"Moon River"

Moon River, wider than a mile,
I'm crossing you in style some day.
Oh, dream maker, you heart breaker,
wherever you're going I'm going your way.
Two drifters off to see the world.
There's such a lot of world to see.
We're after the same rainbow's end--
waiting 'round the bend,
my huckleberry friend,
Moon River and me.


music by Henry Mancini, lyrics by Johnny Mercer

But Galenson simply wanted to poll a broad cross-section of literary scholars about which poems they felt were the most important in the American canon. The top eleven are, in order, T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” William Carlos Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow,” Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife,” Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” Frost’s “Mending Wall,” Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” and Williams’s “The Dance.”

If I recall correctly, this is Gladwell talking about the thoughts and research for his latest book, Outliers. The paragraph sort of popped out and hit me in the face, and I realized that some of these pieces I am not familiar with. Hence I've begun a journey through the eleven poems. My mind right now is scattered, so I only attempted the first two. As Robert Lowell would say, "My mind’s not right."

We'll save the rest for a later day...

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

~Frost

Things on my mind...

My blog is expecting a new visitor so I decided to tidy up a bit.


Warren Buffet has a book I really want to read, The Snowball. I have the book and would like to start reading it but two things prevent this; 1) I haven't the time 2) It's preoccupied currently such as it is being used as a prop to elevate my monitor.

Also, there is a book on my desk about some ridiculous thing called a FairTax. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer right? Yup, I should read it.

Song: I Don't Mind
Album: Cherry Tree EP
Artist: The National

I've decided to start posting an occasional picture or two. This week in pictures; but only one or two, so as to keep a slight trickle of viewership. That would be good I think.

Ready for my third glass of gingerbread egg nogg, a close cousin to the potentially better tasting boiled-custard. Which, dear reader, do you prefer?

Cloud Gate (aka The Bean)

Chicago from a yacht (last summer)

Sunset on the Hancock 2

Sunset on the Hancock

I've followed the election pretty closely, but after Tuesday I'll be so happy to have this issue closed. It's very time consuming to keep track of every endorsement, poll, and op-ed piece that lands itself in the Time or the Journal.

This weekend hosted the notorious the GA-FLA game, so I took advantage of the weekend and rented 5 movies. Originally I was only going to rent 3, but it's not too much more expensive to get 5, so I went back through and picked out two more - turns out those two were my favorites. Roman Holiday with Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn. Also rented a John Wayne movie, The Searchers. Then there was Notorious, an Alfred Hitchcock movie that warrants recommendation.

I'm tired of writing. It requires too much thinking...

Tomorrow is a very important day.

And that's all I have to say about that.