This has not been a busy year on my blog, having sometimes gone a month or more without posting anything new. Currently teaching three college classes online from home, and not finding much time to write and post images for the blog. One more week in the semester and Spring has sprung, so that should change. I have a backlog of several dozen photos taken in the last few weeks, so I will soon be posting them along with stories of the experiences I'm having along the way. My overall theme is generally concentrated on flowering plants and their symbiotic relationships with their pollinators. When the mood strikes, I insert philosophical and political comments. Please feel free to share your comments, but please be nice. I try to be.
I have been teaching since 1965 and have recently joined the English Department as an Associate Faculty member at Feather River College. Recently taught Nature Literature in America and am currently teaching Interpersonal Communication and Basic Reading and Writing.
This is the back cover of the most amazing book I've come across this year - maybe this decade. It provoked (or should I say legitimized?) a kind of stream of consciousness experience that will most certainly affect this blog, and will likely affect a book I'm trying to put together (while badly afflicted with procrastination and distraction) but which I cannot write about further until after dinner. Hmmm, procrastination again? There: I've had a bowl of granola with a banana, and now I can carry this story a little further. I discovered this book during my end-of-May drive to Pittsburgh, PA, to see my daughter, the art professor. This book, backside up, was on a table full of books and papers in her living room. The words "writing the unthinkable" caught my eye. I turned it over and saw the title: WHAT IT IS: The formless thing which gives things form. Some sort of paradox? It would have been easy to ignore this book because it looked so unconventional (euphemism for quirky?), but I already had a copy of Lynda Barry's Syllabus, so I was hooked. Since my mind is frequently racing all over the place, I am often told by others watching my work, my office, etc., that I need to get organized. Then I claim that I am organized, despite appearances. So, after another break - maybe even a good night's sleep - I will try to give form to the formless messages I got from this book. As I write this, my mind frequently flashes on another interesting book I found this past week: Kerri Majors' This Is Not a Writing Manual, which definitely is a writing manual. So, I do think I need some sleep before I can give form to it all. For one thing, a blog in this format is inherently linear, but the processes of thinking and writing I am alluding to definitely are not. Will I be able to fit a round peg into a square hole?
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