The Dog Stars

Just finished The Dog Stars, by Peter Heller, which was post-apocalyptic, but beautiful and poignant in a way that The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, most definitely was not.

I have to memorialize the closing poem to The Dog Stars here, so I can remember it:

When Will I Be Home?
by Li Shangyin

When will I be home? I don't know.
In the mountains, in the rainy night,
The autumn lake is flooded.
Someday we will be back together again.
We will sit in the candlelight by the west window,
And I will tell you how I remembered you
Tonight on the stormy mountain.

Ode to a Little Friend Who Put a Bean in His Nose

My friend’s four year-old son, T., suffered through a bean-in-the-nose extraction process yesterday. It made me hurt just to think about it. So I wrote him a silly poem:

Ode to My Little Friend, T.

It’s very good for you to be bean-free!
Bean-free is the best way to be.
A bean in the nose--
It just grows and it grows,
And who wants to be a bean tree?

Yes, beans should stay out of your nose!
It’s much better to plant beans in rows.
A bean in the ground--
Won’t get you down
And is much easier to water with the hose.

Stay away from those beans, T.!

Page 17

Interwebs, I recently spent about six hours writing an article on Costa Rica for DICTA magazine, the Knoxville Bar Association's monthly publication. I don't even want to add up the opportunity costs associated with writing the piece, but my inner compulsive grammarian does not allow publication of any item without thorough (read: obsessive and time-consuming) editing. A holdover from my days as managing editor of The Washington and Lee Law Review, I guess.

At any rate, I'm going to cut my losses and use the DICTA piece as my contribution to the blogosphere today. If you find a grammatical error in the article, do let me know in the comments. At the same time, please also provide your physical address. That way, I'll know where to beat you senseless with my dog-eared Elements of Style.

Humor and Words

Something I love about the Appalachian South, aside from pimento cheese and red velvet cake, is the Southern sense of humor. Done well, it's a self-deprecating, sly kind of humor, directed at those who may be a bit too full of themselves--often Yankees--and it's very funny. I also love the absurd use of words. For those who don't attend church, it's that "they ain't too churchified." The process of jerryrigging a machine or process is "hillbillying it." Yes is "yeppy." There's also a lot of "fixin,'" as in "I'm fixin' to go to the store," or "I'm fixin' to git my can of whup ass."

I'm fixin' to keep a list of my favorites.