Matt Clements's blog

Now that I am a graduate and done with school for now, I face the same mix of elation and apprehension that most of my friends are feeling.

Here's a link to the Stylus Magazine website, where they have a list of the top 100 music videos, according to their writers. I've found a whole bunch of great ideas here.

Here's my finished video about the role of the sidekick in literature. I threw in a few popular culture references and an obligatory Tarheel shoutout as well.

I found this short essay on Delillo's story online (it was actually the first hit that came up on Google), and I thought it was worth sharing...

http://www.evilmonito.com/011/tv/garza.htm

I want to be a writer. I want to write stories about places I've been and people I've gotten tangled up with.

Marginalia is ridiculous. Collins must have enjoyed the hell out of writing this poem. As a guy who didn't stop studying English literature until he was thirty - only to go on and teach English for another thirty years - he laces the examples of textbook graffiti listed in the poem with a biting satirical realism that you know had to have come from personal experience. The joke at line 30 about "Man vs. Nature" is perfect, and I love the idea of cold lonely monks making a small lasting scratch in time by adding a comment in the margins about a bird outside his cell. Giving a physical presentness to literature with such a timeless nature is pretty heady stuff, like Walt Whitman writing directly to "you." I've never read Billy Collins before, but I like this a lot.