The New Gazelle

Over the past few months, this little nook of the www has gotten as dusty as the peace studies section of the White House library, but now it's time for a little late summer cleaning. I just added "New" to the blog title, as a little R&D has led to a new and improved product. The number one finding: lower expectations. No more grasping at profundity in each post, despite all the gushing comments that suggested the old format was so popular.

No, now my goal is to find some sort of regular blogging rhythm that will work for me. I'll try to make it interesting and keep up with friends through this blog, but admittedly this is one of my mental exercises to routinize new forms of thought. Another one of these exercises is what I call "metaphor-a-day." Every day I'm trying to write down one metaphor I come across in reading or conversation that strikes me. The original plan was also to write my own metaphor each day, in hopes these twin exercises would grease up the associative flow of metaphoric thinking for me. Can't say I've been diligent enough at it yet to say whether it will work.

Here’s today’s metaphor from an article on Edmund Wilson by Louis Menand (found it while sifting through some old magazines):
"He was not obliged, as professors are, to pick out a single furrow and plow it for life. His whole career was devoted to the opposite principle: that an educated, intelligent person can take on any subject that seems interesting and important and, by doing some homework and taking care with exposition, make it interesting and important to other people."