Transparent Panache

Dear Colleagues,

The faculty-l@warren-wilson.edu list is “down”
since last Thursday for some reason or other. I’m
forced to start-up a blog and try to communicate with
Glen Beck just to keep my habit sustained.

I admire the many writers of books and articles and
poems who have no particular audience, but write-at-large
hoping someone “out there” might read and appreciate
if not respond. A dedication and practice of deferred
gratification I’ve never mastered.

I’ve rarely gotten feedback from the few things I’ve
published. Evelyn Wood, from Reading Dynamics
asked to include a short piece on Steinbeck &
Hemingway for their speed reading course
years ago, when it was fashionable to
be able to devour a text. So much
in print. So little time.

I need to have faces in mind when I right.
All in the family so to speak. Local food,
as it were. Brighten the spot where I am
at home. This PLACE.

Think globally.
Act locally.

Ann Turkle and her mother made cozies: small
sweaters and vests and hats for a glassed-in stuffed-
bird display that our missionary and English Professor
Gordan Mahy provided years ago for second floor
Jensen. She & Gwen Diehn got the key to the case,
snuck in the little dashing habitry one night & dressed
them with panache. The display was discarded years
later, dusty broken wings a testimony to passed flight,
bird-calls signifying territory and mating strategies.

There is a larger showcase now, on the third floor,
that I have already celebrated: the many books and
articles spread in annunciation: works of art now
finished, all done, & representing our inquiring and
observant mind-on-a-page (MOP)—cryonic: freeze-
dried but always resurrectible: ideas freed to move
around in my skull-haus even now, on all fours,
upright, and 3-legged too.

xxxooo, Sam