Amazing thing, distance.

The sun has just set on Sydney in a glorious flash of color. In an hour or so, it's influence will have spread a world over, and, once more, the brilliance of our thermo-nuclear life giver will spread comparable color over the morning sky where my friends and loved ones will surely lie sleeping. The world is so large and yet so small by turns. If I decided that I absolutely had go home right now, it would take me at a bare, god-given minimum, 24 hours to do so at peak velocity. That's a large distance to traverse, given the speed of the beautiful machines of our age, yet, an hour or so from now, the same brother light waves that so recently made everyone here just stop and look up will be casting their same spell over my home continent and people. In a manner of seconds, I can send a message to just about anyone on the planet. God's inventions and our pitiful but ingenious ones do much to connect us over the vast and daunting spaces of this rock, but they cannot help me feel all that much closer to people and places and sights that now are just memories, snapshots on a mental wall occasionally given momentary movement by new information, new communication. Every time I talk with someone from home a few frames get added to the film reel of my mind, some based on experience, some rendered through the prism of imagination. It still remains a film, though, two dimensional and projected on a surface. You cannot touch the movies of your mind, and they cannot touch you.

Trying to convince Aussies of the gravity and majesty and general coolness of the Super Bowl is a bit like them trying to convince me of the gravity and majesty and general coolness of cricket. Neither efforts have any possibility of success, but I still managed to rope in some of the people here to come to a sports pub downtown to watch the Super Bowl on the 3rd. Due to the time difference, I have a feeling that we're going to be going around noon-time, but that's fine. I have a feeling they're just looking forward to being able to make even more fun of me, but, as usual, I just say "Bring it."

I'm giving a presentation on "After the Race," one of the short stories in "Dubliners" on Friday, so I have to go and reread it, take better notes, organize those notes, look for scholarly opinion (of which there are apparently is none, as most people skip over Dubliners or only give it passing reference before developing their great thesis on Ulysses), then write up something for real. The guy in class today, the tattooed badass with the American Flag t-shirt, will be a hard act to follow. Reading that, you may think I'm being facetious, but his presentation on "The Circus Animals' Desertion," was truly excellent. He analyzed the verse from every conceivable angle, truly made me think about the nature of inspiration, its relation to aging, the limits of creativity, and Yeats' particular amazing ability to constantly live up to the Modernist creed of "Make it new." His presentation was beautiful, really, though he spoke very quickly and in an Aussie accent of which I'm still catching only about 90%.

Wish me luck. Much love.Peace.B.

Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.