only one.

A little birdie tells me that a late change in the Warren Wilson faculty this semester puts Gabrielle Calvocoressi on the faculty.

I was excited about the faculty when it was announced, then a few days ago, I noticed another surprise in the faculty list, now this. I’m so excited I don’t know what to do with myself. Gaby’s classes are incredible. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that she’ll be doing one of the two-hour discussion classes.

Have you seen Reign Over Me? Most of the sniping I heard about this movie revolved around Adam Sandler in a dramatic role, blah blah. What I couldn’t figure out was how anyone could possibly write a script in which a supposedly-competent psychiatrists acts the way Liv Tyler’s character does. Good Lord, Hollywood.

It feels like November has gotten away from me. I was reading through the month’s articles at Instructify and found that I’d written a whole lot less for that than I thought I had. I bought the CLMP submissions manager (built by one of my favorite journals, One Story) for Inch at the beginning of the month, but it’s the 28th and I still don’t have it working. (Wade installed it for me… I just have to configure it.)

With a week of relative inactivity on this blog, it seems like a good time to use the patented Scott Jennings Bullet-Point Update. (A link is provided in every bullet point because Jennings once fussed at me for linking too damn much.)

• I’ve got three poems up at the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature– I have been remiss in not mentioning this earlier, not because my work is superlative, but because poetry editor Helen Losse has worked really hard to find a series of representative Southern voices that’s broad and varied. Jilly Dybka and Jessie Carty are also in this issue, as is Evie Shockley, whose book a half-red sea I just picked up.
• Ladybug and I spent a couple days in Denver for Thanksgiving. On the return flight, I became enthralled by Daniel Wallace’s new novel, Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician. I’m a sucker for novels about magic. I’m a sucker for Daniel Wallace novels. You can see how I might have had trouble putting this book down.
• Looks like UNC’s turn at Festival of the Book is not going to happen. That’s a let-down.
• Worksheets are here for the winter residency at Warren Wilson. I like the anticipation before the residency– reading the faculty introductory statements, making charts and graphs of how much I would pay (over and above the cost of tuition) to work with each faculty member were bribes acceptable, volunteering to be a buddy for a new student, devouring the assigned bookshop reading and then procrastinating on the annotation.
• I’ve crossed over to the dark side for the bookshop this residency– my first choice was Hemingway’s In Our Time. My right side feels all tingly with guilt, since I’m entering my last semester in the program and this is no way to get focused on the task at hand. My left side feels all tingly with glee, hopeful that I’ll get to hear the fictionistas dissect my favorite Hemingway story (or this PDF’ed one, or this one, or”The Battler,” which I can’t easily find online). I’m not planning to devote any significant portion of my life to fiction but this should be a three-day crash course in awesome short fiction, should I ever make new plans.
• I bought a book by Jenny Factor because I liked the author’s name and the cover. I recently reactivated my City of Heroes account to play around for a couple weeks before I go back to school, so the super-hero-ness of the name struck me. As it turns out , the few poems I’ve read so far are quite good. Score!

My buddy John Betz Jr. is a terrific comedian. Now, you have the opportunity to find this out for yourself. He says:

Hey there. I’m in a comedy contest and I’m sending this out to everyone I know. I performed at the HBO Comedy Festival last week in Las Vegas and the final round is judged by online voting. If you had some time, I’d love some votes and some word-of-mouth to others.

Please go to this website: http://ziddio.com/contest.zd?dispatch=landing&contest=53

Register with Ziddio if you haven’t already and then Vote for John Betz. Vote as often as you can! The rules permit multiple votes, all you have to do is close your browser and open it again. I usually open 7-8 windows at a time, vote on each one, close them all and start again. Also FYI, you don’t actually have to watch the video. The voting is two weeks long. From 10am on Wednesday, Nov. 21st to 11:59pm on Tuesday, December 5th. It’ll be a long two weeks, but worth it if I can win.

Vote relentlessly!

Good Lord. It’s officially a circus.

I finally finished David Allen’s Getting Things Done, and he’s right: implementing his system, even if you can only accommodate part of it at present, leads to a surge in energy and creativity almost immediately. (It also leads to a to-do list that creeps well past 50 items, which for some of us was shocking to see on paper.)

Creighton outlines some issues with Cary’s instant runoff elections, and in so doing, shakes my faith in the American voting system and baseball’s MVP voting.

Harry Connick Jr. Trio’s “Lonely Side” just came up on iTunes– for the first time in over two years. It’s funny how the random shuffle will keep tracks from playing for a long time, but it’s always pleasant when you hear a song that you haven’t heard in a long time.

Lofty’s Roach Souffle , which was the one album that Harry Connick Jr. released with his trio, was the soundtrack to Soap, Scents & Seduction, a live, improvised soap opera that I worked on in 1990. Sharon Elder was the guiding force behind the show, which was a ridiculous send-up of the usual tacky soap opera crap, set in a soap factory. I think, for the life of me, I will never forget Helen Hagan saying the line, “Exfoliating scrub? Mr. Johnson, what kind of girl do you think I am?”

Sharon was one of the first people other than Larry Long who believed that I really had a place doing improv. I was a goofy-looking, 15-year-old kid at the time, which I think is all anyone else saw, but Sharon and Larry really bent over backwards to make me feel like I wasn’t wasting my time. She also set me up with a couple of jobs for different things, like taking photos of people in costume at Harnett County’s Project Graduation in 1991.

I’ve tried a number of times over the years to find a jazz trio that sounded anything like that one Connick album. There aren’t a ton of piano-bass-drums albums that I can find, particularly with my unrefined palate for jazz. Pandora didn’t help me much, but that may be due to the fact that I can’t use any of the Lofty’s Roach Souffle songs as a starting point– they’re not listed anywhere, even though a bunch of Connick’s vocal stuff is (not interested).

via LoFro: The Death of E-mail

I may not be ready for e-mail to die. But I think I’ll be ok if it does.

I spent the day at the NC School Library Media Conference, which was held in Winston-Salem, NC. I went to only one session that wasn’t a LEARN function– a session on social networking that was, I think, too advanced for beginners, too beginner for the advanced, and strongly focused on the technology rather than what we should be doing with it. (But, despite the fact that I know that sell was a little too hard, and I’m not convinced that the uses are even remotely worthwhile, I went ahead and set up a Twitter account during the session, and have Twittered a couple of times today. I swore I would not use a website with such a stupid name.)

When I got back into Chapel Hill, I headed to Linda’s for a blowout, where I showed Iron Scav pictures and just generally made merry for several hours. While I would normally have used the blowout to act the fool, I was quite tame. Stupid cold. I was very well-behaved. I met Team FAT’s Toilet Paper Mummy.

Waiting for me at home was the letter I’d been hoping for all week– the summary of my degree essay from my supervisor and my second reader. In his summary, Pete used a term that struck me as particularly insightful– and I wish I thought to use it in the essay: “deceptive motion.”

My second reader was who I thought it would be. Total hunch. Maybe I should say that’s who I hoped it would be.

Tomorrow, I sit down to write my semester evaluation. Once again, Warren Wilson has provided me with an academic challenge unlike anything I’d ever experienced before, and I’m so thankful for it.

The germs failed to comply.

I took advantage of the time to sleep, eat, and write poem #45. I think I have run out of words. I’m planning to take tomorrow off.

I’ve doubled up on the Vitamin C and been sucking the life out of zinc lozenge after zinc lozenge, to the point where I believe I may no longer be all man: I am part mineral. We will see if it does me any good. Tonight will be the deciding night, the night where the tickle and drip will keep me from sleeping or I’ll wake after 8 solid hours, free of a cold. I have Friday off, so I’d really like to not be sick until at least then. Please, germs: comply.

The daily grind in November has been much less stressful, and I think (hope) that I’m getting better work as a result. I’m less bothered by the poor poems that I’ve turned in, and less inclined to torture myself for an idea. Last night, I simply opened Miroslav Holub’s Supposed to Fly every time I got stuck and looked for a word to use next. The right word appeared immediately the first few times, and then less often, and it was then that I knew the mind had taken some ownership of what the fingers were sending onto the screen. I merely had to question what that ownership was, and why it had been taken. I was not totally satisfied with the answer, but I believe I will find it more fully in revision.

For those keeping score at home:
Nov 1 – Flu Shot
Nov 2 – Idiot Plot
Nov 3 – A History of Deaths in the Colony, Complete to 1656
Nov 4 – Daylight Savings Time
Nov 5 – Birds in the Colony
Nov 6 – People Skills
Nov 7 – Endodontics
Nov 8 – How We Came Upon the Colony
Nov 9 – Spitting Images
Nov 10 – Natural Law Firm
Nov 11 – Teenage Girl in Supermarket Freezer
Nov 12 – Facts About Early America
Nov 13 – Taxidermy and Living Things

Further proof that you should stay off the waterways if you value your life: my buddy John Thompson just landed a 19-foot fishing boat, which he’ll be captaining around.

Words without poems: I have been limiting the number of unnecessary inputs of late, but two that have my attention are Scrabulous for Facebook and Wordie. Scrabulous is a fine application that allows Anthony King and Lee Creighton to absolutely pulverize me in Scrabble at the rate of one or two turns a day, leaving me doubting that I have the vocabulary necessary to be a decent poet. Wordie is a site that Rosalynde Vas Dias turned me on to, which allows me to find new ways to attempt to punish them back, if I have the right tiles…

Iron Scav 10 was a rousing success… with only one minor complication. Team What the Junk won by a tight margin against Team Don’t Tase Me Bro, who took home the trophy for most immoral picture. Team FAT took the honors for best pic, which was Marielle in a freezer, an astonishing shot…

Continuing my push towards the perfect inbox, I have gone ahead and arranged GTD folders for my personal e-mail account. And my Gmail account now has IMAP, so I’m finally bringing that into Thunderbird. Will the wonders never cease?

(Answer: no.)

I don’t mind rejection letters– they’re part of the game as a writer. But this one, received from an online publication that’s had a stack of poems since March, irritated me some.

To: ross@—-.—
From: editors@——.—
Subject: RE: Ross White submission

William,

Thanks for sharing your poems with name removed. We’re sorry to report that they’re not quite right for us. Best of luck placing them elsewhere.

Sincerely,
The Editors

Below was the text of my original message, which included a signature and a short bio, each of which also had my name.

William? WTF?

My less-than-firm resolution to blog at least a little every day hasn’t held up, but my poem-a-day grind, begun on October 1, is still going strong. Recently, I’ve been noodling with James Tate-esque mini-narratives, and will probably continue that at least for a little while, except on days when I’m really pressed for time. Unsurprisingly, the first involved animal-people.

For those keeping score at home:
Nov 1 – Flu Shot
Nov 2 – Idiot Plot
Nov 3 – A History of Deaths in the Colony, Complete to 1656
Nov 4 – Daylight Savings Time
Nov 5 – Birds in the Colony
Nov 6 – People Skills
Nov 7 – Endodontics