Posting some more pictures as a sort of “palate cleanser” while I grade. At the bazaar in Isfahan. Those have to be the largest prayer beads I’ve ever seen.
Also from Persepolis. Not someone whose bad side you want to be on.
A detail from Persepolis
Another one from the Grand Canyon
The Grand Canyon
Another break from grading: Norooz eggs from years and years ago.
I’d rather be under that tree on a day like today than grading, and that’s true even though the papers are pretty good.
Make sure you get my good side.
Without further comment.
That’s fifteen-or-so-year-old me in my drum corps uniform. I played bass baritone bugle, and I was actually pretty damned good. I don’t remember what awards ceremony this is or what I was up there to do, but I definitely don’t look happy about it.
“Google is reportedly paying Apple upward of fifteen billion dollars a year to remain the default search engine on iPhones.” From The New Yorker: What Google Search Isn’t Showing You
We met this guy in Iran, in the summer of 2008.
One more of Mahtab and Aunt Gussie’s scultpure.
I saw this on Twitter (h/t @StephenJFurlong) and it made me laugh out loud. 
When a poet’s explanations of the theory behind their work, or what they are trying to accomplish throught their work, is more interesting/compelling than the work itself. And why do I only seem to have this experience with poets?
This will be interesting to watch: Florida abortion ban violates religious freedom, lawsuit says - Miami Herald. And it will be telling to see what comes out of the woodwork in response.
I’m about a third of the way through a first pass at revising a 36 page essay and I just read something online that will require me to go back and revise again three pages that I thought I had nailed. Ah well, the joys of a non-linear process.
Currently reading: Shrapnel Maps by Philip Metres đź“š: As an academic, as a poet, I am fascinated and engaged, but I also ask myself, betraying a bias of my own poetics, outside of academia and other poets, of what practical use is this book and to whom?
Liquor-cabinet-top still life.
A sunflower in Darakeh, from our 2008 trip to Iran.
One more from the Vasa Museum.
This griffon, along with its twin on the opposite side of the gate you can see in the lower left-hand corner, guards the entrance nearest our building to the garden on the other side that lies in the center of our co-op. A similar pair guards each of the other five gates.
I keep seeing calls for submissions, and I keep having to remind myself that I have right now only three poems I am comfortable submitting, and one of them is 14 pages long—meaning there are really only two that have a reasonable chance and they’re out at enough places for now.
From our 2016 trip to Sweden. I wish I had been more careful about keeping track of where I took pictures. I took these in a museum, but I cannot find where I wrote down which museum it was.
Through the screen, in the light of an early summer evening, the buildings looked like shadows of themselves.
