Anyone out there ever entered a beauty contest? Come on, Jim, admit it.
Author: Timothy Yu
Ah! Mystery solved. The Miss Teen International Pageant™ will be held on August 1st – 2nd at the North Shore Center in Chicago, Illinois. I apparently was fortunate enough to see Jessica Brockman, Miss Teen Kentucky, whose publicity photo on the website looks refreshingly like an embarrassing junior-high photo (I think she even has braces). Looking at the other photos,…
Saw a girl walking the mall today who was actually wearing a sash, like the kind that I thought only existed on TV and in parades and that would vanish if taken out of those artificial contexts. When she turned around I could see that the sash said “Miss Teen Kentucky.” What would Miss Teen Kentucky have been doing at…
The Chicago Reader reports that Lisel Mueller and Li-Young Lee are the inside favorites for Illinois Poet Laureate, a position held for over 30 years by Gwendolyn Brooks and vacant since her death three years ago.
I’m portraying people as “deracinated aestheticians”? Shame on me. I’m probably one too. I acknowledge, and endorse, the idea that the aesthetic realm can be a relatively autonomous one. I would not want aesthetic judgments to be solely determined by political values, or even by aesthetic values. If I didn’t believe that poetry could do something that political discourse couldn’t…
I’m being more flippant than I mean to be in responding to Henry’s responses to my responses to what he said in the first place, not because I don’t take them seriously but because I do. I’m hoping my witticisms will illustrate where I’m coming from better than another iteration of what I’ve already said. The fact is there is…
Sorry, Henry, I should have been clearer. When I attack someone, I am “critiquing” them. When they attack me, they are “bashing.”
The wars over style & “lineage” : psychological projection & compensation. Yeah. I would add: Poetry: psychological projection & compensation. And a damn good one.
A side effect of the trip to Chicago is that I’ve actually been able to make my postcards to Del travel a respectable distance before being read. (Sending them across the bay to Cassie felt like cheating, but not even having them cross a body of water is just wrong.) Dug up some old Chicago postcards from the closet–one showing…
I leave the Bay Area for five minutes and it’s like a blog invasion! Nick and Chris taking local coffee spots by storm!