It is Monday, a Monday with a new moon, which sent me to YouTube, where I watched the video for Duran Duran's "New Moon on Monday." I had never seen this video, which isn't surprising. I was in undergraduate school, and the communal TV in the lounge barely got network stations; it did not have cable.
The video is oddly compelling, a little film with soldiers that could be East German or Soviet, violence going on in the background, espionage in the foreground, a horse-drawn wagon of explosives in an inner city of cobblestoned streets, a motorcycle speeding across countryside. It feels like a cultural artifact from a different age, which of course, it is.
It is Labor Day Monday, which feels like a treat. I'm happy not to be racing through my Monday schedule, which would have me heading down the mountain to Spartanburg Methodist College to teach my 9 a.m. Composition class and then doing my hour at the Writing Center before an office hour and then two more classes.
It is September 2, which means our new health insurance through my job has gone into effect--which means I need to cancel our insurance that I got through the Affordable Care Act. It means filling out paperwork, which means I need to budget a bit more time than I had thought. Happily, I will have time later. Let me get some seminary work done first.
At some point, I will switch to listening/watching the videos I need to for seminary classes this week, but this morning, I am listening to Jennifer Egan's interview with the New York Times podcast show about books. She's talking in great detail about how she composed A Visit to the Goon Squad. If I ever teach a creative writing class about fiction and/or short stories, I want to remember this podcast. She gives great insight about how she arranged the short stories, about the different types of narration (first person, second person, that intriguing experiment with PowerPoint), about the other writing she's done.
It also reminds me of how I wanted to create a book of linked short stories, and I did. It's not nearly as masterful as Egan's. It also makes me want to write more fiction, but that's not the semester I can have this term. If I'm lucky, I can do some poetry writing.
In past years, I would have had a massive poetry mailing created the old-fashioned way, with paper, stamps, and envelopes. That tells you how long ago it was. Part of me wants to do a bit of submitting today, but let me not get distracted. I have seminary work to do.
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