Chicks and cheesy

I read in the New Yorker today that the Dixie Chicks have a new album coming out later this month, with writing credits going to (amongst others) Gary Louris of the Jayhawks, and Pete Yorn. Interesting.

I would love to hear Pete Yorn live. I have 3 live albums and a few of his others. He is great. He's like those floppy haired dudes that were inaccessible to me in my 20's. I used to make eyes at a floppy haired guy I will call Peter Birkenstock (I don't remember his surname anymore) in my English 503 class at UNH. My professor was Bob Connors, editor of The St. Martin's handbook. He despised my class, calling us a bunch of "dunderheads." He almost killed my path as an English major, but I persevered. Connors didn't feel that we read the texts as closely as we could, but I think we feared him so much that no one felt competent to speak. Peter looked very much out of a film adaptation of an E.M. Forster novel, and had I been a little more ballsy, I may have made my move.

Bob Connors now has a writing center named after him at UNH, in Ham Smith. He died tragically in a motorcycle accident in NH in 2000. My fondest memory of him was visiting his office with a classmate who also lived in the same dorm as me. She had red hair and perky boobs and I recall him saying to her breasts what a wonderful student she was, and then looking at me like a mound of gray lint and saying as an after thought, "Oh, you too Sarah." I wasn't convinced.

I still have my writing from college. Some is particularly cheesy, but okay. Despite being a librarian I don't feel as well read now as I was then. In Touch, and People are not the most mind massaging of reading materials. I am reading Markus Zusak's The Book Thief right now, and what writing am I doing besides blogging is basically essays of brevity.