Something I thought about:

  • Narrative vs. lyric poetry

Something I did:

  • Soooo many things. It was a packed week!
  • Wrapped up the poetry part of the first-year survey course.
  • Caught up on grading.
  • Dissertation writing.
  • Other academic writing.

Something I read:

You don’t need to have exactly three elements in a braided personal essay, of course—whether you’re making challah or writing, there are all kinds of complicated braids. But, to move rather abruptly from food to geometry, just as three points define a plane, three elements define the field of an essay. When we read the Steven Hotdog tweet, we see the two points defining a line between the writer’s experience (hot dog memories) and factual research (hot dog history). But we also, consciously or not, see the infinity of possible planes including that line, and the way that a third point would collapse all those possibilities into one relationship, one interdependent structure. In that moment before the third nail goes in, we know that these two strands relate, but we don’t know what they mean. Meaning is defined by at least three points: the personal, the factual, and the resonance between them.