Premises for highly episodic TV narratives might hinge, week after week, on new places (boldly gone to), new clients or patients, new cases (to open files on or, if old, close), new victims (dead, alive, fresh, cold), new monsters (of the week), new reveals (omg! polar bears!), new visitors (howdy, podner), new leads or new information…

Each carries its own sort of plot with it, its own natural ways of encountering and dispatching with the weekly novelty and making room for the next (the ship never stays, nor usually the crew; most patients are healed, clients satisfied, monsters killed; few visitors stay; leads generate more leads).

And each show whose premise hinges on this sort of something new also incorporates, somehow, an outlook on the fact that there will always be something new. On the fact that it will always be that. This needn't be expressed directly by the characters; it could show up in the way cast changes are made, or in the fact that they are made at all.

'And then there is the actual class period, during which you scramble to scoop up what the students toss you and shape it into something which is changing even while you handle it…'

When critics listen to music they can also sometimes hear what the musicians are trying to do.

Assignment for an aesthetics course: write a set of instructions, 2 pp., titled 'How to read a poem out loud—and why'.

What makes us think that philosophy must be a kind of work?

Snow.

Diurnalizing poetry?

Common places: the store, the office, the corner, the kitchen, the street.

'In my poetry a rhyme / Would seem to me almost insolent'