Counting the Days

Seriously:  Camille T. Dungy's book Black Nature:  Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry is a major, major intervention in nature writing, and I cannot wait to hear her talk about it next week.  The introduction alone is brilliant, and the poems and essays are a treasure-house.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers interviews Camille about the book.

(FYI, those who plan to join us for wining and dining:  Camille assures me that tippling around her is no issue.)

But on a less joyful topic:  Academia's endless judging is working my last (raw) nerve, and it has to do with judging.  "There is no reason, no need, to make a contest out of anything," writes Zen Buddhist Cheri Huber.  Sufi mystic Rumi wrote something like, Out beyond good and bad, there is a field.  I'll meet you there.  "I cannot count one.  I know not the first letter of the alphabet.  I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.  The intellect is a cleaver," writes Thoreau.  Judge not, lest ye be judged.   

Yes, the soul replies.

But academia, required to fetishize the cleaver of intellect, makes a contest out of everything.  Right now, we're furiously judging all kinds of folks:  a multitude of job candidates, a record-breaking number of graduate application files in English (due, sadly, to the recession), et cetera . . . The mind can do that.  Yes.  But the mind needs rest.  The mind needs to loaf and invite its soul. 

I'm craving downtime, nature, and peace.  And my pace of blogging on here has dropped; sorry.  I should just declare a January hiatus.  The pace of work is always ridiculous in January.

And judgments, I'm guessing, will only get more stringent.  UNL's chancellor today announced that he'll be looking for ways to cut an additional $5.2 million from the budget this spring.  Cue mirthless laughter. 

Obama's address this week was kick-ass, though.  That was a cheery 70 minutes of telling it like it is.    

Uh-oh.  The heat shut off in my office building--it does that automatically for the weekend--and I can feel it getting colder in here.  I'd better bundle up and head home.  Stay warm, sweet people.  Keep writing.