Three Beautiful Things 05-16-14: Photo Amble, Trust and Learning, Remembering Poets

1.  The shoes I wear seem to be giving my heels and toes proper support (if that was the problem before....).  This means I can walk a lot more and today I walked all around our neighborhood, went into the Whiteaker neighborhood, and eventually made my way downtown and then to the Bier Stein.  I didn't take a ton of pictures -- maybe not even a pound -- but I took some and here are three of them:

What's Your Angle?

;

We Deliver

Imagine

Holding Hands

2.  The Deke and I met at the Bier Stein and talked some house business and then relaxed into some conversation the mysteries of students learning stuff and just what brings it about.  I'm not sure, but I think the most significant source of learning is trust.

3.  Our conversation carried over to Sixteen Tons.  Scott Shirk had texted me that the George Plimpton documentary was  on tonight and that made me think about The Paris Review which made me think about that journal's interviews with writers which made me think of reading Donald Hall's book Remembering Poets back in 1978 and the Deke and I talked about Hall's contempt for audiences who seemed enchanted with Dylan Thomas' drunkenness -- Hall accused them of cheering him to his death (by alcohol).  It was fun thinking back on that book and the impact it's had on me, especially in sorting out the writers' work from their often carefully manufactured public personae.  The book examines Frost's grandfatherly public persona in contrast to his dark poems and his more difficult private person and Hall's discussion opened up for me the existential depth of Frost's work in ways that are very much still with me, as in the closing lines of his "Desert Places".  

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars--on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.