TCUnderground twitter

if you follow us, we'll follow you.

http://twitter.com/eleven40seven

Rick Bass Reading

Friends--

Please join me for a stellar reading! And please pass this information on to students and friends. The reading is free!

Sept 22: Rick Bass, novelist/environmentalist

Reading at UTD at 7:30 pm in the Performance Hall

Rick Bass is the author of over twenty books. His first short story
collection, The Watch, set in Texas, won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award, and
his 2002 collection, The Hermit’s Story, was a Los Angeles Times Best Book
of the Year. Bass’s stories have also been awarded the Pushcart Prize and
the O. Henry Award and have been collected in The Best American Short
Stories. He was a finalist for The Story Prize in 2007 for his short story
collection The Lives of Rocks. He was a finalist for the 2008 National Book
Critics Circle Award (autobiography) for Why I Came West (2008). His most
recent book, The Wild Marsh, about his life in rural Montana was published
earlier this year.

You can read an excerpt from it at:
http://www.oprah.com/article/omagazine/200904-omag-rick-bass

Read more about the event at:
http://www.utdallas.edu/ah/events/detail.html?id=1220068171

Susan Briante, MFA, PhD
Assistant Professor
Aesthetic Studies
University of Texas at Dallas
800 W. Campbell Road--JO 31
Richardson, TX 75081-3021


http://www.ah.utdallas.edu/people/sbriante.html


http://ahsahtapress.boisestate.edu/books/briante/briante.htm

Dear Modifications by Trey Sager

You are the following dangerous words: 1. heart 2. love 3. mind 4. beauty and 5. eyes
(I don't consider beauty a failure, but that's just my opinion).
I wanted to save you because you are all so hackneyed;
maybe some of the words that typically surround you, I thought,
could give you some life?
So for example, for eyes, I wrote: four eyes, private eyes, snake eyes,
When Irish Eyes Are Smiling and Don't Shoot Until You See the Whites of Their Eyes.
For love I listed Hiroshima, From Russia with Love,
Love and Rockets, Love Is a Battlefield and You Can't Buy Me Love.
Maybe you were more political than I realized.
I subtracted you from these phrases, then scrambled your neighbors
into what I called a poem, but the end result was a solipsistic,
awkward definition for each of you
(I think I was trying to do something semiotic).
When I was about seven or eight, I found a blue jay with a broken wing in some nearby woods.
I ran home and told my mom, who gave me a shoe box and a pair of ski gloves
to handle him. My mom rushed us to the vet, and I felt so relieved.
But when we called later that afternoon to check on our patient, the vet had put him to sleep;
there was nothing he could do, he said.
Plato, in the Republic, says that poets must be exiled.
Shelley calls poets "the unacknowledged legislators of the world."
I remember the blue jay's eyes, looking up at me through the foot-length ferns
like I was going to kill him.
Just the exact opposite, I thought, cradling him in ski gloves.

(emailed to me by Tyler Hall)