Who Needs Realism, Really.

These are some things we can learn from the movie "High Fidelity":

1. That, in Hollywoodland, it's possible to be a selfish jerk-face and still have a sexy girlfriend with a husky voice.

2. That there is something fundamentally attractive to the American consumer about list-making.

3. That maybe sometimes it's necessary to ask ourselves what we would want to be and where we would want to be it if historical time, money, and training were not obstacles.

That is to say, Fantasy Is Really Just A Way to Cope. That is to say, I offer you my Top 5 Alternative Life Choices:

1. A Sailor

2. A Member of the Landed Gentry

3. A Kindergarten Teacher

4. A Detective (but really I might just mean Humphrey Bogart):

5. Primary Set Designer For All Future Wes Anderson Films

Wild Airplane Rumpus

What to tell?

I started this blog to more or less keep track of what I was reading and thinking about reading and when I left my house to go listen to people read, I thought I'd talk about that, too.

Really I have no good way to explain how I got from Proust to Lisa Olstein to Kelly Link to A.S. Byatt to Foucault to Balibar to Elizabeth Hughey to Dawn Powell to Ralph Ellison in roughly a month and a half. But voila. Here I am. Still trying to process everything. One day I'd like to write more about it all.

I've also read Anne's poems in Juked and Front Porch; watched Jed read from The Manual of Detection at Amherst Books; shared in a victory dance with Miranda, recently published in Meridian (not to be confused with the magazine published by the Mormons).

I've manned the jib of a 16-footer on Jamaica Pond. I've sat uncomfortably through "Where the Wild Things Are," with its sad belief that humans really are incapable of communicating with one another in any nice way. I've been making sound effects for this bumper sticker. I've been writing poems about underwater cities.

I've been liking this song, even though I'm not sure that I'm ready to endorse a return to the 70s mustache, or the cheesy lyrics, or their particular (and kind of unfortunate) placement of the word 'encyclopedia.' But it's catchy:

How Sad It Was That We Could Not Believe

These breakfast-time quandaries from Kate Beaton, whose webcomic Hark! A Vagrant has been keeping me occupied (ie procrastinating/laughing), could very well be on the syllabus of one of my seminars.

A related object of study being: names for things. Truth in the representation of the thing (name). And, just to get everyone all riled up: capital-T-truth. In objects, in embodiment. Or, as Miranda would say, in Real Human Feelings.

This is where things get tricky. Accessing this truth might require the narrativization of it--blogging, for one. Poems for another. Letters. LiveJournal. You get the idea. That this process of putting all the pieces together, of making some of your own pieces, somehow provides more insight, realness, than Just The Facts.

Problem as solution. Problem as problem.

Paul Celan knew this, and so the Problem gets pastiched:

Landschaft

Ihr hohen Pappeln--Menschen dieser Erde!

Ihr schwarzen Teiche Glücks--ihr spiegelt sie zu Tode!

Ich sah dich, Schwester, stehn in diesem Glanze.

Brilliance in nature and its reflection. Brilliance in a kind of Recognition.

Take us home, Romantics. Take us home, indie kids: