Journal of a Sabbatical

January 30, 2001

all day long

This Day in History (Mine):

1997: the ontological status of mildew? what was I thinking?

1998: real life, real grape juice stains, y'know i didn't get rid of that mondo global grape stain until i got a new car

2000: a hell of an island

This Day in History (Thoreau's):

1855: fine skating

1856: snow

1858: frozen green sphagnum

1859: the hooting of an owl

Today's Reading: How to Use Your Eyes by James Elkins, The Future of Success by Robert Reich

It's raining. I don't feel like writing, working, or doing much of anything. Zsolt is having some weird problem with his computer that causes it to chirp and the screen to become pale and discolored like celery. I'm not making this up. Besides the chirping etc. it seems to freeze in Safe Mode on shutdown or something. The Microsoft knowledge base has been busy all day long all I do is wait to connect...

One of the things that struck me when I was reading Whittier's letters was the concentration of literary heavies in Massachusetts, and the reverence they all paid to Whittier on his 70th birthday. I found an account of that 70th birthday celebration on the web at The Boston Daily Globe on the Whittier Dinner. Kind of cool to realize that here was somewhere back then.

Whittier also referred to Emerson's The Snowstorm being included in an anthology of winter poems to which he also contributed. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have all the prominent American poets collaborate on a winter anthology now? Or an El Nino/La Nina anthology? Or even just have Massachusetts poets collaborate on say a "No Name Storm of '91" anthology (that's the storm immortalized in The Perfect Storm).

I managed to finish one more installment of my China/Tibet trip journal, installment number 10: the Jokhang Temple, this afternoon so I feel like I might just barely finish the last trip journal before the next trip. Of course the upcoming Budapest trip won't be nearly as exciting or interesting to write about as China and Tibet.

I even made progress on installment 11 too but it's not finished yet.

Since I haven't written a whole lot of meaty content today, I've provided a feast of links to past entries for Janaury 30 (wow, last year at this time I was in Antarctica) and to Thoreau's entries for the same date, at least for a few of the years. For your reading pleasure.

Oh, and A Conversation on Work with Robert Reich makes good reading too.

And I updated my book list.