A bluff to snuff

A symptom of the age? Beyond the doublespeak, we also have carefully loaded terms. Take this one: 'I don't believe in X'. If X is angels or aliens, I have no complaints. But X is sometimes 'sesame seeds on pizza crust' or 'same-sex marriage'. You could argue that 'I don't believe in sesame seeds on pizza crust' is just synonymous for 'I don't like sesame seeds on pizza crust'; just a new-fashioned way of saying it. I think there's more to it. I would guess that either an evil wordsmith or an unconscious one got the better of someone somewhere some time ago, and invented the farce of 'I don't believe in X'.

Here's the logic. 'I don't believe' carries more authority and weight than 'I don't like/approve of'. Lack of belief in something is meant to coincide with reasons not to believe in it. I don't believe in unicorns because I have good reasons to believe they don't exist (no geological evidence; they have not been found among present species, while most regions have been explored, etc.). On the other hand, the connotations of 'I don't like' are only that my tastes are specific and limited, as are everyone's. Someone can answer 'I don't like' with 'That's nice. I do.' So, 'I don't believe in X' connotes that there are reasons not to believe in X (even if I don't supply them), while 'I don't like X' connotes untrammeled personal choice.

And here's the new wrinkle: the use of 'I don't believe in X' in cases where X obviously exists. 'I don't believe in sesame seeds on pizza crust' then serves as a way of saying 'No to sesame seeds on pizza crust -- would it were that pizza crust didn't have sesame seeds' rather than the more humble, 'None on mine, please.' It's an invitation and recommendation to deny reality to something; to appropriate the connotation of 'I don't believe in X' (there are impersonal, everywhere-applicable reasons not to believe in X) for the purpose of globalizing a personal preference.

Maybe I'm just harping on Rhetoric Millennium 3.0 -- after all, one of the original "trivial" disciplines is allowed progress, right? But it bugs me. When language is likely to have a component of subliminal advocacy, all participants should know as much: as when a reader ventures into a debate, or into an editorial, or into a poem.

Another easy definition

"A great poem is a perfect blend of sense and sound; it is memorable speech." Another easy definition, bewitchingly well-put. I've been making a list of the definitions of 'poetry' and 'a [good/great/worthy] poem' I come across (maybe at some point I'll steer my curiosity toward a research project). So far, the definitions have all been poetically phrased and absurdly untrue. Even reading them generously, I can't get past their blithe partiality. And even granting that most everything is partial -- doubly so, only part of the story and only part of the story according to you -- partiality should never be blithe. Otherwise, ignorance at best and minor intellectual totalitarianism at worst.

In the case of well-blended sense and sound, the half of the story left out is that some great poems are merely visual, deliberately or effectively. Not every poem resounds in the ear; some resound only in the eye or the inner understanding. Not to mention the deaf (and Deaf) poets who sign their poems.

Are we stuck? Are all epigrams and short shocking claims ultimately pretty shining lies? If so, as a self-described truth-seeker, I'm screwed: One of my main poetic modes is a kind of concatenated or continuous epigram.

The hope I'm hoping to rely on is the regard one can have for what is not said or not sayable. But how to write that regard in, and how to read it out? I don't know. I'm still working on that. It borders on one of the bigger questions I have: how to know what you say is true. Don't launch "What is truth?" against me. Truth is in your conscience, and in mine, and bits of it echo in the 3 or 4 philosophical theories of it.

All told, I love definitions, things nestled and things nested. I'm trying to catch what I can in webs that don't kill or maim, and which acknowledge the worlds small and large they connect. Things caught only for the moment actual.

Apology

Don't mind me. I know I can sound like an underheated attorney on crack and science, but he's just a character of mine who shares my concerns. I'm the same old Chris. Maybe you never knew the same old Chris. He jokes a lot, meows a lot, still thinks the SCAT bus system should be renamed, puts lots of black pepper on his chicken sandwiches, and despite his castles in the sky, is afraid of heights.

I can't clear the air of pretense. It comes rolling in like fog. I'm still learning how to ask words to model my sensibility beyond my thoughts, without degenerating into IM-speak (speaking of which, I wrote a poem recently in the form of an IM chat). It's going slow -- see, I was tempted to say, slow going.

I would say, we are who we are, but of course we're not. Not really. We're protean machines: part meme and perhaps part soul. All in the ratio and in its flux? I have a strange muse, a boy-beauty scrubbed of most his boy beauty so that I can concentrate on what little remains. The world is too much with us -- until we look at it from across the way?

Intermittency

This urge to cling to strips and sheets and bound bundles of text is surely old, but in this age the urge has become self-conscious. Cite the zeitgeist: The text can seem more real or sincere or interesting than any world it might refer to. The text can be definitive -- just those characters with that syntax, coming together some one way -- even in this era of promiscuous mixing, when the definitive text is only the easy childhood before the mad scramble. The stacks of blocks before the waves of ambiguity come toppling.

Cellular automata may be worn thin these days, with Rucker and Wolfram and company fashioning them as The Answer, but they illustrate the point. Take the few ordered characters of a text as the few simple computational rules of a cellular program. Then the structures that come tumbling out of the program -- periodic, chaotic, or intermittent -- are analogous to the meanings that come tumbling out of a text. (Although, one text may have many meanings, some continuous and some subject to gestalt-jumps, whereas a program-generated structure sits instantiated, utterly itself. So perhaps we should draw the analogy not between meanings and structures, but between meanings and patterns we locate in the structures.) In either domain, sustained intermittency is the prize; the harmonies and counterpoints; the Hegelian synthesis after synthesis.

I'm trying to get past all this. To build a post-postmodern room in my mind's MOMA, and one that isn't merely modern again. Actually, the room is up and the lights installed, but the commissions are in the works. The artists keep sending letters, progress reports of sorts, saying things like, "The strongest notes are earth tones. More Zen than granola, but beyond both..." and "Images of God keep coming up. A hesitant, heartbroken God, undergoing a conversion from Architect to Concerned Citizen. Lots of milky orange and sub-luminous light...”

extreme disjunction

no day is forgettable; otherwise, every day is.

a corollary: whimpers matter as much as bangs. this could very well be a lesson we're here to learn, whether or not we're here to learn any. the same way the existential sisyphus isn't here to be happy, but can be despite knowing that. as neo put the obvious, the issue is choice.

you protest: my disjunction is extreme, and worse, untrue. some days suck, you say. i'll give you that -- but forgettable?

for me it comes down to this: i don't want to forget any of this, if any of it matters (and if none of it does, i'd sooner forget it all). agreed, some days life feels too lived-in. still, i want to believe trivia doesn't trivialize, but coats a bearable lightness of being on top of so much plastered-on purpose; it keeps the dice rolling; it keeps the fundamentalists busy and the rest of us reaching.

snap out of it, you say: each day, however coated, isn't a microcosmic marvel -- holy moments are special, not general.

i leap at the chance to say: that isn't for us to say.

time to sublimate

to paraphrase a friend, i wish i had the wisdom not to write this. but it's been one of those weekends, so here goes.

thursday night i was reminded how not to entrust your feelings with people you don't know well. tonight i learned the lesson again, at another level, from a brighter candle. those were the bookends.

my negative but heartfelt manhunt profile served as some kind of inverse philosopher's stone, but not in the way i expected. i expected the usual defensiveness and accusations of bitterness from guys on there, but the large majority of responses were positive. i may have even made a friend from "the ass-end of the universe", who described our resonance thusly: "i seem to have met my evil twin. or maybe i'm your evil twin. either way, uncanny." he got my sense of humor, and i got his, and that doesn't happen much. the double date looms in the indefinite future (he's hitched too).

and yet, points 2 and 3 came home to roost big time, when i wasn't manhunting in name or in fact. i won't get into it, because it's time to sublimate:

i've come to believe that i am most myself in my words. at first i thought such an idea was run-of-the-mill insane (in real life, i'm a nice person with a sentimental streak; i'm an amused didactic fuck in my writing), but over the years the logic has shone through. my poems have become miniature altars to this and that -- ones i'm not ashamed to need or attend. like franz wright's have. i don't know if franz is the man his poems suggest he is, but i am the man i want to be in my poems. and by that i mean nothing less than: i have found (a very unusual, personal but sublime) god in them; i have discovered/invented reasons to continue my life, with or without him/it; i have rediscovered a language my head dreamed of using but my life never allowed; i have begun to understand and undertake my past; i have had moments where i felt honored to exist, even if my existence means nothing more than charming the pants off this model reader i have in mind, who will see my footnotes and rub his eyes in disbelief, just before the unstoppable smile comes across and winds its way through a day reclaimed.

acid afternoon

my new manhunt profile:

(1) there are no such things as tops and bottoms (unless we're talking quarks). if you need to play roles and dress-up to wrap your mind around the idea that you're into guys, i wish i could show you how boring a pattern your matrix code makes.

(2) your constant wit is really just tiring sarcasm. hurt-you-first humor isn't very funny, but it does breed more of itself, so i can see how you might think you're gaining.

(3) honesty isn't gold. it's a god; one we can access from here. try it. everyone will take advantage of you, yes, but you'll have peace of mind, and with luck, or karma, or providence, you may even be rewarded.

***

in a more careful mood, here is (1) restated:

(1') there are no such things as tops and bottoms, except by choices we make and make until they harden into habits. sure, your choices may feel natural: but what are you willing to rule out because of them?

for a future treatise, part two

Most of the time I don't trust regular rhyme because as I write one, the aim of a poem is to capture or release the essence of something, and I believe the essence is the long shot in a contest of schemes. Notable exceptions excepted for a predetermined number of syllables or words a poem contains, but rarely for predetermined alignments of sound: What can be said can always (to a point) be said in fewer words, but not always in fewer or more regular sounds. This has been true of my experience and it may not generalize. But if I have to scheme with sound, I would rather do it retrodictively. I would rather the sounds be like pieces of a puzzle coming together somewhat, if they do.

You could say to my detriment, I don't believe anything is exactly trite. Unthinking, yes; over-thought, perhaps; thought-out without first surveying, the assumed self-sufficient monad too much trusted, very much so. But to believe anything is trite is to succumb to a view of language that it is ruled by fashion: Too much use means we have to flee to the new, rather than work our ways there at whatever pace we might and for whatever reasons. Who would avoid words because they have already been reached, as if each string of words is but the trace of a game of chess, one more sequence of moves for the annals to study? Who would avoid words for this and no other reason? Not because you have fallen on them and wish to get up; not because they have seduced you against your will or done the thinking for and without you. But because you have heard them or seen them n and one too many times. For some, n = 1.

Every use of words is whatever else, advocacy of their use, meaning they express, or both. Much advocacy work bears persistence; versions and versions. This fact is not alone a mark against it. The path to utter originality leads to utter loneliness, and often to incomprehensibility.

You should say what you need to say. You should also learn everything you can, aiming at the best command you can manage of what has been said in the way it was said, consistent with a healthy resting heart-rate and sense of peace. And if the time comes when you need to say, "the science of the night", I hope you won't shrink from your task. I hope you will resist wondering if it is trite, and instead wonder what is gained in the saying of it. You should say what you need to say. Look for your answers everywhere, edit them always, but trust them at last.

A Metaphysic for Poetry

Partly because we expect a symmetry between what they represent and the facts, we make them the way we do, and partly because we make them, technical concepts can be fixed. The natural numbers that are prime, for example, can be fixed: definitionalized into necessary and sufficient conditions for the concept of primality which while subject to refinement in congress with other concepts, is itself modular: self-sufficient: finished.

Many concepts, like poetry, are not fixed because even the essence of poetry (whatever that is and if even it exists) has not yet finished coming into being. Poetry is unfolding in every age and each of their moments bring new forms and refinements. Unfinished, poetry cannot be fixed. And thus it has no necessary conditions: We can't say what poetry invariably is if poetry is varying.

I believe this platitude is true: We must be content with poems as sufficient instances of poetry. If we are forced to a definition of poetry, then it can be defined as the whole grab-bag of sufficiencies: all the poems. Of course, everyone's bag has different contents, so take for the definition the whole Bag of all the individual bags. It will be too big for any of us (and part of whose contents only the future can supply), but that is alright. Here's the thing: When a piece of text has sufficient echoes to a poem in your bag and to your cut of the Bag (however much you can manage), it goes in both. The sufficiency of the echo is again individual, but we already knew that.

By all means, broadcast your principles (if you have them; and if you need to) according to which poems go in your bag: detail your sufficiencies. Just, if you would, don't call them necessities. That assumes poetry is done and you have surveyed every poem and you have found the beating heart of each.

for a future treatise, part one

Since I don't trust the gifts of demons of either the ancient or modern breed, I want to know thought went into a poem. Even if the space it explores is more limbic than cerebral, there is no excuse for a sloppy indulgent tour through limbic space when careful tempered tours abound. For a journal entry to be a poem, for example, it should have more than line breaks, as critics have requested. It should have embedded meanings; whether pitched images, propositions and their echoes, discoveries of language or narrative, it should contain words that draw toward ideas, if not exhibit them.

A poem should reward the further study that comes after the early inroads. It should be at some level or another a lesson, though one that seeks valuation where normally one expects evaluation. The lesson need not be and usually should not be directly stated (unless, none the worse for the poem, there is a lesson accomplished in part by the direct stating of a lesson); rather, it can be embodied in the midst of its materials of construction; it can be the statue in the clay. But charming, disarming, or neither, proselytizing or not, tendering a lesson caught as a cat in a mirrored cage or a lesson wild as a solar flare, a poem should be at worst esoteric: never static.

Actually, there is room in poetry for the celebration of static, but too many poems are themselves static. Indeed, celebrations of static as static -- static personalized as the accidents and coincidences recruited to help locate a poem, static cleaving to the edges of the known, static as silence between the signals -- often work with and for a poem. And indeed, generally, both writers and readers of poetry affirm the truism that poems can use language to do something outside of language. They may share a mystery, shed an illusion, carve out a niche for a rare or frequent feeling, transform a thing into its relations, or, needling it in some novel way with the world, empty a phrase of its meaning, or fill it. But a poem is not its parts and aims: A sequence of words that uses neither static nor signal nor their ratio, neither gesture nor syntax nor their relation, to any great effect, is not yet a poem.

You may ask, Isn't the effect in the eye of the affected? And in the eyes of the age, as the spectrum of prevailing orthodoxies? I find myself unable to believe in the project of poetry without answering, Not entirely. And in the balance -- or rather, in the lack of balance between transmission and reception, between perspicuous poem and ready reader -- lies poetry.

redux

i felt that smile, overpasses and underpasses away, the miles between us. what's in a smile? -- creeping across and holding us together, for the moment content in the belief there's a me looking for you beneath it.

there's no need to be cryptic. the world's not a crypt. well, not yet.

the dance remix of the theme song to ghost taught me something: i'm haunted.

you?

nothing and something

now that i know that there are three people who read this thing, i feel compelled to feel compelled to write here. you know by now that everything's second-order with me.

rainstorms on a full moon tonight. two phenomena i love, cancelling each other out. is there a meaning? well, no -- but i'll whip one up.

look here: it's the zero ontology. i bought into this idea for a while, and still have tendencies. the idea is, the universe is literally nothing. if you're a whack-job quantum theorist, it's a (keyword) little more sensible... the quantum state of the universe being a giant superposition (work with me here) the tensor-product components of which exactly oppose and counterbalance one another. a reified equation that cancels itself out, more or less. we tread down a path -- 'look at this! and this! and turn away from that... look at this!' -- but really, could we see the state of all paths, there's nothing; something being incomplete nothing and nothing being the whole fact.

yeah, dark. but liberating too, in the way rarified nihilism can be. but like all these thought-games, too much is left out (pun intended: shame on you. and, congratulations)... the question, 'why is nothing everything' gets explained 'because everything is nothing', and the question, 'well, why is that?' gets a reflexive 'nothing needs no explanation; you're thinking of something again'. it's a toxic case of begging the question, or you could say, of loading most of your theory into its premise. still, it sparkles, the way miniature theorems in number theory can.

someone asked me if my poems are going to suffer if i start blogging -- getting ideas down and getting prosy when i might be suffering them until they come out as poems. i have two answers to that question.

1) i have a poem that begins:
[Your god isn't as good
as my]
that sits neglected on a corner of my desk.

2) the poems i've written in the past few weeks, though few, make me glad i'm giving this a shot.

you are here

so here i am. i sort of like it, being in this eye of the storm even though i know danger abounds. my self-concept is going to supervene on what happens in the next year or two. will i remain a poet? will i emerge a new, career poet? will i want to stay in florida, move to nyc, or pine for toronto? will arman and i continue this trend we've recently begun, of meeting people here and making friends? will they hold us here? i want them to. but i also think about that chocolate commune with elliot and company.

things are far from perfect, but this is what i wanted: to be always at the beginning of an adventure worth beginning. to savor the potential of things, with bursts of actuality (you know, to keep it real).

Everyman's dilemma

days like those, i remember why buddhism. if only i could dip into that disconnected calm and emptiness, at will. these days the closest i come is listening to a lowercase-t trancy song on repeat for a couple of hours.

it's a tough one. if my happiness depends on other people doing what i expect them to, i'll be as contingent as the stock market. but if i removed myself entirely -- the old self-reliance bit -- then what am i here for? personal gnostic growth? i feel the nobility of that idea deeply, but i can't embrace it... blame this on a too-early exposure to jewish mysticism (eighth grade, sidetracked from book hunting for a report)... i can't help believing we shards of the Absolute, if we are and if it exists, have something to do with and for one another. a conditional belief, but a sincere one: we aren't monads. the world minus me isn't just educational panorama-vision.

so there is Everyman's dilemma: find yourself, or find your place. they'll try to tell you there's no conflict, that you'll be most yourself in a place of your discovering or inventing; but once there, if you look closely, you may find that you stand out as the alien artifact all the more, wondering, 'does the universe want this? does it want me to want this? or is it frankfurtian in its tolerance?: loving this (you pick the this) is the very reason for this.'

by contrast, it's easier to know what you are as a gear turning with the rest toward some good, and for your own (hence religion), but then, what are you? a means? a gear, with some choice of turning speed? -- one that can suspect as much? how interestingly awful. ... so either way, taking a role (assuming a place) begs the question, i think, of who is taking it. on the other hand, taking the time to figure out what and who you are leads to a kind of world-weariness; to a sort of angst about there being no instruction manual, no diagram labeling you as which gear. ... find yourself: arbitrary in your role or determined in it. find your place: who am i to find it? i think we could do better without either bit of folk advice, since neither one amounts to much, and each pulls against the other.

i have a way out, but i don't always hold to it. and of course, it's both unoriginal and for most, still heresy (by whatever name). count me among those mystics: the Absolute did (or is) split, and we are splinters. we're not gears because we're not a wholly separate creation; and we're not arbitrary pick-your-flavor oversouls either (the freedom of which is their reason to exist), since we really are some of the broken Absolute, who, somehow collected or collecting, has an agenda. 'but uncle chris, an agenda is future-oriented... what if the Absolute is timeless?' well, then it only dabbles in time: it knows how to time, at least. beneath the nausea at the idea, there is room for the belief that our infinite future is only unending from here; that all and any of this mere progression, all of this mere matter mattering, matters.

retrospective

given the chance -- if being directly direct is cock-sure and being indirectly indirect is lost -- i'm indirectly direct. but confession doesn't suffice; these blog posts embarrass me. i come across as someone who hasn't been outside in weeks. scholastic, i guess.

often when i read a poem i wrote 10 or 14 months ago, it embarrasses me too, and i feel a difficult, mixed feeling of gratitude and disappointment: gratitude that i get to edit or banish it (to a 'history' folder), and disappointment because i then have to recharge my belief that a poem has more than its moment; the moment when it worked. then again, there are a few poems that have survived my rereads and criticism for years (though by few i do mean few), so often i recharge by attempting to believe its moment can be renewed. disappointment lingers, because i can't foresee the list of who gets renewed: every poem a firework in free-fall, beautiful and blustering to one or another degree and in the dark unknowing of whether its encore is coming.

what of it? choices. let my optimist run loose, nakedly sure crazy-era nash-like that everything matters and is simmering toward some synthesis, muttering, 'process! process! the path, the means, is meandering toward something, and anyway, is an end in itself!' ... or let my more natural voice intrude: 'think of what you want a poem to be -- sermon? (what sort? didactic? casual? self-deprecating?) code? discovery? self-discovery? -- then put up the scaffolding, then build with the building in sight. don't worry if you have to change the plan several times midway. no one is going to de-fund the project.'

i try to listen to both. it's taxing. but it feels honest, and honesty is a friend of embarrassment.

preconditions

hey mark, do you or would read the london review of books, if you were given a subscription? details on why i ask at your request.

in medias res, yes. i get lectured a lot on putting things where they don't belong (such as myself on manhunt, by fellow hunters; a pic of a mouse on manhunt, by the site operators; or my body distance running through the snow at 1am, by campus police). no, i'm not xtreme (sic), just a little sick, in a way i enjoy: estranged from the usual patterns but interested in others.

i'm trying to be cute, i guess, even though i'm told cuteness in poetry is the fastest way to annoy everyone who matters and get left behind in the slush pile of the age. so that worries me, but i find other thoughts to shake it off: generally i'm not cute in poems; i have fun in poems, with a spare, abstract, parmenidean farce that isn't afraid, additionally, to be true. anyway, most poets officially endorse the dictum 'autobiography rots' (i've mentioned this, but hear me out) and yet many write journal entries with line breaks (not my turn of phrase, but a good one): one more reason to believe we fool ourselves. and because we fool ourselves, we should try not to fool ourselves, but not to the neglect of more pressing matters of writing, such as having something to say about life, language and everything in between, and such as having a social pulse and agenda even, and such as believing maybe 'insight' and 'message' were perhaps thrown into modern poetry's hume's fire a little too hastily.

which brings me to a lesson i've learned (contra dean young: lessons are not barometers of simplemindedness), one of the better ones a poet can learn: you don't matter. your norse gods and love of baroque architecture or music, your fascination with the promiscuity of language or brazilian clubkids, none of it matters. i don't want to read about it, either. and only those who dig you for other reasons, or are using your poems as cutting-edge therapy by some well-meaning therapist, are going to give it more than a passing thought, should they have the good fortune to chance across it. ok, so what? make what you write matter: if it doesn't matter to you, if you are only channeling it to get rid of it or to have fun with it (since you're stuck in your life with your interests), i don't want it. but if you do make it matter: if i feel you're a real person showing me something, not hiding the fact that you have nothing to hide (or show); if you have something to say, 'across however wild or thin a thread' (mary oliver), that makes all the difference. your obscurity and difficulty is then not earned (you can't earn it), but enabled, even ennobled. huh? your obscurity is par for the course on a course of purple ricegrass on twin earth, if you have your twinpack of curiosity and courage packed.

posing

the phrase 'help me spread my words' stands out in my mind, and won't sit down. 'spread' is most naturally what happens to seeds or diseases or memes, the connotation being that survival trumps worthiness. i keep thinking how a year and some months back i resisted the idea that too many would-be poets seek publication and too few seek help in becoming better poets. i wanted to go on believing that my meandering, formal, often didactic poetic voice, bent on finding epigrammatic gems and conclusions, was worth the chase -- and didn't need to be caught and tamed.

things have changed. i've come to see that at its worst, poetry is an unhappy marriage of narcissism and solipsism; and although two 'isms' seldom bear sweet fruit, these two only bring out the worst in each. rilke was right, in his letters, advising patience and advising writing out of deep need (without which life would be less, if not nothing) and need of discovery. he was right to say that publication is derivative and later, if ever; that achieving something public can never be the goal. i half-believed him before, but wanted to avoid any sticky implications. now i believe him fully, and this despite the fact that his poetry speaks to me less now than before.

i guess it's another instance of the trend: the more seriously i take myself, the more modest my goals become.

i will never ask for help spreading my words. i won't ask for help *sharing* them either: i will earn it, if i can.

the halting problem, for blogs

i just took a shower. but that is the most concrete thing i have to say.

in that shower, my thoughts were cascading, the way they were a year back when i was using the steam to 'steam-glue' sheets of paper to my shower, so that i could write the thoughts coming in streams like the water: words and lines of poems, parts and sometimes even whole poems.

strange, a blog is a sounding board; a diary; a sort of bulletin; and probably other things besides. it is a new sensation for me, since i am for the most part intensely private and since my sounding boards have been my own thoughts, my partner, and my few e-mail pals. strange but fun to think a few of the curious might gander down these lines, and a few of the few might be taken with something like interest. it is the same with poems: they are the workings-out of my own concerns, as well as embodiments of larger concerns. the calculated frolicking of ideas that matter to me, with a door cracked and opening a line of light others, if willing, may follow to somewhere they've seen but in different light.

marvin bell says autobiography rots (number 10 of his 'thirty-two statements about writing poetry', which i more or less follow), and i tend to agree with him. yet here is a sanctioned space for fatuous self-absorption: memoir without an editor to tone you down and broaden your appeal and relevance. or so it seems.

yet here is the chance to wiggle things into words without the pressure of it being all that worthy. here, even, is the democratic ideal that worthiness comes of process: of wordiness. it's all very new and exciting, even though i had a friend in college, ken (hi ken), who i remember back in the hinter-era of 1998 or 99 posting internet entries to what i think he called a journal, well before this craze got going. i remember wondering where he found the time, but ken was a marvel of efficiency on a bottle or three of jolt (my own poison of choice was red bull, back when it was new and 'small' and 'gross, like liquid smarties' -- back before it was widely discovered). i guess i have to admit that smarties, jolt, red bull and ken are all concrete.

so this is the halting problem for blogs. the churning continues, and a thought can't think itself over. (relatively) unfiltered thoughts are fun, even in this accumulating glut of memoir and personality cults that we call the new millenium. by now you see certain idioms -- or are they cadences? or are they memes? -- that i rely on in writing prose sentences. the thing is, i don't usually write the big, generalized, overbearing academic sentences that much anymore (i save those for the poems, ha!), so what gives? the spirit of pine view has found me, i guess, in more ways than one.

super-condensed update

so i got to thinking about a friend of mine up in boston who despises the word 'blog'. he thinks it's one of the ugliest words ever unleashed. i remember a conversation that went something like, 'but carl, a blog is a fun concept. and i've seen worse abbrevs., even if 'blog' does sound kind of bloated and soggy...'. which brings me to my point: i think word-arguments (by which i mean, arguments over the comparative beauty, origins, and uses of words) are pretty fun. try one with someone you know well enough to have a word-argument with, but not as well as you would like. you get to try out ideas that don't usually come up when the conversation ranges over workspace drama, favorite restaurants, and the weather.

in other news, i have been found by pine view alums cathy and amber. it's sort of a strange feeling, since this is my first contact with anyone from pine view (with 2 exceptions) in nearly nine years. for a long time i have treasured the relative anonymity i have achieved. i guess it began as a consequence of the butterfly syndrome... i've changed, a lot, and i'm gay (maybe to some, 'Duh'? i'm not sure. and to anyone it concerns: seth and i were never lovers. ha). which to mainly liberal/libertarian pv students is probably a non-issue, but it was a big issue for me, for a long time, as i gradually outgrew my asexuality and discovered the odd flashes of interest, attraction, and affection i felt toward members of my own sex were not, after all, flukes. plus i changed from a booksmart kid into something else entirely... a deeply theoretical but deeply flaky premature grad student. i decided physics was a joke (i still think it is, but it's a funnier one these days: and by that i mean, it wasn't right for me at all), and philosophy was where i belonged. so i tried to learn if academic philosophy could really suit me career-wise, decided it just might, but then decided i preferred philosophical poems and essays. which brings me close to the present moment, since i spend several days each week reading and waiting for inspiration to strike (pardon the cliche, but that it how it works).

i've had a fun ride, though, in case i'm coming across too strongly as the whiny brat i've been and sometimes am. maybe i'll get into some of that on this potential time-sink-hole into narcissism, myspace. that sounds too dark: maybe i'll get into some of that on this strange outcropping of an overly connected age, on this happy-home spreadsheet of our post-modern apocalyptic utopia. (yeah, for purposes of entertainment, i can still write sentences like that: tell mr. mccracken it was all bullshit.)

even now my social-liberal angst cries,
it wasn't ALL bullshit!
...
long live the lumpenproletariat!

first things first

ok, full disclosure: i'm brand new to myspace as of 4/24/06. and sad but true: i didn't seriously look into myspace until i read an article off yahoo yesterday that said some community college in texas banned myspace from its computer labs. i clicked on the headline expecting to read about censorship, and whaaa? 40% of internet traffic was to myspace? using up bandwidth? they had to do something?

so maybe it was time to see what the fuss is about... maybe yahoo and manhunt and salon and nyt online needed a new bookmark companion. yeah, i know. but i live in my own little wor(l)d most of the time, only slightly intersected by the larger one. i should be a buddhist or a physicist. ... wait, i've been both of those.

don't be afraid. beneath the layers and layers of dork, there is a cool streak.

and beneath that streak, dork all the way down.