Cheers everyone and welcome to Morning Open Thread, a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum. Join us, please.
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Notes from Below Sea Level
All Good Things
I am using my time this morning to let our readers know that I will be scaling down my DKos obligations over the next couple months and retiring completely from posting at the end of December. If anyone is interested in picking up an editorial or contributor role, please reach out to me or Officebss; if you know anyone who is interested in regular posting that isn’t a regular visitor here, please reach out to them and let them know.
I’ve had a wonderful time here, but my life is moving on and the one thing I cannot change is the amount of time in a day and the amount of time I can afford to dedicate to writing and managing a daily online post. I won’t be completely shutting down my online presence, but I will be here very little until things settle. I hope to travel more, write more for myself, and focus on organizing my work life to make it easier to transition in a year or so to my next great adventure.
While I don’t know exactly how many posts I’ve made—having gone through a purge some years ago of four- or five-hundred old posts for one reason or another—I do know the number is north of a thousand, which is a lot of words no matter how you slice it up. I’ve enjoyed the experience and am grateful for the opportunity that was offered way back in 2011 by Joy of Fishes. I’ve learned along the way to be a better writer, better listener, better reader, and (honestly) a better person. That, of course, is thanks to all you who read and reach out with support, encouragement, and even criticisms. It’s been a wild and rewarding ride over these last dozen years.
In more local news, after work yesterday I received in the mail a gift from a friend, a copy of The Letters of Seamus Heaney (selected and edited by Christopher Reid). My god what a tome; and I am totally smitten. At 820 pages, it is like a treasure chest of assorted riches. Couldn’t help myself and started it yesterday evening, fell asleep with it on my chest and a cat on my lap, and then picked it up again this morning when I should have been writing these very words. [Again, the ever-teetering time available vs things to get done conundrum that will eventually work as a weight balance scale in our lives.]
Anyway, there is an early letter from Heaney to his friend Seamus Deane (a fellow poet and recently appointed lecturer at Pembroke College). Heaney complains to his friend that Heaney’s teaching duties (roughly equivalent to a master's fellowship in the American system) were killing his energy for working on his thesis and that, anyway, no one at Queens College “was much interested in reading a work on ‘The Repressed Hero in Modern Irish Writing’.” This was written back before Seamus Heaney’s first collection, Death of a Naturalist, was published, before he was married, before he had more than a half dozen poems published in a handful of literary magazines of varying degrees of pretentiousness.
He reminds me of every English MA and PhD candidate I knew in my college years; he reminds me of myself at that age. If graduate school teaches nothing else, I’m convinced it teaches us how to gently smother the life out of dreams while taking on the Sisyphean task of educating young men and women even less interested in the subject than I was at the time.
Now, though, I will use these last few minutes before I head to work to dig again in this acreage of personal history of a dead poet—lamenting paths I’ve taken while celebrating others I would not have otherwise known.
Cheers everyone and here’s to a lovely Friday and a relaxing weekend.
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Be well, be kind, and appreciate the love you have in your life.
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Grab your coffee or tea and join us, please.
What's on your mind this morning?
