Last night was one of those nights. Mmm, didn't sleep well, but that's all right, you still gotta attack the day. Get going. Got a confession to make. I can't see you. I've been hiding something from you.  Thank you. Thank you Bridget. It smells kind of funky. Chicken teriyaki. And spicy operator. Nice. Just has a zest of that I'm not used to. How's the steak? It's good. It's good. It tastes real. Yeah. It's a real deal. Thank you Costco. Not too shabby. Thank you Bridget. Yeah. Brigid. Brigid. She's not English, she's Irish. Oh, St. Patrick's Day is coming up. The office for the day. Beautiful day. Oh, I think it's like 75 degrees in Denver. Amazing. And getting a lot of funky looks with the cardboard on the car now on the broken window and the Seek Beauty work card. Love each other tag. So anyway, just waking the world up. Waking the world up. Favorite store. Here we go. Time to secure our patio furniture. Make sure it's safe. So, going to get changed. The guy that just drove by in that red car was jamming out to the soundtrack of the Little Mermaid. Now, I'm just making fun of myself because I know what that song is, but that's kind of funny. All right.  Love it. And trivia question. I'm watching a documentary right now on Tom Petty. Do you guys love music? I love music. Especially old music. Music with history. So, pretty big Tom Petty fan. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. But the trivia question is, do you know the name of his first band? I'll tell you one thing. It starts with an M and also that he started this band and he's from, and I didn't know this, I watched this documentary from Gainesville, Florida. Who'd have thunked it? So, what was the name of this first band? And it starts with an M. All right. Time to go home. Good run. Good run. Out on the furniture. I better be careful. How much I invite you guys over to come break in the furniture. We might have a whole party here all summer. But you are welcome. Calculating my mind the salsa. Mama's saving papa. Getting some PBR. Degrees out. Gotta go get some PBR. And we're going to fire up the hose. All right, Joseph. Hot, I know that. That's what they need your PBR. Just run around. Run around.  I know that was a little bit. But we had cash. Oh, yeah. We had extra cash. Oh, babe. I know it was a little bit of an impulse buy. We needed it. All right. My gosh. I hope you like them. I love little mo. You happy something. And I was like, I'm getting this one. So you guys, you guys know me. I'm happy with PBR. You know, poor boy, rocket juice. Remember that? Remember that vlog? Yeah. Yeah. With the fire. Upper right hand corner. But my buddy started this brewery right here called Elevation in Salida, Colorado, essentially. And it is delicious. But you know, it's high end. Yeah. Good. Come on. Thank you for treating me. That's amazing. Hands out. Like for me. What are you guys doing? Oh, you're making a stream? Yeah. Oh my gosh. It's going all the way to Susan and Wally's gutter. We just, we just, uh, we won't tell the city of Englewood. Why? Because it's so fun. What you're doing. We're probably going to buy about $12 worth of stuff. Yeah. But we're basically strategizing. Scouting. Yeah. Scouting. Yeah. We'll be scouting today. Patio furniture. Mm-hmm. And possibly an umbrella. No judging line. Hello. All right. We're back from Ikea. Lighting. All about lighting. So I bought these lights. And this is going to be really handy. Especially for travel. Ayo. How's that look? How's that look? Huh? Oh. Toys from Ikea. This was, okay. It was $4.99. Which actually is a little expensive in my mind. I think it probably should be like $2.99. Maybe $1.99. But that, and thank you guys for sticking around. 7, 8, 9, 10 minute vlogs. I don't know how long this is going to take. But you guys are amazing. I applaud you. I bow down to you guys for staying with me. You're all with the shenanigans. All right. See beauty. Look hard. Buy good lighting. And love each other. See you tomorrow.


We have two wonderful poets for you to listen to this afternoon. Carol Westberg is going to read first, and then we'll have Pamela Harrison. So I'm going to introduce Carol now, and then she'll read. And then I will introduce Pamela and then she'll read. And then we'll have some time at the end where you can talk with them. Carol Westberg is poet, teacher, and editor two full collections of poetry. The first one was Slipstream, for which she was a finalist in the 2011 New Hampshire Literary Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry. Her second book, Terra Infirma, was a finalist for the 2014 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. She's written many additional poems. Two of them were honored. One, The Map of Uncertained Soundings was a finalist for the Ruth Stone Prize. And Tyranny of Dreams was a selection for the Poet Laureates New Hampshire Poet Showcase. She's published in Prairie Schooner, Hunger Mountain, Salamander, Calyx, North American Review, and other journals. She currently consults as a writer, editor, and project manager in such organizations and companies as Apple, the Aspen Institute, the Institute for the Future. These are very, you know, wow. I read this and thought, ooh, that is a really impressive. John Wiley and Sons, Josie Baz, Simon Pierce. Oh, that little university on the West Coast called Stanford and many others. She has a degree from Duke. Another one from that university out there on the West Coast starts with an S. But most importantly, Vermont College. She's worked as a communications director at Vermont Law School, director of creative services at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, and on and on. But what we really want to hear from her is her poetry. So let's welcome Carol. Thank you so much. Can everyone hear? I want to acknowledge all the people who worked really hard to make Palm City a thriving endeavor for poetry for many years. It's, I think, very important. And to have it out in the world, is that good? Good, all right. And it's true, my most important degree was from Vermont College because it was about poetry. And by that time, it was all because I wanted to do it. Makes a big difference. Can you speak into the mic? Can I speak into the mic? Can you hear better now? Yes, a little bit louder. A little louder? All right. I think we'll just have to talk about that. Is that better? Yes. Good. Thank you. I'd like to know whether or not you're going to hear. I'm going to start with, after the bell stops, the sound. My father asks, who lives in that White House? Just visible out the kitchen window. I reply, as I did five minutes before. I don't know, Dad. He will ask again. As he will ask, how long ago my mother died? He could not remember. Not the day she died or the days after. When he kept weeping, can I see her again? Have we held the service yet? His wife is nine weeks gone. And he wonders where she is, where he is. And who lives in that house way up there? I don't know what he can see of her face and hands. A gestures once familiar as his own. Does he still hear her calling in the next room? Does he remember her hair as auburn or white? Her breasts before the surgery or after? Her image slowly fades to a stranger's. And this moment is all he has. Just this within waves of resonance of his story, of hers. I'm going to go back in time a little bit to the farm called the destructive power of pigs. I take those pigs everywhere under the eight layers of my skin, midwinter sows, piglets attached, sadide mort, the boar, I ride out of the feedlot, willing him to scratch wings through his white, wiry hide. He likes his straw clean, gates open, every itch scratched. Pig nature calls him to grab the melon rind with his whole mouth. My father gives me the runt to bottle feed until it can fend for itself. Years later, under my azure coat, I carry that piglet to Istanbul and Paris.  A carving knife slipped under its hide.  The pig girl travels everywhere inside, still wanting, wanting the melon, the wings. Halo, you inhale through a hole in your throat attached to the machine that breathes for you. A silver halo drilled into your skull secures your caged body, silent as sand. They've stitched the cut that gaped from your mouth into your left cheek. You sleep as long as the drug grips into your vein. Wake to hear, see your mouth words, unable to escape pain. It's my turn to see you alone. How small you look, big brother. Hands still, legs still. I'm afraid to wake you, but touch your shoulder, wrist, foot. I worry that your swollen feet will get cold exposed with no sheet. Then remember, they can't be a source of pain. Only a miracle could let you move again below the neck. How could you not fear this tethered life more than death? You climbed high into the Andes, cast your small, plain shadow over ocean and desert. And just yesterday tore a brick neck down a Mazazal trail to crash and sever the lacework of nerves at the top of your spine. A mercy that you who don't believe in miracles wake able to shape the words, let me go.  So some of us live longer than others, and some of us just live on with whatever it is that is handed to us. This poem is called A Tyranny of Dreams. I don't mean to compete over whose child suffers more. Yours, bleeding, hope away each month. Or mine, signed up for our first shock treatment. Nemons impassive over all our children's dreams. As a mother, I know fear wraps its hands around the throat. A phone call can turn the night air to ice. Today, a fire burns in the wood stove, and Garrison Keeler jokes on the radio about SSRIs. I doubt his son ever took a razor and sliced line by line into his thigh to silence voices clamoring inside. But what do I know of his son? Our daughters. They all must strive to rise each day and find two comfortable shoes to slip into. I've grown wary of the tyranny of dreams. Just now, I mean to pad downstairs for tea and toast that all spread thick with your wild plum jam. I don't know that it gets happier, but I'm going to read the title. The title poem, this is called Terra Inferma. A gullswing tangled in net, strandy and high tide, scavenging I don't touch it. No place is safe with a window open, screens off, alligators slithering in the yard. My piece of Terra Inferma. A slow dance opens the heart. The whole gapes widens in a gyre. Don't sew me up yet. Let me help you with the buttons, the zipper. I'm in over my heart, the moon. My idea of you, our lips electric. All the women in the exercise room had lost a breast, usually the left. We woke to morphine dreams, dared to touch our incisions. The alien construction, warm to the touch, gives no milk. The glass eye does not see. I slouch toward the corner store, tubes protruding. Each night I take flight, return in time for toast and eggs.   Sparks fly from my eyes and mouth, the body capacious as stars. Catch the wheel and spin it into the vast. So I'm going to read some newer poems. I don't promise that they're happier, but this is sort of what's been going on. So here we go. This one's called Once More With No Feeling. Everyone is talking about the new moon, blood moon, and another thing. Soon it will be time to go. So love the slab you stand on. Inside the body, a willow catches fire in this minute, in the next, in the unreal country of next year. That breath is passed. Another vagrant passes through. Inside, like outside, space expands in the ambient anxiety of my night watch. After the surgery, I felt relieved to not have sex. No, I don't want to talk about it now. Maybe in the lifespan of an ant, of a mountain range heaved up from the sea, I will find two sticks to rub together for fire. I slide my fingertips lightly from collarbone down respone to the hollow that separates what remains of cleavage. Soft slope to the right, taut ridge to the left. Search for the margins of sensation for endings, beginnings, as feeling appears or disappears, skin warm to the touch, but numb as an empty bowl. Next one's called Accumulations. It has an epigraph from the poet Gupu. The thing in itself has no abnormality. A small spider spins in the north corner of our bedroom in the momentum of our life with words. You tell me why the eighth king cut the skyrope. We alight in storm, drought, aspirations to be steadfast, pause in the hard knowledge of bone protruding on my x-ray. I become more unknowing each day, crack one egg in the glass bowl, another distracted in the sink. Don't hope for a better past. Accumulation of snapped wings, catcalls, cornells, boxed owls, be calmed on the post-coital sea. Do you hear my flinch and quiver? See the light in my fingers spill out my eyes. And the isolation of this cork-lined room cruised was large enough to contain kindness. I pause, open the door, outside as inside. We shift and glide. There's another kind of gliding. It's called drift. Mid-afternoon in the slow lane on I-89, on the verge of drifting right, as usual, barely aware of threats too huge to take in, trucks speed past, my hands light on my own wheel, attention fraying into space, torpor, fractions of seconds elapse. Before I remember, I must remember to stay alert in the gaps, in time, in space, wing beats before blackout, impact, screech of metal on guard rail, adrenaline surge, grip, lift, and brain takes charge. Slows my car down, tests for alignment, listens for signs it's safe to motor on home slowly in this space and time. No deer or humans were harmed in my laps. Just one left quaking, aware she was spared for an instant on a cliff's edge, awake. Edible in edible. In Reykjavik, I sip birch bark tea, eat spotted catfish wrapped in moss. The wide mind takes it all in.  Will I eat carrot but not cow, sheep, not dog, pig, not horse, pheasant, not cormorant, or puffin, charming thieves with parrot beaks who don't hunt their own food but steal other birds prey, humpbacks taken schooling fish, and I taste ninky quail disguised in lime sauce on a white plate. God sees everything I do, being with me, being in, consuming what I consume. Fish eyes stare up at us, make a face on the plate, unnumbered the eyes of God. I'm just going to read a couple more new ones in almost 10. Snow moon for the disruptor in chief's clothing. I feel the full moon's pull, wake to radiance out my window. Snow moon under cloud covers gaps, spilling uneven light over new snow. I think of the downed trees and fungus-covered stumps on yesterday's mink-brook walk, water rushing through the narrows where ice breaks free. Briefly eclipsed, the snow moon shines over us all, sleeping or waking. Eyes open or closed. If, as the betas say, all intelligences awake with the morning, when our crazed chief tweets at 3 AM ego swelled his dark vision descending, he too feels the snow moon's pull, speaks and gestures to effects unknown. Powerless over the moon, he can't steal our freedom to extend him benevolence this radiant night. Bitter house in my fear, I'll end up bitter as chicory and alone, alone, wind quipping long grasses in the dunes. With my fear, I'll end up like the husband I left in the wake of my faithlessness, both of us wandering a wilderness of concrete streets. No one to go home to, no one to talk to in the swaddling dark. Past my fear, I'll end up bitter as burdock root, like a child beaten with her father's studded belt, grown, scarred, and angry, leaving home afraid of no ghost more than her father, living alone. I'm not alone in my fear, I'll end up like my ex, who fears his next wife will leave him and she does. I've grown wary of acrid greens. I brew bitter-nailed tea, serve kiwi and papitas as antidotes to soothe my two grown daughters, thin as reeds, and not alone in their fear, they'll end up on some windswept coast, scutting along, along like a sea foam, left quivering on damp sand. And I have one more to hope will be a little more optimistic. Just, you know, we do what we can here. This is called, we pass like thieves. We pass in the grocery store, quilling our anonymous carts. We pass invisible as a summer breeze, tubes hidden under loose clothes. We pass marked by scars familiar to our lovers, like sleepwalkers. Our hands graze the banister on the way downstairs. We pass like thieves, stealing each day we can, like the guilty, cleared of all charges, like innocents falsely accused. We pass for natives, unremarkable, unscathed. We pass like ghosts of our former selves, sorrows mingling in the air, like snowdees overhead, we sweep north or south in season. We pass like comets, trailing our cosmic dust. So thank you all. And thank you. We'll have some time at the end if you would like to talk to Carol about any of those amazing poems. Next, we have Pamela Harrison, winner of the 2002 Penn Northern New England Discovery Poet Award. She has read her poems at the Library of Congress and has five full-length collections of poetry. Stereocticon, Oki Chronicles. And that comes from, I'm assuming, she says she was born and raised in Oklahoma, so Oki Chronicles. Out of Silence, which was cited as one of three notable new books of poetry and the Denver Post's Book Beat column. In 2012, a volume titled What to Make of It. And that is a recounting of her adventures with her doctor husband in challenging circumstances in the Arctic, Africa, and Central America. She will be reading from her most recent volume, Glory Bush and Green Banana. Pamela is an adjunct professor in English literature for the University System of New Hampshire and in creative writing for Dartmouth College. Please welcome Pamela. It's lovely to see all these lovely faces out in the audience. And thank you all for coming. I'm very happy to read from this particular book. Lindy said, told you that I traveled with my husband, who sadly passed unexpectedly away two years ago. But before that happened, he took me to Africa during the reign of Ibi Amin and to Finland, where I had just a small nervous breakdown because I didn't know the language. And then he had malaria and almost died on our honeymoon in Africa. And then we went to Honduras and the Arctic and all these places. So this particular book, which was actually the first collection that I put together, I wrote after we came back from a year's stay on a tiny Caribbean island with our eight-year-old daughter, Kate. And Dennis was the Project Hope Doctor. And Kate was the only resident white child on the island. And I taught at the high school. And it was an absolutely challenging, beautiful, difficult, memorable not to be missed year. So this is the story. It was a finalist in 12 national contests. And then I just couldn't, I had to move on. So I put it in a drawer for 16 years. And forgot about it. And then by a circuitous route, my publisher found out about it and it came to light. And regrettably, Dennis died a year before. Just the year before it could come out. But he was so excited about it. So this is an interview to him. He's one of the major players. And I'm going to just move sort of quickly through in a chronological way so you can get a sense of the bite of the place. The first poem is called Carriacou. And there's a word, manumission in it. Manumission is the term for the formal emancipation of all of Britain's colonial slaves. And it happened in 1834. Carriacou, a sound like birdsong. Ring neck dove, a sidling to sleep in a tamarind tree. This isle of reefs winks eight by three miles small in a peacock sea, for refugees from plagues of ants on Guadalupe first fled with their thousand slaves. Abandoned here at manumission, unprofitable as a cracked jug, suffering two seasons, sodden and draught. Chromanti, Igbo, Chamba survived and thrived. Among their 7,000 descendants will raise to 10 the number of white planter volunteers. Arriving in a squall, the pilot takes two tries to land on a runway grazed by goats and cows. The road trickles out to a jungle trail. Climbing vines insinuate through slatted blinds. Rain slithers in muddy waves beneath the doors. Gurgles from the roof into a basement cistern, our catchment for the year, purified for us by some eyeless fish eating larvae in the dark. Too tired to unpack, we eat a meal of crackers and sardines. The cat mules in unfamiliar rooms. Kate hums comfort to her dolls as the sun sinks into sea. No twilight softens the care worn day. When we turn on the lamp, every curious bug in the bush shoulders in to welcome us. No painter's brush. While you spend your days running island clinics, attending the sick and dying, corralling kids from undercots to tests for sickle cell, trekking to make calls in mud shanties, cocked like top hats on steep volcanic hills. Yes, I cope at home, unpacking our belongings and entertaining Kate. But also, darling, dealing with mahogany roaches, fastened like old broaches at the neck of my nightgown. Long-horned hoppers gripping the bed close like a guilty conscience. And beside me, on the kitchen wall, tarantulas, coys tinted as a lover's hand, striped black and yellow scarlet-painted caterpillars, lascivious and plump as grandmasquil bosses to the frangipani boughs. Olscorpio, like an aroused lothario, sachets smugly up the veranda and into my sleepless nights. In a place so thickly strewn with sneaky creatures, it's hard to pretend platonic thoughts. One orchid sings its satisfactions, many multiply delight. These insects, though, grown strange with camouflage and geared for eating, startle singly. In numbers, they appall. Leaf by leaf, I will watch them cart whole trees away, caravans departing with the lavishments of Rome, eating till my aesthetics pared down to an eyeball on nature's plate. No painter's brush saves jungle blooms from their undoing. Here, dear, racks the way of the place. Export English.  I must, if there to pass the test that prunes their futures in the bud. How, without books, a library, or some reinforcing pattern in their mother tongue, am I to teach them? I'm crossed from speaking over the rub and bustle of too many kids and too few desks, above the clanking roar of generators at the electrical plant next door. I see the attendance sprawled on the floor two days by the din to think or move. Now rain clatters down like hard consonants on the corrugated roof and were caught in the drumming. Lester's large eyes stare from his honey-brown face in the rear of the rain-darkened room, dreaming again of the yellowfin he fishes for on weekends off the rocks at Belmont with a bent wire and beach-combed scrap of monofilament line. Leandra folds her elegant bones and rebraids the ribbon in her corn-road hair. Kinroy taps his pencil to the Hillsborough beat of hi-fi calypso that colors the street beside the rum shops and fixing tree, where his father repairs every truck that breaks and car that dies from the beatings they take on the high climb to Windward. Kinroy's got the music in him and knows enough about cars to make him golden wherever he goes. And Magdalene, Magdalene, my mischief, father and five brothers lost at sea. She's got some brilliant excuse for not doing homework and heads to town with her sleeves rolled up, breaking all the rules. If she wrote her reasons out, she'd have a book too smart for her own good. If she doesn't get knocked up first, some righteous Pharisee will take her down. We gaze past one another in the gloom, waiting for the rain to stop bringing news through the painless windows of a life whose necessities and pleasures spring far beyond the rigid rules of my foreign grammar. Only one in six of these kids will pass the government test, skimmed like sweet cream and stolen away to life abroad. The rain relents. We return to what came first, old tales told around a fire before the written word was known. Prometheus, who brought that fire. Fair Pandora, who saved Hope's gift. Sly Anansi, a shanty spider who stole ripe breadfruit from proud, suspicious Cassander. And Neami, the god of all things who hung the moon for all Anansi's sons. Tropical math. Take 300 kids in a one room grade school divided by four chocolates blackboards, times zero desk paper, pencils, books, plus every lesson learned by rote equals a cacophony beyond my powers to compute. It takes no prodigy to know our eight-year-old and I go nose to nose each morning bluddying the sacred rules. Oh, boy, bluddying the sacred rules of homeschooling before I leave to teach the island kids each day. Mother, daughter, playmates by default. Now must we prove so teacher pupil to? Blessedly my headmasters got the answer. Mascot first former Kate will come to college. A head short of seventh grade shoulders, fair-haired child in a sea of dark, now out of the house in school and loosed from the frazzle of her mother's hair. But catalog of split lips, scraped shins, lumps and blood bruises, plucked ribbons, dismantled braids, hidden books and stolen lunches, snatched at, scratched her path barred by teasing teens and still Kate rises to their every bait. She sets her chin and scowls, sticks both elbows out, saves her tears for home. Today one clots her lash as she declares she hates me for our coming here. I wanted to tell her it was her father's idea. But she's also a heroine of the story because she's one of the bravest little kids I ever saw. You know, we didn't have mosquito netting for the first three months during the rainy season because the house that we'd been given to live in was a house for January, February and March when there are no books. So, but her solution was so sane and so simple and she never whippered, she never complained, she never cried about it, I can't believe it. She would get into bed and pull the sheet up over her head and then tuck it in all around her through, you know, and she slept under her sheath until we got some mosquito netting. What a kid. Now she loves to travel, can you believe it? Paradise unfurled, there's a term obia, meaning witchcraft or spell. Paradise unfurled, the tropical sun sets somewhere beyond the bulwark of trunks, vines and jungle scrub that muscle from our backyard all the way to where we're told smugglers load their boats with dope by night for richer markets north. Rufus drops his cutlass to help me cut a view. Armed with garden shears and pruning tongs, I'm gloved, trousered, long-sleeved and de-hatted against caustic blossoms posing as bugs, venomous bandits passing as sticks, life so disguised, half the time I don't know what I'm hacking at. Three hours work clears an arm's length more. Sinking into a chair to sit my rum, I see the sunset just. Pearly clouds mount behind chapokare, beaches glow pale pairings of the moon. Godiva's working late, digging her okra slope with a mannequin blade. 82, she waves a stringy arm tougher than her Bible's cover. Before he goes, Rufus gathers stinkbush leaves for his baby's clothes. Obia, he says, against the evil devil. What do I know? I have scant purchase on a view. Green mango chutney, there's a term for this, jumbies, jumbies are West Indian ghosts of the dead. Sick of sameness, I want a condiment to dandia drab food. Dennis and I both lost 17 pounds this year, you have to understand, the food was iffy. Something saucy to give some relish to the rice. High over the forest trail, a mango tree waves inverted skirts, casting a somber shade where it's rumored, headless jumbies lurk. Scoffing at credulity, I climb laden boughs to steal the new fruit hanging plump as purses. Bag filled, I scramble home, peel and cut the pulp, macerate and salt then stew with sugar, vinegar, ginger root and raisins, gone only a little wormy in their box. After dinner, 10 bottles glisten on the counter like miser's coin, hoarded for my tasting, late alone. Shadow at my back, greed attends my pleasure.  Refusing the jar I offer from my store, Rufus shakes the black rattle of his rastafarian locks and reproves green mango jucu. Don't you know? No, I didn't know, nobody knew that. Okay, this is the end of the poems that end the first section. And it introduces, the second of these two poems, introduces the argument that begins to take, that has already begun to take place between the romantic woman, at least she used to be romantic and the realist husband, right? Okay, Halloween. As all the mothers do back home, I've draped our living room with crepe paper, leering cardboard jack-o'-lanterns and a life-size laughing skeleton hanging from the ceiling on a string. I've invited six children up from town for a party tonight, bobbing for limes, pinning the tail on the donkey, costumes, animal masks, cookies, popcorns, favors. One kid may prove Kate's playmate by and by, but something strange is up before the sun is down. Streams of villagers climb the hill beside our house. In hushed tones and nervous whispers, they call it our gate for the doctor. A suicide, they say, hanging in the mango.  Forget the party, no parent or child will brave our road for months to come. So, island suicide, first part, first half is the wife speaking and the second half, the doctor. Two weeks, he hung with the birds beneath the shelter of the mango tree. Slender, long fingers of leaves, pieced sunshine into dappled shadow, hung sheets of sea squall out to dry and sewed each evening star into his midnight cloak. The rain bird sat at his shoulder and the goats and cows grazing beneath his gaze were satisfied. He oversaw it all. Guavas swelled, quawks out of the tree, and the dogs and cows gracing beneath his gaze Guavas swelled, coral and yellow and ripened, fell plump as ready expectations, leaving delicate tracings in the long, blonde grass. It was as fine a place as any he knew. After gray years abroad, working steerage and hustling like a rat through alleyways of Brooklyn, he could hear the sea and see it, bluer in sunshine in the tropical sky, branches creaked like a ship in the breeze and it felt like the voyage home. The doctor demures, it wasn't like that. Bodies wrought in this heat. The poor man's head detached and rolled, flying crusted down a hill of dirt. His limbs, what the land crabs didn't eat were piled like dunnel below the rope. You want to prettify to escape the ugly truth. The wretch was mad, so tormented, suffocation offered his broken brain relief. We'll all come to it in our saddened boxes. Though the whole village could see and smell the fact, I had to pronounce him. It made me gag. Well, let me introduce you to a few of the characters. Odinga quashy. And she's gonna use the word juking again. It's a juking board, which is what you wash your clothes on. Odinga quashy. Grown so old and weak, her children must feed her. Odinga drifts most of every day, somewhere beyond Lester, chatting with friends now dead, humming tunes at her juking board. Today she walks off a cloud toward the open arms of her young mother, hits her head on the floor so hard the family sends for the hope doctor to certify her death. As the white man, bearded as the blessed Nazarene, bends to read her lidded eyes, they flutter open. Then, wee foo, she says, it takes a mess of talking to convince Odinga she hasn't waked in heaven. So here's a poem in honor of Dennis, Doctor Hopeful. That's sort of what they called it, Doctor Hopeful.  No generator means no refrigeration, means no blood, no plasma, no saline, no lights, and no night flights from this tiny island anchored in the ocean, softly suing dark. Two months ago, my hope doc had to call the Coast Guard cutter up through heavy seas to save a young mother in convulsions. Bent over her travail in the heaving hold, looking in his life vest like a wounded frigate bird, he remembers now how his own spirit tossed on the waves, steeps, and troughs. That night, the baby died, though the mother lived, and in Grenada was delivered of her lost hope, so gone to the world, she never believed his tale of so much danger in the dead of night. Now, when Kanisha's baby's heartbeat stops pulsing through the cord, the doctor steps outside to mourn beneath the canopy of stars. Haley's comet curls, a vagrant, Haley's comet curls, a vagrant comma in heaven's unbroken code. He wonders again why he came, what it was he hoped to do.  The doctor holds the tiny body close, breathing his last extravagant hope into its thimble full of lungs. Minutes pass, his eyes blur with weariness or tears. The deck of the baby's chest rises and falls on the desperate waves of his desire, but the borrowed breath at last takes hold, harbored in the body of a boy whose name and strapping health thereafter make a sign of saving grace to all who know the truth of baby Dr. Hopeful Bristol's birth. Mr. Clement gives a lesson in good manners. I come, all business to a shop, to see if he will mend my broken chair. Sawdust, like golden snow, drifts in the notches of his lays and saws, lights the dusky halo of his hair. I start straight in with what I want, how the cane broke and what I'd like to pay. Mr. Clement looks twice away, abashed, sets his tools down, wipes his face, waits before me with his proffered hand. Greetings first I learn how the family is, then how things prosper at the school. Our hands joined all the while, moving gently up and down, raising the rungs of our relation to that cordial height where work may rightly start. Three more, we got time for three more. There's a word blocko in this. It's a big dance party that they always would locate at the crossroads so that they could put the amps on the four corners of the roads and you would dance in the middle of the amps. It was really loud. Rough magic. Kate's one her place with Susan at the blocko and big drum. Sitting at Miss Ina's knee, shaking a red rattle in time with the beat, she dangles a pink flip-flop from her toe. In petticoats, Susan passes Papa Labia's cup. Fire lights the whites of teeth and eyes. Kate's face glows like a ghost of the moon in a camera flash. As the big drum ends, reggae and calypso blasts from amps stacked like obelisks at Bogle's Crossroad. Music swells, orgasmic, catching up the circle of revelers, rippling out in a galactic spiral through the cloud, crowd until even shadowy bodies at the outer edge of dark sway like sea fans in the oceanic tide of sound. The dusty scene is weirdly pretty. Dark arms flailing and loose hips grinding, so far removed from parades, march back home, memorial days with lifeless wreaths and marble tombs. Pushed back when the center circle grew, I watched Kate across uncrossable space as Logan, the horny schizophrenic who wears no underwear beneath his holy clothes, draws near her. Pale moon shines and dark stars spin. Island women guard her as a mother would. Kanisha plants an elbow like a truncheon on his chin. Kate's mouth opens in a perfect, oh. Just today, I sent her to Miss Inas for some rice. Tiny grains spilled after her down the trail. Enough. Friends, you bring me precious field eggs. Tiny, wrapped in newsprint, bags of cornmeal ground by hand, sour sauce, pumpkins, guava cheese in season, and quarts of pigeon peas rattling in a milk pan. And I, who have always given what I needed least, whose rooms have wheezed with plenty, see myself burdened with belongings, spending a wealth of worry over loss. Take now my gifts, new needles unparodied by salt air, fishing hooks for your lines, extra shirts and shoes and all my gratitude for teaching me how much a little is. We have time for one last. Glory Bush and Green Banana. This is what I saw. A lone fisherman coiled about a rod of muscled concentration on the seaford, dripping rocks of Vogelstown. The amber hour leaned, and everything around him poured and ran in rhythmic sway. Gulls and turns crowded the air. In a flash, he set the scent and strain to pull his harvest in. So it looked. As in a narrow boat, we cut a seam across the surface of the sunlit bay. Our boat was painted red, and from the shore, so others said, appeared suspended on a burnish tray. Life's a ditch, you say, and better told in coarse erosion than Eden's garden glade, slim comfort in a universe of random stars. You sighed the peeling rasp of scavenging birds, the ulcer on his leg that oozed, and painful truth, his son inherited an illness born by the love that brought him to be born. Reality, you say. In the shade of glory bush and green banana, this fisherman will string his salted catch to dry. All day, he'll mend his nets and tend his traps in a frothing tide of chickens and children. The wide world is, and we are of it. Why not praise the gift life gives? Why speak, except words convey some rough gleam of truth? Why gaze so intently at a loved one's face, except the particulars gathered there may be touched, and in the touching compose a universe of feeling? I say, the late sun shone, striking countless barbs and plumes on raucous birds feathered breasts, making radiant curves of outstretched wing. Thank you. We have this room for another 30 minutes, so we have plenty of time for conversation with these two amazing poets. Shall we come up? Why don't you come up? And then Carol and I can speak in unison at least. Anybody have any questions? Yes? Thank you so much for involved, both of you. I was wondering if you might speak a little bit to what your revision process is, as you're writing. Well, time does amazing things. If your manuscript is sat in a drawer for 16 years, what happened in the meantime was that I actually grew into being a poet. I never quite claimed that yet, although I supposedly had a my MFA, but it was very hard to claim being a poet yet. One of the things that I got to do when I reread the book for the first time in 16 years, I saw immediately all the things that were incomplete and needed changing about it. Time is a wonderful editor, and it helps to have been working at it for all those years in the meantime. So I took the liberty. I wanted to keep the arc of the story, the same, the characters, the same, the issues, the same. I did allow myself to rename the book because I realized that it was the Glory Bush and Green Banana poem that needed to be the book, because it's the poem that was arrived at. It was the knowledge that I achieved. And then there were all these little waterfall poems that were about three lines long. It was all the rage back when. I don't know why. I think it was something to do with Robert Bly, but anyway. Little poems like this. And I thought, well, I never lineated them. I never got them into shape. I never shaped those poems. It was about a third of the volume. No wonder it never did one. It was a finalist, but never one. But this was the great glory. I got the rare privilege of applying experience to the manuscript and saving that third of the poems that have been not completed. So that was my method for this book. I'm speaking about book revision, which is a challenging process for most of us. I think the question about revision around poems, individual poems. And I will say that for me, the ones that in the end I'm happiest with are the ones that come fast, or just I felt compelled to write. And even though I may tinker with them for certainly months, I mean, often years, I'm not fast writer. I think sometimes it can be very helpful if you have a writing group to have people give you feedback on poems and they can be invaluable. And sometimes it's good not to listen to other people.  But a lot can happen in revision. We can jettison easily half very often in doing that, at least I find. I'm not sure that was an answer to your question. I mean, it was all of it. I mean, I was meaning that poetry writing process, but that was actually very interesting to hear about your book editing process. I do know poets who don't revise, who just write, and that's it. They might change a tiny bit, but I think people are different. I revise. I like the revision process. But some poems have files this thick, because you haven't found the right window in. Or at least I haven't found the right window in. And then there are the ones that fall like a little pearl up from the top of your subconscious into words. And those are gifts. And that's when we're just speakers that something was given to us. But revision is critical, but it's the poems that just write themselves that are oftentimes the ones that last long. And you're in our pleasure that the words still still alive, if you're very good. They still speak to us after years. Yes? Can the same thing in the writing process? What do you find as a writer causes writer's block? That's a sensitive question. Try two part of it. I have periodically fallen into silences when I finished What to Make of It, which was the last book before this one. I felt that I had come to the end of something. In a natural end, one would expect some silence in the wake of that. But then it deepened, and it deepened, and it deepened. And then it became writer's block. And I was very, I began to be quite disturbed. But you know what happened? You know who brought me back? I decided that I was going to reread all of my favorite Shakespearean plays. Because I came this close to doing graduate school in Shakespearean literature. And then I didn't. I became a teacher instead. And then I found poetry, which was much better. But rereading him taught me, retaught the pleasure that I took in the language. It was the language that brought me to poetry. Because I certainly hadn't led any kind of life to write about at that point. It was the words. It was the way they felt in your mouth, and the muscles of it, and the sounds, and the way they fit together. I rediscovered, and I would give myself a week to read the play. And I was using the very textbook that I had used in college. So that I had all my little minuscule, little pencil and notes and everything. And that was so cool to revisit her, whoever she was. And then at the end of the week, I would invite friends in. And I would get CDs of my favorite place. And we would have it on viewing. And that was wonderful. And so by the end of that year, all of that joy, all of that pleasure in the medium, in the medium of words, brought me back. Maybe that one could work for you, too. I think, again, something that I heard people talk about in different ways, and depends on how long you've been at it. In the beginning, when I was first seriously writing poetry, I was supposed to just be off in private and so forth. I just wrote every day. And my process often had to do with journal writing first and then. But then the process changed. And there was some little seed of an idea. I'd wake up with a line and just start from that. But I made a promise to myself that I would write every day before work, get up, even if I could only find a half an hour, but just so that I would be writing. And I knew most of that was lost. It was just something was coming, but it was going to have to be thrown away. That got me through a lot of periods when there was nothing good that I liked coming. But it just felt like it was enough to keep going. Sometimes I think you need to stop. Maybe go do something else. If you can possibly take a little trip and get some new inspiration. Or get yourself into, you know, take an online class or a poetry class. So you get encouraged to do something different from what you do all the time.  I just think it's excitement that makes you want to write. And so if you can get enthusiasm, a new obsession, something to be obsessed about. That's a good place to write from for me. Anything else? We can talk one-on-one, too. It doesn't have to be all questions. OK. Thank you. Thanks for coming. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.


Here are nine ways to reduce cognitive load. Number one, offloading. Offloading is helping to present material through narration. Now, this research is particularly with regards to multimedia, but there are some things teachers can take away to translate into their slides or their worksheets that they distribute to their students. Think about the last video that you watched. There might be background music. By removing the music, you are offloading unnecessary cognitive load. Tip number two, segmenting. Segmenting allows time to break material into smaller chunks. What teachers should do is think about their lesson length and how they'll divide the length of time into chunks. What teachers should do is consider two things. One, their approach to the lesson length. If you have a 60-minute lesson, for example, how we divide that lesson. And two, if you're presenting information, how you break the information down into smaller bite-sized chunks. Tip number three, pre-training. Pre-training is a little bit like homework, where you provide the material in advance, whether it's a cue or prior instruction about the components that are to come ahead. For example, read this paragraph before next lesson. Tip number four, weeding. Now we're not talking about gardening here. We're talking about being concise as possible. See how you can make your instruction or the resources you provide your students as concise and coherent as possible. Get rid of the faff. Tip number five, signalling. Signalling focuses on the essential facts. As an example, although this research paper is in great depth, I'm providing you with the nine headlines. Tip number six, aligning facts and images. A term you may be familiar with is dual coding. Dual coding is where you guide the processing through visual and auditory methods. In this case, you might be watching the video, listening to my voice. There's no distracting background music. If I talk about the weather today, I'm adding unnecessary information. And if I add lots of images to this video also, I am supporting, if I choose the right images, your processing of this information. Tip number seven, eliminating redundant information. Not to be confused with weeding. Weeding, remember, is being concise and coherent. Redundancy is removing duplicated information. Or for example, me talking about the weather in relation to an abstract comment I made in the lesson. Tip number eight, synchronization. Marry up your auditory and visual information. So for example, if we look at an octopus, it's important that the image and the words marry up and they synchronize with what's been said or displayed. Tip number nine, individualizing. Now this is the toughest one for all teachers across the world. How do you match the material to the individual needs? This isn't a problem I've ever solved, and it's something all teachers struggle with all the time. My advice, approach all your lessons from a three pronged attack, students who fly, students who have misconceptions, and students that will need a bit of extra love and attention. Where you can spend more time getting to understand the needs of your students and helping them translate the information, the more successful you will be. Take a look at the research paper in greater depth. Thanks for watching.


So, for those of you who haven't been here before, this is my part of the lobby of Hope Theatre, and this is Watch Your Work. And this is a play, and we've been selected, carefully selected to participate in this play. So, we're going to do it together. We're going to do the action together. We're going to work for 20 minutes, and then we're going to do the dialogue of the play together. And the dialogue consists of you asking me questions about your work and your creative process. So, what's your name? Adam. Oh, Adam. He's here. So, he's like the first person in the universe. So, what we'll do, you know, so your work is your creative process. So, Adam, as everybody else here knows, and if you try to ask me a question about my work, I'm going to make it not yours. I'll vote for you. Okay. So, yeah. So, the me and the title is actually you. So, that's what I mean. And what else? It's a play. It's a free writing class. We're going to work for 20 minutes, and we're going to talk for as long as how or how that says. And those of you who are out there in there into Earth, we have Matt behind the camera, and Angie behind the sound thing. And Anika's going to tell us how to get in touch with us, whatever, blah blah blah. Hi, everybody. Thank you for tuning in at home. If you are watching this right now from your house, your laptop, wherever, after 20 minutes or up, wow, there's something moving. Something really loud. They're in hard hats. They're in hard hats. It's definitely working. Do you want a pink one like that one? We'll get a pink hard hat for next time. Tune in next week. So, what's going to happen is after 20 minutes, you guys can get on Twitter and you can tweet us your questions. You can find us at SLP, watch me work SLP, which is on Twitter. And you can also use the hashtag HowlRound, which is H-O-W-L-R-O-U-N-D. And everybody is mouthing that along with me. So, if you didn't catch that, it's hashtag HowlRound. And we will take your questions and give it to SLP. There you go. And I will make up answers. That's perfect. So, thanks. Okay, so we're going to start the timer. And I'm going to be on the timer also. Yep, great. Okay, I'm going to get behind the desk because it might take like... Oh, Ryan's here again. How are you doing, Ryan? Good. Yeah! Okay, okay. Well, that's the day. You didn't hear that series. So, that's the class like... Is it talking action? I was like, oh, yeah. And they were like, what about ladies for good health? But I didn't realize it does. So, I got home like, they're waiting you. This is like, yeah, you're right. They're just like, no, they're waiting. Okay, but that has nothing to do with what we're doing right now. Almost nothing. So, this is where you... If you have questions... Oh, your name is like... Oh! Oh! Myself. Okay, yeah. How are you? I'm great. It was your birthday once when you were here. It was, yeah. And you were like, right? But not so high. I'm in a chair over there. Oh, like over there. Come on. Welcome back. How are you? Great, yeah. Maybe you just have answers. Anybody have any questions? Yeah, Adam. I have kind of a more general question than about like, work specific. Sure. So, have you ever seen something or read something that is, you know, which is, you blew you away. You're just so amazed by it. And then afterwards, when you kind of... kind of sat down to work, you just kind of felt like, I'm never going to, like, match that. And if so, how were you able to overcome that? Right. So, when you read something, and it blows you away, and you go, oh my God, so great.  And you say, but I'm never going to be... I had a friend who used to say, I'm never going to be... Who was it? Dusty. Dusty. So, why bother? I was like... Whoa, that's heavy.  And then you go, how do I get going with my own work? So, there are two answers to that question. Or there are probably a lot more. But some of us professionals, we have, you know, it's like, some people are culture holders and some people stay on the work. So, a lot of times, people who stay on the work and we selectively go out and see stuff. So, that's number one. So, we're very, very selective. So, we're all in the community here. We're all wanting to support everybody and everything. So, a lot of times, come to my show, come to my show, come to my show, come to me. And we feel obligated, you know, but we have to be selective. So, you have to be in the exercise saying, you know, I know that.  So, there's that. You're saying no. Which means you're saying yes to yourself. Number one. Number two, when you do see that wonderful play and you're like, oh my God, I've got wonderful, whatever. You do that great job. You do that great song. You show up to do your work the next day and you feel, where do you feel that feeling? Like, where? When I sit down. At home. To be honest, it was like, right after I'd, I'd just listened to the Hampton soundtrack.  It was more just like, I finished listening to it and it just kind of, it kind of froze me up. Like, I wasn't even trying to do work. At that point I was like, should I even bother trying to do work? I mean, like, I got over it. Yeah, sure. But, you know, I just, I was interested to hear how other people might, like, deal with that kind of thing. Well, how did you get over it? I mean, I just kind of thought, well, you know, I played Memo Miranda, or Stephen Sondheim had thought, well, I can't do that. That he would have been for Hamilton, so I figured I might as well go ahead and just try anyway. I suppose I make it about you if you ask me a question about me. I, I think I said I looked forward to it. So, but that's important, you know. You say, yeah, sure. Everybody has experienced seeing something wonderful. Everybody has made something wonderful and has had experience of seeing something wonderful. Maybe it's possible to do it to make something wonderful without having seen something wonderful. But I don't think so. I'm gonna go out and learn. It's never happened. Because, you know, like, there's the sunrise.  So, you've had experience with something that blew your mind. Or if someone's heard you or something as great as happened. And the question is, how do I make something beautiful and brilliant? If you wake up in the morning look at the sunrise and you walk in. How am I gonna do that? Oh, yeah. Let me do your, add your contributions because that's really what it's about. Making your contribution. Good question. Great answer. Adam? Do we have any use of that one? We've got a question from German. From German? Yes. His name's German... Moonos? German? I'm sorry, if I... I think German. So, how do you spell it? Well, it's M-U-N-O-Z. That's his last name. M-U-N-O-Z. His name is German. His first name's German. Oh, cool, okay. So, perhaps he's not a German. But he's a German, at least. Yes. Hi, we love German. We do, actually. He asks, how do you get to know your characters? Do you get to know them before you write or as you write? Right. I would say, I would say, why don't you get to know your characters as they're writing? Right? It's like dating. I mean, everything. So, German, everything I'm just saying is either like dating or whether it's in class or Spiderman. But not necessarily dating Spiderman. He just says his name's pronounced hair man. Hair man. Hair man. Her mom. Her mom. There we go. I'm so sorry. Her mom. But it's with the... That's not how it looked on Twitter. Hair man. Hair man. Hair man. Hair man. This is Dutch. Yeah, he's Dutch. I have a very close friend who's German. Whatever. Anyway, but I don't think it's that person. Anyway. So, I would suggest getting to know your characters while you're writing. You know, you do a little preliminary work before you write, and then you jump in and get to know them that way. Like dating, right? So, you get to... Someone says, I have this wonderful person here to be. Right? And they tell you all about them. But what is that really going to tell you? Like, a little bit.  You don't know so much about someone before you actually get intimate with them. And that's what you do when you write. You're getting intimate with your characters. So, you can sort of have a little character sketch. Like, he's 35. He doesn't bathe. He lives in a yurt. Has a goat. Like that.  And then you start to do things to get to know Joe. You can do things like interview your character, which is a good way to do it. You just talk to him or her, like as you would, you know, in an interview situation with somebody. And then you kind of need to support each other. And you give them a story and you read another story to kind of move along. So it's a combination of both. The characters are going to reveal themselves through action. See? Someone said that like, Aristotle or something. Probably. Like Aristotle. One of those DWM's that we love so much. Anybody else? No, no, no. You just like, like, Ryan is just like, no, no, no, yes he is. I don't have a question. You don't have a question? Did you write those things down on this piece of paper? I did not. Oh, you did? I wanted to be surprised. That's great. That's why I wrote up a question. I had, I knew what I was going to write, but I didn't know what it is. When you're writing something autobiographical, do you step out of it? Right. On top of it or on top of it? Right. When one writes something that's autobiographical, how could one, how might one step outside of it? But that's such an issue for your question, you should ask me. Why don't you just be step into it? Get in it. You're like so outside of it. You're having like an out-of-body experience. If we know Ryan, Ryan Thompson, and we love and enjoy you, keep saying, get into it. Step in it.  Like, step in it. Like, go ahead. Step in it. You know, I would say get outside of it for you. Like, get some perspective. You know? Tell the story. Take a chance. You know?  Have you ever written like a really, really, really, really, really bad draft or something? I'm sure you have. Yes. Who's the right, so do that. Write a really bad draft. Like impress us with your, should be writing. I'm serious. This is how professionals work. I know because I'm a professional. I've been a professional for a long time. This is how we work.  It's awesome, it's lovely. She directed the play. And I was like, yay! She's like, why are you so happy? I mean, I'm happy because she did such a good job directing this wonderful play. And a wonderful actress in it, Michael Cray and Michael Kompstein. And Dan Brown, the writer also. Lovely. And I was like, yay! She's like, why are you so happy? I'm like, yeah, your work is great. But I just finished this show. Usually you have to love writing. I was like, yay! That's how you do it. And then you make it better. Get in it. I mean, you don't have to write on no card or whatever I suggested. But, get in it. I think you're spending a lot of time thinking about it and outside of it already. We know you. We love you. We want your writing. And keep coming back because we love to have you here. No, yeah, no, that's it. Ha! Do you have tips on internalizing the possible? It's really good. Because I don't know about other people here, but I'm really good at possibly having real tendency to rationalize it in the other direction. So if somebody were to say, meh, your song sucks, man. You'd like to totally take that to heart. Yeah, it's like, oh, yeah. Yeah, of course it's good. Because I love you. Right, right. And if somebody says, meh, your song is like, it's so great. You'd be like, who are you talking to? I'm not even here. Or I'll be like, you're my friends. You're my friends, so. Yeah, guys can't have this. Okay. So, this, I mean, I don't know. I don't know the mom and dad. I don't know how you're raised. But it does sound like it's just, it's a, you what? How much time is it now? Yeah. I mean, keep coming and we'll talk about it. I mean, this is a problem that started, I would guess, a long time ago. So, you know, okay, so, but that's okay. I mean, that's okay, we can do this, I know. So there are a couple things. One, I tell my students, I love your, get used to hearing praise. It's a muscle.  Right? You have to train yourself to hear praise. Okay? What's good is that you're not one of those people who cannot hear, maybe they're free of that. Those people are called positive feedback. So, you're not one of those people, yay, hooray. Okay?  So what you need is a, probably need to bombard yourself with positive feedback. That's one way to do it. Just like something that somebody should just do it. You have to then take it to somebody that you don't know so well and have them look at it and give your feedback. And just say, just give me the positive feedback. And also, you have to start talking to yourself and with your friends. Because what happens is that you're only like, maybe Hermann is German and he speaks German. So he has German in his head along with English. So, but most of us are like, how many languages do you speak? Okay, so one and a half. So you've got these languages in your head. It's the one language, right? You don't have another way of talking to yourself. You learn this from being very small. It's not a bad, it's not because of bad parenting. It's just the way it happens, don't be fooled. You have to create another groove in your mind, right? Do you have a meditation practice? Yes, I do. It's for acting. So it's for acting. Because what happens in meditation is you regroup your mind. Like a record. I know some of you don't know what it is. LP, you know, I mean they're coming back. Rhyal is like, it's a show called vinyl. Okay, so the vinyl, right? Yes. Those grooves. What you want to do is create new grooves in your mind where these positive things can live. And we're not talking about positive things as a BS and a more intense student. They're not real positive, real just basic positive things. You have to develop an ear for them. Can you carry a tune?  They can't hear it. You can't hear that. You have to work on that. It's actually something I've worked on. Meditation is what we do. So, I don't know, 20 minutes in the morning, sitting down in quiet, giving you the timer. Oh, 20 minutes, wait a second, it's 20 minutes. 20 minutes, the magical 20 minutes. When we start with 10 minutes, make it consistent every single morning.  And if thoughts come up, that's fine. What you're doing is preparing a space to receive new grooves because you have to create those grooves. And if you don't, the people who work on it now, it's only gonna get the most right exactly. They will widen and thicken and you will just become accustomed to listening to them and when you listen to them, the less, the less and less and less. Okay, let's start working on it now. Okay, so try that. So, we have a question from Alexis. Alexis Atkinson, and she sent us her picture so you can see what she looks like. Oh my gosh, she's a, no. Oh, you're Alexis from here. You just sit right here. Oh hi, Alexis. Why is she sitting there? It's Alexis. She, I'm sorry, she was here with her mom on that. And she'll be like, hi, Alexis. Hi, Alexis. So she came across something similar to a work she's finished and it was written by someone more respected than her. She says she feels like networking with them would make her liable for what she assumes plagiarism, should she network with them? She was recommended to network with them but she wanted to just sort of ask. So she wrote something and then she found something out there already written, like what she wrote. Similar to what she wrote, yes. Okay, but she didn't know it before. You didn't know it before. No, you're not plagiarist at the time. So, and then someone told her to hang out with this person? Yeah, she met them. And then it was suggested that she networked with them but she's afraid that she'll be accused of plagiarism. Network to what end, is she gonna say? Like, network for what? Like, I don't know. And so we asked Alexis, so Alexis, why? How can this person help you? Is it just to be like, they're fun to hang out with or you know, you can also tell them when you meet them. Hello, I wrote a play or a song or a book or whatever. It's kind of like yours. So, if we get to know each other, don't think I copy. You know, you can put that right out there, you know? That can help. As long as it's not me, I'll be cute. I don't know, to what end? I'm curious, why is this person a good person for a network with them? Okay, and we'll come back to that. Answer that, we'll come back to this. Like. You just came back to me.  He's huge. He's this big. He's four. He's like, hi, Riti, how are you? See, I usually bring him, but you know, I didn't bring him today. He's generous. Now he's, any day now, he's gonna be like, hey, I'll do you right in the shade of super big. Right, right. What next? Do you think we, as a collaborator, promise we'll do the rest of the trial? We'll figure out what it's gonna be. Right, that's a great question, Riti. So Riti has this question, after you write the shooting, should you do it by draft? What do you do? So you take your day off when you're done, right? You take a whole day off and do something nice. That's important. It doesn't have to involve spending a lot of money for buying things you don't need. Right, but it should be something that you enjoy. Okay, so you do that. And then you read over the draft all the way through, okay? Without rewriting as you go, just read it through and ask yourself, what does scene by scene, assuming it's a player, a screen player, whatever, see how it looks not all the way through, scene by scene, what is this scene trying to do? Am I doing it here? You know? Okay, and then you can think, what is the whole story? Is it kind of flowing? Okay, so you started the rewriting process by asking this question, right? So now this is like my personal. My personal, I don't finish a scene, should be made, made, draft, and then go looking for a collaborator, someone to help me fix it. You? I don't do that, because I feel like, I mean, I eventually, sure, I'm working with people, I'm working with book editors, I'm working with dramaturgs and directors and all that kind of stuff, right? Producers and stuff, so they don't, because if I'm rushing out to them with my shitty, shitty job, what I'm saying without saying it is, I don't know how to fix this, what I'm doing, help me, won't you help me Chloe, fix my play, right? Right? And what you need, what you mostly need is to know that you can do it, you can do this. So you wake up in the morning and say things like, I can do this, I just wake up, I wake up and go, I can do this, I can write this, I know how to write this, I'm gonna do it, say that, and say like, I don't know how to do it. You know what I mean? That's like, I'm really good at what I do. I'm a really good writer, why do you just try saying that, Rhett? Just say that to yourself. You don't have to like announce it on Twitter or whatever we're on right now. You know what I mean? Howl around, howl around. Rhett's a really good writer. He really is. No, he's not, no, not. I'm waiting for you to say that. No, but you know, you just say that, you start saying this kind of thing that sounds a little kind of corny or whatever, but so you say those kind of things, I can do this, I can do this. And you read the draft and you've taken notes now, what is this scene doing? What is it trying to do? And how can I make it better? Okay, and then after you've done maybe another draft or another draft even, then maybe you talk to a friend about it, show a friend the text, like that, then you bring a check, and you go see if you can draw a church or something. You know that? Because then what it does, you're giving yourself like a bullet of confidence and that's so important in the arts, instead of a vote of lack of confidence. What is it doing? What do I want it to do? What does it need to do? What is the screenplay need right here? I mean, Jane needs to tell him that she's leaving, because X, Y, Z, yeah, it doesn't really help. You know what I mean? So what is the screenplay need? What is the play need? What is the novel need right in this scene? Okay, is that clarified? So it's not like what should it do? I mean, it's kind of all those things alone, right? But I really think you like write a couple of drafts, two or three, and then show it to people. That doesn't mean like you can write two or three drafts, you come in here and you talk to us about it, like, hey, you know, I got a problem with the character bubble and we can talk to you about it, but we are not going to take your pages and look at them and render judgment. The act of rendering judgment in the early days resides in you, because you know it. He's cute, he's diagnosed. I'll show you pictures, he's cute. Yes. We're back from Alexis. Oh right, Alexis, oh yeah. All right, Alexis says this person's new play uses imagery like the imagery I use in my one woman show, and those helping me put it on think I should reach out and see about a mentoring or sort of sharing inspiration. But she thinks it's a bit more of a confidence thing. She feels like her work is no longer good enough because somebody more powerful and well-connected has something seemingly similar to say. Yeah, I'm trying to think, because Alexis sat here a couple of weeks ago and we were talking about she started something and then she stopped it and she started something. Is that true, Alexis? I mean, I don't want to... She was here in December and you told her that she had a week to finish something. Right, because she kept starting something and stopping and starting something. So everything I believe, I'm just saying it's true, Alexis, but maybe also you're blocking yourself. You're finding a way to not feel good about what you're doing, even though you've already finished something and you're happy with it, you're finding a way to not feel good about it. So, because, you know, if we look far and wide enough, there's always somebody who's also saying something like kind of what we're saying, something like that.  You know, there's always a reason to not write something. So should she network with the person then? Because you're gonna feel, are you gonna feel better by networking with this person? Isn't that a question? Go work and do what makes you feel really good. So if you're gonna network with this person and feel worse because they've already kind of like shot your law for you, excuse my language. You know what I'm saying? Then don't meet with them, Alexis. Like stay home and do your white writing. That's what I would suggest. Don't meet with them. You don't need to meet with them. I don't think you need to meet with them, quite honestly. Like, who is it like, Edward Albee?  You know what I'm saying? Don't meet with Edward Albee as wonderful as he is.  You know, confidence, it's an inside job. Get the confidence going from the inside. Surround yourself with people who love you and who are afraid to tell you this. Come back here. Come visit us. Oh, well, you're so thoughtful. I was mind-chattaged into a novel. I thought I'd probably rent something or show something to publish it weekly. It was. It sounded often like what I was doing. Right. And so I had that feeling that you're having now. But what turned out was that made me go more deeply into my own story and it came out a much better movie. Because I used that as inspiration. I thought I should do better. See? See, Carol's smart. I gotta say that. Carol's smart. Carol got tricks, that's it.  This is what I said. I'm sorry. That's not, I'm sorry. But, you know, use that weird fear thing for inspiration.  I mean, it works for what's his name. Do anything you've been. But, you know, that's what he blew up over all the season. For life. So, it's time, and I just said, I just said it's like getting to that point where we have to go. What's the time? We have to go. Yeah, we gotta tell them about next week. Okay. What's happening next week? We're gonna get next week. We're gonna get next week. And you guys have been great. Thank you. Thank you. We love you. And yeah, see you next time.


I'm Phillip Labra, earthquake program specialist at Cal OES. As the current earthquake program specialist, I have the opportunity to work with some of our partners in earthquake preparedness, like the earthquake country lines that manages the California Great Shakeout that's coming up in October. We also have the opportunity to work with some of our state agency partners to better prepare for earthquakes, increase resiliency in our communities, we go into the community with our earthquake simulator. We're able to reach out to the community in their backyard to talk about how they're preparing for earthquakes. It's an awesome perspective to get to reach out to those folks one-on-one and it really puts everything into perspective for me as far as working at the state level. I've had a great career starting out as an unpaid intern in international affairs. I've had the opportunity to experience a variety of different programs in Cal OES. I've been here for the last 10 years and every program that I've been to is just really really positive experience. I really enjoy working with all the folks that are here at Cal OES, having kind of a dual role as you know day-to-day job as well as responding to statewide disasters. I'm Philip Labra and I am Cal OES.


If you share my screen I can give you the executive summary like this kind of, if you have to give it to the CEO or somebody like? Executive summary what are the bullet points that you need to know, not fancy much about this system is that module system is every cluster has their own software installed, It depends on the cluster, but almost all of them use these modules to make it available for the users. So what are the modules? They are basically like a fancy way of loading software. It's fancy on the bottom, like it's fancy for the execution is fancy, but the usage is very simple. So like Richard in his example had, he had this module purge command, so there is good command to make certain that I have no modules loaded. You can use module list to check if you have any modules loaded, and then you can run module load to load a module. And what are the modules? They are basically like shortcuts to different programs, and every HPC cluster provides their own list of programs. So we have a bunch of programs here in the applications page.  So let's say we want to load MATLAB. We want to have MATLAB available to us. In our system, we module load MATLAB, and if we now run module list, we have a MATLAB loaded. What does that mean? It means that now we have MATLAB command available to us, and we can run MATLAB. So usually you just have, you can look at the applications page for a specific application that you want to use, and you can then load the relevant module and use that application. It's as simple as that basically, and going to too much detail would be disservice to the whole system I'd say. If you want to search for available modules, you can run module spider, and this will produce you with a huge list of software. I guess you can module spider for a certain name somehow. Yeah, you can module spider for example MATLAB, and it will give you different versions of MATLAB that are available. Or you can use this module available to produce this list as well. That will be a big list of software. But I would recommend before loading some simple module, I would probably go to the documentation and check the application page if there's an example on how to use the specific application. So that's the better way of doing it. We have in our information, where is it? Under Triton, we have a whole application section which lists many things which need special instructions somehow. Okay, so yeah, is that it for modules then? Yeah, so the actual chapter has more information, more commands, like you can check various things. But really what you need to do is that if you want to use some program that we have already provided for you, and you probably should because we usually try to test them out and make them as easy to use in the system as possible. So if there's such a program available, if the application page gives instructions, use that. If you can just load the module, try that, and then play around with it and give us a hint or give us an issue if the software doesn't perform as you expect. It's usually a good idea to just run a quick search through the documentation or the module avail to check if there's available software. And if it isn't there, then let us know if you want it to be installed by us or if you want health finding. Yeah. What about if something's not in module? Is module the only way of getting applications? No, of course you can install applications yourself, like many people do it. But usually, especially the more complex application, the harder it usually is to install. And some applications are really hard to install. So that's why we try to provide them centrally so that it helps everybody and nobody, like people don't have to hit the head in the brick wall installing. And we can do the heating ourselves. But of course you can install a software yourself as well as yourself. I think I remember one person yesterday in the icebreaker question. They said they wanted to use singularity on Triton. Should we talk about that now or later? Maybe later? Yeah, I think later. That's an advanced kind of word. If you're interested in that, I would suggest coming to the garage. That's probably the case, because it becomes advanced stuff immediately. We do have pages on singularity. And with what you're learning now, you should be able to read that page and do it pretty quickly.


Hello and welcome to the session. In this session, first we will discuss equation of a line through a given point and parallel to a given vector. Consider a point A with position vector A with respect to the origin of the rectangular coordinate system. Let L be the line which passes through this point A and this line is parallel to a given vector B. Let R be the position vector of a point P on the line. Then we have vector equation of a line that passes through the given point whose position vector is vector A parallel to a given vector B is given by vector R equal to vector A plus lambda into vector B. And if we have the coordinates of the point A as x1, y1, z1 that is coordinates of this point A are given by x1, y1, z1 and ABC are the direction ratios of the line. Then equation of the line through a point A and having ABC as direction ratios is given by x minus x1 upon A equal to y minus y1 upon V equal to z minus z1 upon C. This is the Cartesian equation of the line and if we are given the direction cosines that is L, M, N of the line then we say equation of the line is given by x minus x1 upon L equal to y minus y1 upon M equal to z minus z1 upon N. Also if we are given vector B as I cap plus B j cap plus C k cap then we say ABC are direction ratios of the line. Let's find out the vector equation of a line that passes through a point with position vector given by vector x equal to 2 I cap minus j cap plus 4 k cap and is parallel to the vector given by vector y I cap plus j cap minus 2 k cap. Now the vector equation of the line is given by vector r equal to vector x plus lambda into vector y where lambda is some non-zero real number that is vector r equal to 2 I cap minus j cap plus 4 k cap plus lambda into I cap plus j cap minus 2 k cap. This is the required vector equation of the line. Next we discuss equation of a line passing through two given points. Consider two points A and B lying on the line. The point A has coordinates x1, y1, z1 point B has coordinates x2, y2, z2. We have a point P also on the line with coordinates x, y, z position vector of point P with respect to the origin is given by vector r, position vector of point A is given by vector A and position vector of point B is vector B. So we have vector equation of a line which passes through two points whose position vectors are vector A and vector B is given by vector r equal to vector A plus lambda into vector B minus vector A. We have the coordinates of point A as x1, y1, z1 and coordinates of point B as x2, y2, z2 and the coordinates of point P are given by x, y, z. So Cartesian equation of a line that passes through two points A with coordinates x1, y1, z1 and B with coordinates x2, y2, z2 is given by x minus x1 upon x2 minus x1 equal to y minus y1 upon y2 minus y1 equal to z minus z1 upon z2 minus z1. Let's try and find out the Cartesian equation of the line passing through the points A with coordinates 2 minus 1, 4 and point B with coordinates 1, 1 minus 2. From the point A we have x1 equal to 2, y1 equal to minus 1 and z1 equal to 4. From point B we have x2 equal to 1, y2 equal to 1 and z2 equal to minus 2.  So this comes out to be x minus 2 upon minus 1 equal to y plus 1 upon 2 equal to z minus 4 upon minus 6. This is the required Cartesian equation of the line. This completes the session. Hope you have understood how we find the equation of a line through a given point in parallel to a given vector and equation of a line passing through two given points.


In the previous video, we have defined the notion of a Boolean algebra. In this video, I want to collect some properties about Boolean algebras. Now, this discussion is going to mimic that is our previous discussions of properties of groups, rings, fields, vector spaces, r modules, you know, it's very similar things. So Boolean algebras do have identities zero and one. And as we already mentioned, when we talked about bounded lattices, these identities are necessarily unique to each other. And this is a consequence of just, you know, we have a two-sided identity. I want to prove that in a Boolean algebra, we have cancellation laws. So for example, our cancellation laws look like the following. If x join y is equal to x join z and x complement join y is equal to x complement join z, then that actually means that y equals z. Okay. Similarly, if x meet y is equal to x meet z and x complement meet y is equal to x complement meet z, then you can cancel the x's and you get that y equals z in that situation. And then the third cancellation law says that if x join y equals x join z, and if x meet y is equal to x meet z, then in that situation, you get that y equals z. Now, when it came to groups, all we had to say was something like the following. If x times y equals x times z, then you can cancel the x and you have y equals z. Now, of course, in groups, you have inverses, so we could use inverses to cancel things out. We don't have inverses. We have compliments, but that's what will be required here, that if two products are the same with regard to x and with regard to its x complement, then it turns out the factors had to be the same. And that doesn't matter if you're doing joins or meets. In this situation, this says that if x acts the same way with respect to join as it does meet, then you can cancel the x out and get that y equals z in that situation. So there's a couple of things we have to prove here. Now, before going on, I do want to mention that with the groups like this is only one sided. You didn't have a notion of a complement there. You do need both statements in order for these things to be true. So note that cancellation is only going to work with both hypotheses because if you take something like a following, let's take z is less than y, which is less than x, and these are strict inequalities here. If you take that situation, since x is greater than y, notice this is going to equal x. x join y is going to equal x. And then because x is greater than z, you're going to get that x join z is likewise equal to x. So these things are equal to each other. But since z and y are not equal to each other, we can't infer that y equals z because that would actually be a falsehood. So we do have to consider the complement. Similar kind of examples can be constructed for these other two possibilities as well. So what we're going to do is we're going to prove the first one. So let's assume that we have equality when you join the x and when you join x complement. We want to show that y equals z in that situation. So let's start off with just y. y equals zero join y because zero is the join identity. Well, since this is the join identity, we can use complements. The join identity zero is equal to x meet x complement. Again, it's kind of like an inverse, but it's backwards in this situation. The complements combined to give you the dominant element, not the identity element. So zero is equal to x join x complement, excuse me, x meet x complement join y like so. For which now we're going to distribute join across meet. So this becomes x join y meet x complement join y, but by our assumptions x join y is x join z and x prime join y is the same thing as x prime join z. For which then, since we have z in the left and the right factor, we can factor it out by the distributive law. So we get x join x prime meet z, excuse me, x meet x prime join z in that situation. Well, x meet x prime, since they're complements, that's going to give you zero. Zero join z gives you back z, and so that proves the first cancellation law that was then here. So you do need the complements. So we took care of that one. Now the second one, I don't need to provide a proof for it because the second one is the dual statement of the first one. So take the proof, we just saw, take its dual and boom, that's the proof of the second one. Now the third one here is actually a so-called self-dual statement. If you reverse all the symbols, meet with join and join with meet, and you'd also switch things like inequalities and zeros and ones, but that's not in the statement. If you switch all the joins with meet to meet with joins, you get the exact same statement back. So it's self-duals. Now since this is a self-dual statement, we have to prove it because it's not the dual of anything else other than itself. So we'll provide it. It'll be a very similar proof to what we just saw. So let's come down and take a look at what that looks like. So we want to prove that y equals z. So we're going to start off with y and then end up with z. So what we have here is that y, of course, is the element we're starting with. And so then I claim that this equals y, join, x, meet, y. And this is a consequence of the absorption property there. I also used some commutativity going on there because absorption is like y, join, y, meet, x is equal to y, and then I swap the order of these things. Took some liberty there. But absorption commutativity gives us this one right here. Then by assumption, x, meet, y is equal to x, meet, z. So I make that substitution right there. The next thing we're going to do is then we're going to distribute y in this situation. So this is going to then give us y, join, x, meet, y, join, z, for which in the second case by commutativity we can swap these things around. So we get the statement now that x, join, y, meet, y, join, z is where we act now. But then by assumption from before, x, join, y is the same thing as x, join, z. And then y, join, z is what we still have there. So we get that one. So now looking at this one, we have an z on the second factor. We can factor it out using the distributive laws. This becomes x, meet, y, join, z, for which by assumption x, meet, y is the same thing as x, meet, z. And so we get x, meet, z, join, z by absorption. And again, there's some, there's some commutativity we'd also be using there as well. But by the absorption action, this gives us a z. And that then proves the second cancellation axiom. Well, the third one, I should say. All right, a few other properties. This one's a lot easier to do a few other properties of Boolean algebras I want to establish in this video before we end lecture 38. If x is an element inside of a Boolean algebra, then its complement is unique. There's an analogous statement for inverses like in groups. If you have an inverse, it's unique. We want that complements are unique as well. The proof is going to look a lot different though. So what we're going to do is suppose that we have two different complements for an element x. So let's say that x prime and not x are two different complements. Well, if x prime is a complement of x, that means that x join x prime is equal to zero and x meet x prime is equal to one. Now, if not x is a complement, that means that x join not x is equal to zero and x meet not x is equal to one. So that is we're assuming they're both complements. All right, so notice by assumption x join x prime is equal to zero, but x join not x is also equal to zero. So we get that those two, these two things in particular equal to each other. I'm going to write that to the side x join x prime is equal to x join not x, but also x meet x prime is equal to one. So we get this, but x meet not x is equal to one. So we get this one as well. So in particular, these elements are equal to each other. We get that x meet x prime is equal to x meet not x. So then by the cancellation law, the third one in particular, the one we just proved, we can cancel the x's and get that x prime equals not x. So two different complements for the same element actually have to be equal to each other. So complements are in fact equal to each other. Then an immediate consequence, mostly immediate consequence of this, is that if you take the double complement, you get back to the original elements. We had an analogous statement for that when it came to groups that the inverse of the inverse was the original element. And the proof of that is going to be the same proof here, that you use uniqueness.  So I want to show that x is a compliment for x prime, and therefore the double complement have to be x. So compare what happens here. So by assumption, x prime join x is equal to x join x prime, which is equal to zero, and x prime meet x is equal to x meet x prime, which equals to one. So x is acting like a compliment of x prime. And by uniqueness of compliments, that means x has to be a compliment of x prime so that we get that the compliment of the compliment was equal to the original element as well. And so as an immediate corollary of this, we get that zero is the compliment of one, and one is the compliment of zero. I'm not going to provide the proof of that one. I'm going to leave that as an exercise to the viewer. And so that's going to bring us to the end of lecture 38, which we've introduced distributive lattices, bounded lattices, and all of this leading to the idea of a Boolean algebra, for which this is the equivalent of like a field inside of order theory. The Boolean algebra is this most structured lattice we possibly have, much like a field is like the most structured ring that you could think of. We have all the axioms, associative, commutative, distributive. We have compliments in this situation. And our next and final lecture of this lecture series, lecture 39, we'll continue to develop the idea of a Boolean algebra. In particular, we're going to classify all finite Boolean algebras. Kind of sounds like what we did with finite fields. We could characterize all finite fields up to their order, and we can restrict their orders just to be powers of a prime. With Boolean algebras, we can do basically the same thing. All finite Boolean algebras will be isomorphic up to their order, and their order always has to be a power of two. I'll see you then. If you have any questions about any of these videos, please post your comments below. I'll be glad to answer them. Like these videos if you've learned anything. Subscribe to the channel to see more videos like this in the future. And if there's, since we are basically at the end of this lecture series, if there's more topics you want to learn about in the future, feel free to post those in the comments too. If there's some interest, I am glad to make additional videos on topics that are not part of a regular class.