April 11, 2008
Off to Maine...
...to plan this summer's conference at Ferry Beach. As always, I will be bringing some work with me, but I will be bringing my eBookWise reader with Heart of Darkness to finish.
Sunday I return early in the day and, weather providing, coach my younger son's U16 travel soccer team.
So I ask you, kind reader, which is harder--herding cats or getting 18 boys, 16 and under, to listen to you for more than 20 seconds? I know the answer! Especially during last night's practice when I was trying to go over something with them as they prepared to scrimmage the U18 girls' team. But they are great kids, really, and I fully expect their exuberance to be an asset on the field.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:16 PM
April 10, 2008
The Inevitable
American Life in Poetry: Column 159
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
Bad news all too often arrives with a ringing telephone, all too early in the morning. But sometimes it comes with less emphasis, by regular mail. Here Allan Peterson of Florida gets at the feelings of receiving bad news by letter, not by directly stating how he feels but by suddenly noticing the world that surrounds the moment when that news arrives.
The Inevitable
To have that letter arrive
was like the mist that took a meadow
and revealed hundreds
of small webs once invisible
The inevitable often
stands by plainly but unnoticed
till it hands you a letter
that says death and you notice
the weed field had been
readying its many damp handkerchiefs
all along
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 2007 by Allan Peterson, whose most recent book of poetry is All the Lavish in Common, University of Massachusetts Press, 2005, winner of the Juniper Prize. Reprinted from The Chattahoochee Review, Winter 2007, V. 27, no. 2, by permission of the author. Introduction copyright (c) 2008 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:31 PM
April 8, 2008
All is Forgiven
Bill Buckner is throwing out the first ball. I guess enough time has passed since you-know-when.
UPDATE: The Globe's Amalie Benjamin has a nice article about the emotions of the day.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:30 PM | Comments (1)
April 7, 2008
Blogging Reminder
As I mentioned recently, this blog has morphed, and I am now doing technical blogging over at Gilbane (see the XML Technologies & Content Strategies blog here and the Publishing Practice blog here). Just thought I would mention it in case you happened to drop in here expecting to see something else entirely!
Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:11 PM
Sports Illustrated Opens the Vault...
... and produces gems like this, a 1988 article that relates a story about how Larry Bird viewed an earlier Boston legend, and one of the heroes of my youth, Bobby Orr.
At the Boston Garden when the national anthem is played, Bird gazes to the heavens. Everyone assumes that he's looking at the Celtics banners, but ironically, he began to fix his eyes on only one banner—the retired No. 4. But not retired by the Celtics. The No. 4 belonged to the Bruins' Bobby Orr. Bird has stared at the black and gold banner so many times, he can see it in his mind's eye. He knows every stitch, how many lines pierce the circle around the capital B. "Eight. Don't bet me," he says.
Bird had met Orr only once and had never seen him play, but he had heard how great he was as a player and had learned how much Boston admired Orr as a person. Bird had been too bashful ever to tell Orr this, though, and revealed it only last month in his speech at the Sports Museum dinner, where Orr was on hand for the unveiling of Bird's statue. When Orr heard Bird speak of him, the breath went out of him in a whoosh, and there were tears in his eyes.
"My god," Orr whispered in the dark. "My god."
Posted by Bill Trippe at 6:55 PM
