Here’s a short list of things I really enjoy:

• T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
• American people faking British accents
• Portishead’s “Sour Times”

So why should this be so annoying?  Maybe it’s because it’s eight-and-a-half minutes of the loop from “Sour Times.”  Eight-and-a-half minutes!

Look, I applaud almost any mashup that incorporates good poems.  But, in a cruel and bizarre twist of fate, this one increased my appreciation of the Eliot for about 45 seconds, and then I became so annoyed at the loop that I actually started thinking, “Oh my God, if I never hear ‘Sour Times’ again, that will be OK by me.”  Is there such a thing as a mashdown?  You know, a mashup attempt that not only fails to do anything really new, but also makes you wonder why you ever liked the work it’s derived from in the first place?

I am now at home, hanging out on the couch while I run one last load of laundry.  I was planning to read some this weekend, but I find when I get buried in a book that I don’t really want to put it down for housework, so instead, I have started John Adams.  I must say that I am enjoying it, but I doubt seriously that this is how things went down.  I’ve seen 1776, so I know that the founding fathers broke into song pretty frequently, and I don’t think I have heard John Adams sing a thing in this.  (I am, however, impressed with the casting, because Paul Giamatti does bear a reasonable likeness.)

So what was the deal with all those wigs?  And seriously, what on Earth is the deal with monarchies?  All that bowing and curtsying and just general ceremony.  Ick.

For the second Sunday in a row, it’s raining like mad, hard enough that there’s been some flash flooding.  Why it should be that we have these hot, muggy weeks and then these unmercifully wet Sunday nights, dumping down water just in time to make the start of the week even more oppressively muggy…

I can barely believe that school starts Thursday, or that I am so prepared for it that I do not need to do anything else but pack.  My class has only, what, 4 Star Trek references?  I thought that was pretty restrained.

I find it charming when rappers feel compelled to say what year it is in their songs.  I don’t know if this is happening as much any more.  But when you’re listening to BDP or De La Soul, and they get all haughty about how fresh they are in 1988, it’s kind of funny.  And cute.  You wonder if they continue to tour, repeating the original dates when they get to that part of the song, looking out at the crowd to see if they go crazy for 1991.

I wish I was a rapper.  I’d do that.

I am a crazy-deliberate Scrabulous player, which does not show in the words I play, since I so often lay down “WO” or “ET.”  But I have been playing uber-slow games with people for the past couple months, and in the last two weeks, I have started playing a little more… I’m about back at the level I was when I first got interested in it.  Today around 5, I decided that I’d kill the pre-dinner hour with some live games, so I used the “host a table” feature for the first time and started playing some strangers.  I’m holding my own in one and doing pretty well in the other, which is a suprise because I have given myself no more than two minutes per turn.  Both opponents have now gone offline, within five minutes of each other, so I’ll probably have to drag these games out along with some of the other games I have going.

I have a great affinity for words but Scrabulous no longer seems much like a word game to me, though occasionally my vocabulary expands as a result of an ambitious arrangement of tiles that just happens to work.  But the electronic game does not, unless you play challenge mode (which bores me), force you to know the words, only to be willing to experiment with tiles until something works.  So it’s a math game that sometimes yields neat words.  Why I should find myself more excited about the game now that I have come to this realization is beyond me.  Logically, I should find it more boring than ever.

I just started my tenth concurrent game, which is my absolute max, so I probably won’t take any more on.  I’m hoping that I can finish some of these before I head to school, because once there, I will not play a lick.

A friend sent me The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which will be my nighttime entertainment this weekend.  I do not expect to read more than 40-60 pages before I head to school, but I’m told that the book is so good I’ll be envious, so perhaps…

Took a “writing” day yesterday to work on developing my graduating class, but ended up using it to complete my preparation for thesis interviews.  I now have two manuscripts entirely marked up, one in more detail than just about anything I have ever marked up, and one at a comfortable level.  (The comfortable one is a friend, and hell, we’ve already talked about the manuscript… so I hardly know what to say in the interview, though given the fact that I actually get smarter in the proximity of the smart people at Warren Wilson, I am sure I’ll say something useful to the author.)

After finishing up, I started re-reading a novel that I really enjoyed in middle school, and am surprised at how, though I did not remember any of it when I started, I now recall quite a bit of it now that I have seen the name of the wacky occultist: Samuel Klugarsh.  A good name in a story will stay with a reader for a long, long time in the deepest pockets of the subconscious.  I was feeling guilty about the fact that I haven’t read a book of poems in two weeks, then realized that I have, they just aren’t bound yet.

I am eating half a Pizzone for breakfast.

Long talks this afternoon with two distant friends.  A short talk this afternoon with the wife, who will not, as it turns out, be going to the Turkish mudbaths.

Friends rule.  But let’s be honest, if it weren’t for them, I would have been writing in my blog for the last half hour.  Boo, friends!

I’m off to run trivia and perhaps compose hilrious Twitters.

Robin Black is this month’s One Story.  Purchase it now or perish.

Wow.  Little Fury lay fallow for over a month, the longest such dry spell since I started blogging in 2002.  Thanks to each of you who sent puzzled notes asking when it would be regularly updated again… you can now resume wasting valuable work time here, instead of surfing for Internet pr0n.

I just finished up my first radio appearance in a long, long time as a guest on WUNC’s The State of Things.   Producer Susan Davis, host Frank Stasio, and the rest of the production team do a really terrific job; from start to finish I was amazed at how effortless they make it seem.  I was on with Michael McFee to talk about The Smallest Talk, Bull City Press, and literary life in Durham.  Sitting in their new studios in the American Tobacco Complex, it’s hard not to be struck by how thoroughly Durham is in the throes of being revitalized, of growing into a truly exceptional place to live and work.

Assuming that I’m able to complete this last stretch, I graduate on July 12, which has been part of the reason for my silence.  I am now assembling a class and preparing for two thesis interviews.  I’m not sure why I have chosen to focus more of my energy and grey matter on these two tasks than I did on most of the rest of the semester, but friends, I tell you, they have eaten up just about all of my spare bandwidth.  I often feel like I’m not myself for days on end.  But I suppose that these two tasks are the first where I’ve been really beholden to my classmates, and I feel the weight of that responsibility quite keenly.  If I am to leave Warren Wilson with a sense of peace, I’ll have to feel like I knocked these two tasks out of the park.  (As an aside, I am also working with Lili Flanders on the fundraising for the graduating class gift to Friends of Writers.   Though wehave publicly stated that we really want 100% of the grads to participate, we’ve been a little more subdued about our other goal.  But I’ll put it out there, commit it to print: We don’t just want to contribute more than any class before us, we want to shatter the record, setting the bar so high for future classes that they will hire professional fundraisers.  We want the Holden Minority Scholarship endowed now.  If you are a loved one and you’re reading this, I hope you’ll consider a donation– the donation form is on the FOW website– in honor of the Summer ‘08 grads.)

So I expect the blogging will be slow a while longer, though since Ladybug is currently in Turkey, I have a little more bachelor time.  I don’t think any man wants to receive e-mail updates from his wife, half a world away, about coed naked massage, but that’s the state of my inbox right now…