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A great percentage of my current students are Asian -- Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Vietnamese. Since discussion of cultural difference is the primary content in ESL classes, I have managed to learn bits here and there about the various Asian cultures and nations of my students and my curiosity has grown ( Read more... )

'Cause there's nothin' strange
About an axe with bloodstains in the barn.

There's always some killin'
You got to do around the farm.

-- Tom Waits, "Murder in the Red Barn"

As the Waits song does, Bryan Bertino's The Strangers layers discrete and shadowed detail to build a portrait of the rural and remote as a place where cruelty can be expected ( Read more... )

The fog lay against our loft windows this morning like worn gauze. You could just make out the obscured traffic and street lights through it. A wall of soft gray.

It made me think of my father's phrase, The morning will burn it off. And I didn't want it, too. I wanted to lie back on the couch, in 7 a.m. silence, and watch its uniformity unravel ( Read more... )

Before moving back to Appalachia, I admit to building a certain kind of fledgling sense of an eccentrically Southern cultural liberal strain (with some distinctly queer spins) on the east side of the Smokies, in NC, my interest mostly sparked by the fact of Black Mountain College. Back then, I mused over a little-known writer I feel some poetic ( Read more... )

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At some point, box sets went off the map of my imagination. I really didn't know they were being made anymore. But I've also not yet really gotten into the mp3/IPod thing; I like what someone else has thoughtfully collected, conceived and constructed as a whole. I still have a nostalgia for the album, the mix tape ... and -- evidently -- the box ( Read more... )

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Yesterday, around noon, it was sunny and cool, but warm enough to enjoy driving with the window down. As I headed back from a bank on Chapman Highway, crossing the river back to downtown, listening to Neko Case's Blacklisted, I sense the pitch of pre-winter and the music are perfect, that match in climate and tone that only happens now and then. ( Read more... )

Got to be one of my favorite metaphors of all time. Nice to hear lyrics like these with the sun coming up November morning.

And when I see you kitten as a cat,
Yeah, as smitten as that,
I can't get that small.
The way you fur,
The how you purr,
It makes me want to paw you all.

"High" -- The Cure


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