I haven't used this blog for much talk about me and I plan to keep it that way. There are thousands of brilliant blogs and millions of vanity-press blogs. Luminations should me at least modeling the brilliant ones... I always aim for much more than is realistically possible - hence my complete burnout at the end of every semester. Nevertheless, I aim to update Luminations much more frequently in 2007. Bring it back to its former... activity(?). Luminations started as blog I updated at lunchtime while I was working in Tokyo. I would often have time to plan out a post or project while riding the yamanote line in the morning and sometimes on the way home in the evening. After moving into a much slower paced life in Iowa, the potent mix of train noise and movement, chatter, announcements, and all the brilliance public transport added to life has been pretty much wiped out. So... It's back to the blog to work backwards in a way: how to thrive in dead city, midwest USA. I am also in the (very slow moving) process of building a new magazine to edit on my own terms. The Iowa Review Web is now just a mark on my resumé, but I'm not ready to drop my publishing projects yet. I've not yet developed a clear picture of the journal. Art+politics-'social realism'-bombast=?? is where I am now.

Is this BBC scaremongering about Hugo Chavez ? Not that I find him especially defensible, but the "one leader.." socialist 'threat' seems more like a capitalist bogeyman, than any real threat. But then again, lefties of all stripes should be careful who they support. The communist party's support of Stalin outside of the USSR was a mistake that has continued to provide the right and centrists pundits plenty of scare fodder for anything 'left.' Chavez doesn't seem like a Stalin though, and he does have a sense of humor.