For anyone who didn't get the idea, I was a homicidal English teacher for Halloween (or, as I told my students, I didn't actually have a costume). We met at the Astor Place Starbucks, and it took us about an hour for everyone to meet up and get into their costumes before we could start down to the parade route. By the time we got there, it was difficult for those of us under six feet tall to see much. Eventually, though, the crowd thinned, and I managed to get to the front. There were some interesting costumes (and puppets), but mostly it was just the same five costumes repeated hundreds of times.

Tonight we're taking our students to the Village Halloween Parade. I've taken pictures of some elements of my costume. Can anyone guess what I'm going to be?

CRIT Journal 1 is here: fourteen pages exploring themes of transition, gray areas, and liminality. $2 via Paypal or contact me about a trade.

I ask because I went to three different copy shops today (one after finishing work for the evening) and couldn't find a single machine that would give me clean prints. Actually, that's not fair. One did manage to print without distorting the letters or adding random lines, but it decided to jam up irreparably after issuing a single copy.

At all these places, I had to go to the counter to get a refund, and they didn't do anything beyond crediting my card. They didn't try to figure out what was wrong with the machines. They didn't put up a note informing people that they wouldn't be getting clean copies. And I think this is typical of New York. Even under the brightest lights, the streets are filthy and the gutters stink. As long as people can walk on the sidewalk, it's good enough. As long as everyone keeps moving, it's fine. As long as you can make enough cash to get by.

That's right, kids, this place is pure mediocrity, and the goal of the ambitious is, in general, only to be at the top of the mediocre.

One of my biggest frustrations with poetry communities and the discussions that take place within them is how often conversations turn into attempts to flaunt one's own outsider status: I'm a real outsider, because I don't have an MFA. I'm a true outsider, because I publish in x or don't publish in y.

Don't get me wrong. I embrace the model of the poet as an outsider who brings a special perspective or critique to society. My first and deepest influence was Dickinson, afterall. The problem is that when it turns into a contest, when certain social markers of marginality are lionized, outsider status is being claimed in order to increase one's status inside a group. No matter how marginal that group may be, this goes against the very nature of being an outsider.

At the risk of sounding like the people I'm criticizing, I don't really have a choice about being an outsider. It's difficult to explain my particular issues with social interaction, since the precise problem is that they're wrapped up in things that are intuitive to most people: all the unwritten social rules that seem natural are things I have to figure out intellectually. It's like always being in a foreign culture without anyone realizing that you're from somewhere else and don't know the customs. These people boasting about their marginality in poetry communities aren't, for the most part, talking about anything that causes them any real difficulties.

Why don't they just buy a T-shirt?

Or, better yet, why don't they just shutup and write?

I credit the sound of last night's downpour with helping me get twelve hours of sleep-- an amazing feat for an insomniac like myself. And here's how the world (or at least the view from my window) looked after the storm had ceased:

What are you going to be for Halloween?

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

--Robert Frost, "Mending Wall"

I didn't care much for Frost when I was younger and forced to read him in survey classes, but this poem was my first thought on reading the news about the barrier (which is really just another part of the security theater, when you get down to it). It's especially appropriate that the question of 'why' hangs there unanswered except by repetition of the platitude. I guess this means I'll have to dig back into Frost's work.

That seems to be where everything I try to write in straight prose about the current state of politics, the world, and my life leads me right now. In poems and stories I can tell the slants of deeper truths; I can get at things that can't be known outside those arts. And sometimes I dream that, by these works, I can incite or reawaken enough to desire to change things. I suppose my photographs are about that as well. In the most general sense, they're about developing desire for the beautiful-- or even just heightening one of the senses that can be imagined to fulfill desires so that this fulfillment can become something more desired.

And I've written all that just to say that, instead of some brief insightful essay, I'm giving you a photograph today.

It's one of those crisp fall nights when you can taste the cold. People who underdressed for the after-dark temperature rush home, leaving the streets quiet.

My work is going to be appearing in the 2007 Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Outside Voices' 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets.

I've had mixed feelings about Sofia Coppola as a filmmaker, but I loved this movie. What she did so well was to combine the story arc of a historical figure with contemporary elements to display-- or create-- something human. That we're not to take this as a straightforward period piece is made clear from the very beginning. ( spoilers within )

It's pouring this morning, so tell me about your rain gear . . .

When the rain hits the sidewalks here, you get the smell of soil being washed away with the sting of blood. But it takes a real downpour to budge discarded coffee cups, and then they end up blocking gutters, letting murky puddles gather. Dark gum patches-- or whatever else they may be-- remain no matter how intense the rain.

I used to go running in showers and come back feeling cleansed. But rain can't sweep away the memory of Jon's face twisted in a sick grin above me. No, his smile wasn't any different that night. It's just a part of how he hurt me, and I'm stuck with it no matter how well I live, how fast I run or where. I may thrive, but this filth will always be there.

And what may be harder for me is that the rain can't bring back what I gave up when I believed his lies and came to New York. I'm not even sure I know what it was or could have been.

He called me tonight to thank me for getting him to follow baseball this year.

During the second half of my TOEFL class this evening, I gave my students a review test to assess their progress with the reading skills we'd covered over the previous three weeks. After going over the answers, I asked if they had any questions about the quiz. I expected to be met with the usual zombified silence.

Instead, one of the students who had been struggling with the intensive practice drills said, "Yeah, why is this so easy?"

I just spent almost half an hour on the phone with their customer service department trying to get them to actually deliver a package to me. The problem is that there's no buzzer in my building, so you have to call me to get past the mailbox area (or into the building at all after dark). UPS drivers don't have cell phones (apparently), and they refuse to leave the package inside for me, because they have to hand it to an actual person. Now, if I lived in a single-family home, I could just have them leave it on the porch, but apartment dwellers are treated differently "for [our] protection".

FedEx had no problem calling me. USPS is willing to leave packages unless the sender specifically requests a signature-- and, even then, walking five minutes to the post office is not exactly a big deal. Spending two hours on the subway to get to a warehouse is, and I wouldn't be able to do it before Thursday, when they're going to send it back, anyway. Lovely.

Also, dear customer service supervisor, telling me "this is why we're the number one shipping company in the world" is guaranteed to make me angrier.

One of the most interesting things about a recent Wal-Mart employee walkout in Florida is that it was organized not by a union but by two departmental managers. I don't think, however, that this could be too surprising to anyone who has been employed in low-level retail management. When I was working as a front-end supervisor at a thrift store, I often found myself asked to enforce policies with which I disagreed. Sometimes, I was able to talk the general manager out of really obnoxious rules ("Come on, would it really be so bad if the cashiers just keep water bottles under their stations?"); sometimes, I was more deceitful ("No, cashier x didn't go home for personal reasons last night. I sent her home, because business was slow what with having had a major earthquake in the morning.")

I finally did my laundry this morning (for which I'm grateful tonight, since it means that I can sleep in clean-smelling sweats under a newly washed blanket). Part of the plan involved running to the library while my clothes were in the dryer, but it turned out that the place was closed for some sort of staff training. Anyway, soon after I'd dragged my clothing and sundries home, it was time to head to work.

I've really been pushing my TOEFL class: I usually introduce one skill each day, rotating through the reading, listening, and speaking sections (writing is taught on Thursdays and Fridays when I have a different class for conversation). The rest of the time I spend on vocabulary exercises and on reviewing all the previously learned skills in whatever section we're focusing on that day. It was kind of funny today, because the new skill was pragmatic understanding and a lot of the passages had professors saying things like "Come on, you guys should know this . . .", which they hear from me almost every class when I ask them to explain what we've learned so far.

After class, I went up to the area around Times Square to reclaim some property from a certain someone. He wanted me to go into his workplace to get it, but I didn't really feel comfortable with that, so I insisted that he leave it somewhere for me to pick up. It's a small thing, I know, but I held my line, and I'm glad.

You know, I don't think I'll ever see the appeal of the lights here, even if I can photograph them into something pleasing:

I am completely in love with Josh Brown right now. We needed to win this game after the debacle in Chicago two weeks ago.

But, you know, it's a good thing that I have a strong heart.