2 tired 2 B of much use...

...found here via Google tonight, while researching the work of Jean Toomer.

(Okay, I really found the link here first, but didn't want to scare you right off the bat. )

(Just maybe a little, and later.)

(Oh, and, here is a link only David T. and his fellow Buffalonians can fully appreciate)

Plus, some news on the material plane: I saw Artist Formerly Known as Unpublished Tom in the flesh tonight.

I love that man, I really do. Enough to lend him money. But not enough to live with him.

I saw him at a bittersweet reunion called to celebrate the retirement of two fine teachers (See below).

This is my last post, ever. Really, I swear.

But see below from the AU College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) web site:

Kermit Moyer taught courses on creative writing and American literature for more than two decades. During his tenure at AU, Moyer was inspired by visiting writers like William Stafford and Stanley Kunitz to try his hand at his own creative writing, publishing Tumbling in 1988, which the New York Times Book Review hailed as “a work of ringing authenticity.”

“You always hear that you learn from teaching," [says Moyer] "but it’s not so simple as a student giving you an insight into a poem or a novel you’ve been teaching for years . . . When I’m teaching I find myself thinking about what I’m teaching all the time, and it’s not only the subject that I’m teaching, but the feeling of that particular room, the feeling of the particular people in that class. You’re all talking about this novel or this poem, which enables you to talk more deeply about your own experiences than if you were just talking about yourselves. That conversation somehow becomes a part of you, and I think it’s a great privilege to be in that position.”

Myra Sklarew began teaching at AU in 1970. The former president of the Yaddo artist community, she has written three chapbooks, six collections of poetry, a book of essays, and a collection of short fiction. She’s currently working on a nonfiction book exploring the fractured memories of Lithuanian Holocaust survivors tentatively titled Holocaust and the Construction of Memory.

Fondest Memory: “I used to run this program on Washington for undergrads [in the mid-1970s], and we got the curator of the Smithsonian Castle, James Good, to take us out on a barge that we borrowed from the National Park Service. It was called the Wood Duck Barge, and we’d sail up and down the Potomac River at 5 o’clock in the morning as he pointed out all the buildings that use to be there. Then when we were all soaked and miserable and excited, we’d end up in Georgetown, get coffee, and go to school.”

“Of all the things I’ve worked at here...[I will miss most] that mysterious thing that we do when we’re in the classroom can’t be duplicated in some other way....You come into a room and there are 30 strangers . . . and then little by little there’s a conversation that goes on mostly on paper and then in person. It’s just that process, which happens over and over again, how you come to one another and how they rise up in your mind and your spirit, and then it’s gone. And this time, I’ll be gone too. That’s going to be a huge loss for me.

Future Plans: “I’m going to finish this book on the Holocaust, but I’m also interested in getting some kind of rescue training. People think I’m joking, but I’m not. After seeing what happened with Katrina, I have this need . . . There are lots of ways you can be useful, and I very much want to be useful. I’m interested in this process of growing old, this question of what to do with whatever time you have left. No one gives you an instruction book on how to do it. So the rest is sort of like a poem. You put a word down and see where it goes. I’m looking forward to taking that first step and seeing where it goes.”