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:

Some Things Are Happening. Some Things Are Bound to Happen.

First, the changing weather.

Second, an overwhelming amount of projects.

Third, some possibilities.

Some things for you to look at:

1. The new issue of Fou.

2. My new favorite webcomic.

3. A movie with some good poet friends.

Some things for you to expect:

1. Fewer posts with a little less substance (at least for awhile).

2. A print magazine with big ambitions.

3. Everything else.

Spying on the campaign trail

Announcement: fall is in the midst of Arrival. The air is cold in northern Pennsylvania, and I am ready to don a trench coat and a knit cap. This could possibly happen in a spy-like scenario.

I tried my hand at spying in Philadelphia. My Subject had an orange shirt and a shock of gray hair at his temple. Who knew that orange was a popular color for men this season? Everyone in Philadelphia is anticipating autumn with their clothing choices. Although my Subject proved elusive amidst all this foliage-like fashion, I happened upon a bakery just as the rain started up. I think a scone is considered relatively little payoff in the spy world, but it is certainly a tasty kind of payoff.

If fall is for spy games, it is also, historically, a time for campaigns. I have some ideas:

Let's campaign for wood smoke and wet leaves.

Let's campaign for the badass super hero parade of princesses.

Let's campaign for vintage leather camera bags with corduroy linings.

Let's campaign for Nixon. Or, failing that, commemorative campaign glasses. More generally.

Let's just be on the trail.

Moving magic

Look out, world. I'm changing locations.

Look out, the world is magical.

Your faithful correspondent returns in an undisclosed amount of time.

Anatomy of water

Depleted by a week of reading more than 400 tiny blue books full of responses to the same two writing prompts that oscillated between heartbreakingly naive, unintentionally hilarious, and Just Plain Wrong. All written in the vaguely off-key notes of just-out-of-high-school Test English, which is not unlike the struggling plonks of a dilapidated carousel or the maddening strains of the "It's A Small World" Disney ride.

So I retreat into cheesy, accordion-driven love song waltzes and Matthea Harvey poems and over-priced vintage stores and ridiculous hat fashion shows to re-boot. Jumbled up in my post-blue book thoughts: the tantalizing decision to leave behind the moderns for the messy, sprawling vistas of Contemporary Fiction. I am squinting to see it better.


Last weekend I tried to read Lauren Groff's Delicate, Edible Birds on the beach before the fog fell out of the sky like a brick. Or something really heavy. And sneaky. Until it falls on you.

Reading through the collection, indoors, in the ensuing week of rain, it struck me how present water is in the book: humid indoor swimming pools and rainstorms and lakes and flooded rivers. And then, as I'm having this thought, Groff gives me this paragraph, in the middle of a love story that turns out to be a jagged tale of loss, self-forgiveness:

There is no ending, no neatness in this story. There never really is, where water is concerned. It is wild, febrile, kind, ambiguous; it is dark and carries the mud, and it is clear and the cleanest thing. Too much of it kills us, and not enough kills us, and it is what makes us, mostly. Water is the cleverest substance, wily beyond the stretch of our mortal imaginations. And no matter where it is pent, no matter if it is air or liquid or solid, it will someday, inevitably, find its way out. (192)

I want to say that the other, complementary thing in the book has to do with little tragedies (absences, denials, misunderstandings, surrenderings), familial or creative or intellectual struggles that loom large on our personal horizons and so tiny on any other natural scale.¹ But those little tragic moments of giving up or letting go (sometimes to positive effect), fit so perfectly there amidst Groff's soundless depths, strung up in that "wild, febrile" tension between the quotidian and the monumental.

And there are some thoughts about To The Lighthouse floating around in my head. I am squinting to see them better, too.

---

¹ The phrase 'little tragedies' klinks a little bit wrong in my head, as the Germans would say. But it's a matter of translation and there's no fixing it tonight.