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Call us nutty but we booked it—a trip to Europe with the wee one. Grey will be just over one year old when we head off to Switzerland to visit his Uncle Todd and Aunt Pee Wee with a stopover in London on the way home to see my high school bud Aaron. The trip to Savannah went almost without a hitch so we duly raised the stakes. Fingers firmly crossed for the next six months…

Speaking of Brother Todd he (foolishly) invited me to take part in a “Last Man Standing” competition, where players all kick in some currency and get to pick one team who is certain to win over the weekend in the Barclay’s Premier League. The catch is that you can only take each team once, and they have to win—a draw is as good as a loss.

Out of a field of 23 players from various countries, two players remain—me and Larry, one of Todd’s friends from high school who now lives in Wales. Unlikely draws and losses for Ars*nal, Man Citeh, and Spurs in the last few weeks thinned the field considerably, topped off by Liverpool’s draw yesterday with Birmingham to put me and Larry head-to-head. I stand to win (or lose) about $115 US, but we’re idle this weekend for the international break. Can’t you just feel the tension?!?!

Over the next two classes in my creative writing class my students will be reading short shorts by Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Ben Marcus. I am more than interested to hear what they have to say. A good number of them appear to appreciate complicated, confusing, and somewhat perplexing stories, but there is also a contingent that seem to feel if a story doesn’t have a pronounced linear plot that features rising action, climax, and denouement, then the story is deficient.

I teach intro to creative writing again in the spring semester and will be changing things around, but not a ton. Conversations about modernism versus postmodernism seemed to help adjust reader expectations somewhat, so that if a piece of creative nonfiction or a short story appears to be devoid of a fixed “meaning” that it doesn’t automatically mean the author sucks. I plan on building this more deliberately into the syllabus next semester since a surprising number of essays and stories in the course textbook definitely bear some hallmarks of postmodernism.

Have to stop here and start working, unfortunately. A lot of stuff on my mind that seems blog worthy, but it’ll have to wait.

Current Mood: Pretty Good |