The 12th Dodge Poetry Festival

One week to go...

My 11th time attending. Wordstock. Poetry Heaven. A gathering of the tribe in New Jersey.

dodgepoetry.org

Audiences of up to 20,000 expected for the 12th biennial Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, which will run from Thursday, September 25 through Sunday, September 28, 2008.

Join poets Chris Abani, Coleman Barks, Coral Bracho, Billy Collins, Lucille Clifton, Mark Doty, Martín Espada, Joy Harjo, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Edward Hirsch, Jane Hirshfield, Ted Kooser, Maxine Kumin, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sharon Olds, Linda Pastan, Charles Simic, C. D. Wright, Franz Wright and dozens of other accomplished poets, musicians and storytellers for four days of poetry and music beside the Musconetcong River and among Waterloo Village’s lawns, trees, and landmark historic buildings.

Blog Action

One month until Blog Action Day on October 15th.

Last year, they got more than 20,000 bloggers with an estimated combined audience of over 15 million viewers, to post about their slant on the environment for one day.

This year the topic will be poverty and bloggers who sign on will discuss that issue from the view of their own blog. Since this blog have a single view, perhaps I can consider the poverty of being a blogger.

They are hoping I will be nobler than that. Look at The Global Fund which combats AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria - 3 diseases that have a crippling effect on the fight against poverty. That's who the Blog Action Day folks chose to ask bloggers to donate their day's earnings to as their official Blog Action Day charity.That's why I thought, "Well, this blog makes no money, so why not write about that?"

Bookmarks

I picked up the magazine BOOKMARKS while killing some time in a Barnes & Noble cafe over coffee. The Edward Hopper illustration on the cover caught my eye. (Does B&N realize that people are using the store as a library? Is this a good thing for business?)

Bookmarks presents a few hundred book reviews each month with summaries of hundreds of opinions from every major newspaper and magazine. You get a comprehensive look at the latest fiction, nonfiction, and children's books.

They do classic books as well. The "Book by Book" author profiles focus on the major works of great writers, from Charles Dickens and Mark Twain to Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf.

Bookmarks also covers genres from the best American biographies to great mystery series, and uses experts in each issue to recommend the best books on a specific nonfiction subject: consciousness, games, ancient Greece, magic, travel, true crime...

They also publish lists of subscribers' favorites featuring lots of oddball choices that don't make the major reviews, and a profile of a book club discussing the books its members loved or hated.

Slacker Uprising

Love him or hate him, Michael Moore gets attention like few other documentary filmmakers.

Slacker Uprising is a new film by him that he is making available for a free download at slackeruprising.com starting September 23rd. (only available to US and Canadian residents though - hmmmm) It will be free via the web for three weeks.

It's directed at election time and I'm sure it will be loved and hated as much, or possibly more, than his earlier films. After all, Moore asks questions to his opposition like "What would Jesus bomb?"

Here's a preview via YouTube-



Start downloading, you slackers...

Big Questions

Big Questions was the theme for TED2008. So having Professor Stephen Hawking ask and try to answer some Big Questions about our universe, like about the Big Bang, makes sense.

How did the universe begin?
How did life begin?
Are we alone?

No, he doesn't answer these questions, but he talks about how we might go about answering them.