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

Who knew Hyperbole was a ballet dancing transcendentalist?

I did what I always do when I'm a little perplexed--I made a ton of food: summer squash, zucchini, and potato gratin with olive oil, fresh parsley, and garlic scapes (almost all of the ingredients of which came from the farm) and enough chocolate chip cookies for all of my neighbors and some of Bartlett.

I also made about 10 alternative life plans in my head, a course of action I take when I am unsure of what I'm doing in life. Most of these plans included jobs in publishing or freelancing and lots of writing in apartments with nice lighting and a typewriter. These apartments were located everywhere from Paris to New York to Philadelphia to Lancaster. They were very definitely not in Amherst and far, far away from academia.

I think I've been so concerned with figuring out what I'm going to *do* to support the thing that I really want to do in life (ie write), that I haven't been doing what I need to do. That is: poems. Except I did write a poem this week, and it felt good. About dreams and Amelia Earhart and a personified Low Pressure System wearing a cravat.

It is confusing to be good at and praised for something that you enjoy but do not love. It is somewhat worse to be good at and praised for something that you enjoy but do not love in a town that is a postcard for a bourgeois, upper-middle class existence that is mind-numbingly boring. But for the farm, the small press, the Bookmill, the prospect of rowing in the fall, and the insane library access, I might run screaming off into the hills.

My next poem will feature a personified Hyperbole wearing a tutu and reciting Whitman.

The sight of bridges and balloons

makes calm canaries irritable / and they caw and claw all afternoon / catenaries and dirigibles...


I just realized that the same reason I love Shannon Burns is quite possibly the same reason I love Joanna Newsom. Breadfruit.

And this is kind of what I feel like right now. Archive. Palimpsest. Paper! Except my clothes aren't as nice.


And I'd much rather be here, on the water.

(I promise to make more sense in a month, after a massage and a bubble bath and a pot of chocolate fondue.)