I passed my pollworker exam, and I might be running your neighborhood polling place if you live up the hill from Dolores Park. See ya there in November.

I think it's fall in San Francisco right NOW. Midwestern-style dark clouds, brown and orange leaves, light breeze, 85% humidity.

Timothy McSweeney is devastated and lost

David Foster Wallace memories above

and below a postscript in the New Yorker.

Some Pomona friends have commented on the McSweeney's site. I don't remember him well. I tried to take a contemporary fiction class with him his first year at Pomona, my last, but it filled up. I went to his office hours to try to get in. He told me I could sit in the interrogation chair or the tippy chair. I sat in one. The class didn't have room. That was fair. I worked in the English department office, library, etc. I ran into Wallace at night in Crookshank Hall. He would be using the office, putting things in mailboxes, taking things from mailboxes. He often wore shorts.

But it's not him I remember (or don't) as well I as I remember the experience of his brain on the page. I remember the companionship, talkiness, the hallways, the drone. I read Infinite Jest throughout a semester abroad in Madrid. I read it after lunches, after napping after lunches in my tiny floral room, after staring at canvases, after staying out 'til morning and waking in the afternoon, after reading L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E.

I don't know what to say. I'm trying not to delete my recollections. Read the books? Read DeLillo.

I thought saw a scene from White Noise today on the highway. The kind of rubbernecking where your head bends down.

I'm also thinking of you, English department, and I hope you are alright.

PALIN
PA IN
PAIN
pain

My most frivolous thought currently

It's pledge drive time for my two local NPR stations, KQED (88.5 FM) and KALW (91.7 FM). This interruption—voices saying nothing instead of voices saying choreographed things—that I wake up to daily, almost drives me crazy, and combined with some other things like election anxiety and work-related stress, that's not good.

I have a beautiful dream involving silence. Instead of the pledge drive, they turn the radio stations off. And they tell us once maybe or mail us a postcard, fly a small plane with a banner, put a notice in the newspaper: no more of your local NPR station until we've collected enough money to run the station. Start sending money in now, and we will turn it back on when we have enough.

If that takes two weeks, that's normal. If it never comes back on because they don't receive enough money, they'll have to try a different strategy. I'll just keep checking those frequencies to see what's up. They could do a lot with empty frequencies.

Michiko Kakutani on David Foster Wallace (Dave Wallace).

Reginald Shepherd's Obituary link

It's been a bad year for life.

David Foster Wallace, Writer, Is Dead at 46

Awful awful.

He did wonderful things for a lot of people I know.

"Woman burns brush in a barrel." (Accessibility)

The new iPod Nano finally has some built in accessibility features for the visually impaired. You can enlarge the font size, and you can operate the menus with your voice. However, there are only 2 settings for the font size, Standard & Large! I can't imagine that's sufficient. You can also now use iTunes 8 with a screen reader. Why did it take so long?! The baby boomers are going to demand accessibility all over the place as visual impairments start to set in, and that's going to be great.

I have students who use iPods. They just play them on shuffle and skip what they don't want to hear. I also have students using text messaging who guess what the messages say.

Anyway, people don't really use Macs in the blind community. My friend, a technology expert, hates them. I think there are a lot of holes in the way things work.

We tried using Google Chrome with Jaws, a very mainstream screen reader, yesterday, and we could not do a thing. Jaws only read the address bar and wouldn't tell us what was on the screen. Google Chrome also wasn't working with some standard keyboard commands, since it doesn't have a menu bar. I hope those things get worked out.

I keep meaning to check if this blog is even accessible. And now I remember it's not. I need alt tags on my images...I think that's what they are called.

Happy Birthday LCB!

Thanks for letting me perch on the edge of your bed
for most of your years.

I can't figure out which website they're using currently, but Books & Bookshelves, at 99 Sanchez Street in San Francisco, is selling tons of great small press poetry chapbooks, full length books, and journals as well as beautiful unfinished bookshelves and other furniture. If you're a small press, you should get in touch with them so they can carry your stuff. They also have a new reading series. If you want more information, I might be able to work a little to get some hard facts.

In other news, I got stuck with a broken down van, 5 students and 2 teachers for several hours today outside the Palace of the Legion of Honor art museum. Then I went straight to my 3 hour class on teaching math and made origami fish. Oh man. Human.

Nico Alvarado-Greenwood sent me this link to a very nice blog piece about my work: mm/dd/yyyy . Thanks guys.

Hey LL and the rest of us: Don't despair. Even Sarah Palin supports Obama according to a recent interview. Check it out: Palin on Obama in the New Yorker.

By the way, I'm using Google Chrome to write this. Whoa.

Check out Ammon's rad t-shirt, mousepad, wall clock, and button design while I cry a lot about Sarah Palin.

Update from Trafficker Press, which recently unvailed its home on the interweb.

Jared Stanley's The Outer Bay is now available!

"From our bay to yours for $8."

I've read it, and you will want to. Juicy late summer reading for your afternoons.

Selfishly working to improve oneself.

"Some Americans identify themselves as Irish, whereas others say they are Americans."
-found in textbook