5000

I'm reading Don Quixote because Kundera can't stop talking about it in The Curtain, a book I love.

I'm reading Geoff Dyer's The Ongoing Moment. This book is extremely irritating for a lot of quite interesting reasons involving the notion of creative nonfiction as a genre, the question of expertise, ways of reading/seeing, and authority. But I'm not going to get into that here, for reasons soon to be explained.

I'm reading Color Correction for Digital Photographers Only for 20 minutes at a stretch, because it puts me to sleep.

I watched Chris Rock's Good Hair, and that was totally fascinating.

I watched Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story and kept bursting into tears, which made me angry, because I should be doing something about injustice instead of crying about it while I eat pesto in front of the TV.

I'm not doing much about injustice, though I have been harrying my elected state representatives to pass HB-1 to get rid of Alabama's punitive sales tax on groceries.

I've been taking a lot of pictures. You can see some here and here.

I've started a garden. It looks like this.

I've written some new poems. You can't see those anywhere yet.

I'm reading and rereading Borchert obsessively.

What I haven't been doing is writing on this blog, because it's started to feel like a chore. So I'm going to set it aside for a while. I don't think this is going to be much of a blow to my readers, of which there are, I think, probably only three or four anyway.

Nevertheless, I would like to say to those readers that I love them.

5000,

JB

What my drunk friend said goes double for me

I've been keeping a journal of reactions to books, movies, and albums for years, and have decided to move that enterprise onto this blog, for two reasons. First, it's my standing policy to investigate phenomena I find both attractive and repellent, e.g. twelve-tone music, crawfish, and blogging. Second, I imagine I'll press myself to think through my reactions a bit more thoroughly if I'm aware there's a possibility, however remote, that others might read them. That last said, I pivot to caveat: these entries are not careful critiques but knee-jerk reactions, written in the immediate aftermath of reading, watching, or listening, and so are certain to contain dumbnesses, solecisms, and regrettables. They are what they are; I stand by them only inasmuch as I would by a drunk friend.