This is how writing dialogue for a novel can actually get you into trouble, via Kevin Drum from the Houston Chronicle:

Without further explanation, they took me to the onsite police station, where I waited for an “interview” with the Transportation Security Administration. By then I was being accused of writing “bomb” on a piece of paper and waving it around for people in the back of the plane to see. While two policemen guarded the door, the honcho behind the desk informed me that my choice of dialogue was unfortunate, that life was not a stage play and that the tiniest thing can ignite fear in American travelers these days. He wanted a summary of my novel’s plot to get the context for why I’d written what I had.

Things just keep moving in their bizarre direction. I feel much better now that Tony Soprano is going to be in charge.

TPM has a nice take too.

People talk about energy crises. There is no energy crises. Thereis, however, a real creativity crises. Does XP need a damned desktop cleanup wizard? Nope.

XP needs sun and wind power.

For sunpower all we need is a good editor.

So about that sticker shock at the pump. I’m actually hoping gas goes up another two dollars.

What drives innovation?

This from CBS:

Mr. Bush’s overall job approval rating has continued to decline. Forty-one percent approve of the job he is doing as president, while 52 percent disapprove  the lowest overall job rating of his presidency. Two weeks ago, 44 percent approved. A year ago, two-thirds did.

Sixty-one percent of Americans now disapprove of the way Mr. Bush is handling the situation in Iraq, while just 34 percent approve.

No, what bothers me is that the numbers in support are even that high. Those in support of current policy and strategy should be down to 5 people.

Congratulations to all the Tunxis graduates. And to those I wasn’t able to find and talk to on Sunday, good job.

It was also an honor meeting Neha’s parents. Nice people. Smart parents. A good life to them and their daughter.

In a particularly wonderful moment the phenomenon of sitting and the human ass all of the sudden became profoundly strange to me, this at a meeting of our English Department. This has no bearing on the Tunxis English Department; it was merely coincidence, since most of us were seated. Sure we have chairs. But why do we have asses? Are they for sitting?

I can imagine a human condition in which people never sit and therefore do not envision chairs? In such a case, what is the ass good for? I mention this to my good friend and colleague John Timmons and he reminded me of Bukowski in this regard, which of course got us thinking about this anatomical issue to even greater degrees of absurdity. If the ass were on the head, discos could have lower ceilings and people could leap to no effect but minor bruising.

The question yet persists. It’s either why do we have asses or why do we sit?

For those who want to know, Grace Paley will be opening the Sunken Garden Poetry Fest at the Hillstead on June 2nd.

Also of note Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s The Mystery Plays are running at the Yale Repertory till May 22nd. Aguirre-Sacasa’s an interesting guy. He also writes for Marvel Comics, currently writing the Marvel Knights series.

I learned a lot the past week in El Paso, where my father resides. I learned a lot about poetry. Not about form, lines, and imagery, but about sight. I drove streets I remember driving in a car and on a mountain bike and learned that they were the same roads clarified. I know them perhaps better now.

Seated on the front steps in the early morning I noted a man run by in expensive running shoes. He was followed by a stooped woman in broken sandals, who carried a paper bag. This is the mix on that old road on which my father’s house was built in about 1917, a red brick 1200 sq ft bungalow where my parents raised 5 children. The house is small, squat, raised on a base of stones, the front squares of lawn now just dust and sand with a few spears of grass struggling to live. The sun and sand forbid more.

When I visit, the house always appears smaller than I remember. I wonder how we all got on there. The city is exploding in size, the university building up, and the mix keeps mixing. The way landscaping has changed is interesting, too–multi-colored rock, orange quarter-inch paving sand, red and white brick, very little grass, lots of cactus rearing out of places that had once been watered routinely. Water conservation. The city’s backbone mountain has more and more radio and communications towers so that at night red lights blink like needle punctures heating and cooling, heating, cooling, over the dark houses that climb the rocky slopes, the stars above it all wiped away by the tens of thousands of street lights.

Drivers stopping at the stop signs waved. I remember a Lexus and a beat up Ford. That’s the mix in my “old” neighborhood. But that’s not the way it used to be. Of course, I waved back, because I was seated there, and it’s what you do.

I’ve always been intrigued by patterns, especially with mazes, thus narrative is a means for me of seeing. Urban spaces reveal how we think about idealized space and action, from the smallest plot to the more aggressive boundaries of a city. The space, its shapes, its roads, its architecture, reveals us. Built, controlled space follows a thinking plot. It demonstrates. It reveals collective and individual creativity. It reveals failures that can’t just be put into the trunk of a car and driven to the dump.

The city is another kind of poem and story. It changes when you keep trying to read it.

I’m back from my trip to Texas.

The first order of business is to congratulate Joanne Buehler on her acceptance to Trinity College. Congratulations and good luck.