It’s too bad I don’t fly more often—I’d have a much steadier supply of blog material. Today’s in-flight entertainment included a documentary on the founder of Hershey’s Chocolate.

I’m returning from a fun-filled trip back to the Bay Area, where an hour or two of actual academic business helped justify what was really a poetry vacation. There was a delightful poetry-swap reunion on Wednesday evening, fueled by chicken soup and potato pancakes at David’s Deli and concluding, after a rain-drenched uphill sprint, with poems at Del’s place. An early Christmas: when I appeared at David’s Cassie greeted me with two bags groaning with Australian books and journals and a thick sheaf of photos from the postcard poems reading (featuring things like me, Stephanie, and Del doing what looked like a little doo-wop together at the mike and Catherine making rabbit ears behind the head of any unsuspecting victim she could find).

Stephanie, meanwhile, handed me a mysterious manila envelope labeled "TIM LNPB"; inside was a stack of thin, beautiful, nearly square chapbooks, each with a slightly different, finger-painted image on the front: a circle topped by a pyramid with a protrusion that looked suspiciously like an elongating nose. Stephanie had, in fact, followed through on her promise to preserve Long Nose Pinocchio Bitch for posterity, with my, her, and Kasey’s LNPB poems now prefaced by Jonathan Mayhew’s ode to an alternate species, the Long Nosed Pinocchio Squirrel Bitch.