Nerd Alert

I sent this to my Wordsworth and Coleridge / Gift and Sacrifice class tonight with a response paper about Wordsworth's Prelude. You will have to read the Prelude, which you should do anyway, to get the full extent of the humor. Anyway, I amuse myself, so here you go.

Not uselessly employed
Response here I have made, and stated how
The Prelude might be read, nor have I failed
To touch on how the poet's friend, the other
Poet, whom we have read and not without
Delight, might be addressed within the work,
Nor have excluded mention of the Gift,
And in the selfsame vein the Sacrifice
Have likewise I not shunned, nor will it seem,
To thee, dear Friends, that I in vain have read
And made response and summarized, as well
As fond and feeble tongue allows, the poem
Which you I need not dread neglected not
To read this one day that Seattle was
A visible scene on which the sun was shining.

Update

Yesterday it was like 80 degrees, and I went to a Wordsworth party. The day before I hung out with sailing officials and got a "beer rating" ("double-handed novice"). Being financially sensible, I'm missing the Irvine MFA prom, which I'm sad about, and instead spending Sunday watching a marathon of some Canadian mystery show that K Dub and L are obsessed with. I don't feel like doing any work. I REALLY don't feel like doing any work. Maybe I will buy some papers online.

By the way: for the past couple of weeks I have been feeling unusually phone-averse. I mean, I hate the phone anyway, always have. But I miss you. So don't think that I don't encourage any and all drunk dials, texts, emails, and/or carrier pigeons.

It's raining, it's pouring

Scenes from the University District street fair: lots of booths selling insurance or pictures of wolves or recruiting people to be atheists or bus commuters; people eating fried dough in the pouring rain; me walking through it clutching a giant tome about punctuation.

My new-poetry-mentor called something in one of my poems a "self-dissolving declaration," and I've realized that all my poems kind of work that way. Everything turns into its own opposite pretty much as soon as it hits the page. No wonder people say my poems are cryptic. I'm very pleased that NPM thought through them and understood.

Here's a question: should I write my second paper of the year about Wordsworth and Coleridge, or should I write about someone more contemporary? It might make more sense to work in my actual so-called period, but the class is about W&C and I'm kind of getting into them. Plus, poor Wordsworth! He's so maligned I always want to defend him.

Gertrude Stein taught me how to read Wordsworth

As you know if you've had the minutest discussion with me about my academic work, I've been on the defensive all year about my unwillingness to align myself with a specifically "experimental" tradition in poetry. In a conversation with my friend J(2) today, I formulated the reason like this. To me, the virtues people ascribe to experimental or avant-garde writing are the virtues that distinguish good poetry, period. If it's not inarticulable, irreducible, and counter-intuitive, if it doesn't take the world apart and put it back together off-kilter, it's not a poem. That makes me a postmodern reader, I guess. So if you're going to read like this anyway, if you're going to approach everything looking for what's off, what's inexplicable, what's a "site" of (linguistic, cultural, personal, etc) conflict, then a lot of effort in the writing intended to make you read this way just seems obvious. Rather than actually deconstructing your reading practices, it didactically congratulates itself for doing so--in the process undermining the very deconstruction at which it aims. For this reason, true experimentation within an "experimental" idiom is, at this literary moment, very difficult. Weird paradox.

Or that's my opinion, anyway. Now off to shower and then party.

Magic!

Obviously, blogging about sickness is the best way to get over being sick. Today on my run, I barely wheezed at all.

I also got to exercise my new motto, "Friends don't let friends take a cab to the airport." It's true!

I'm sick

of being sick. I will write more when the tribe of tiny guinea pigs decamps from the inside of my sinuses. Actually I will probably write more before that but it will probably sound like the world does to me right now, like it is coming from very, very far away.

Business as usual in Seattle

from today's Seattle Times: Two vehicles were swallowed by a giant sinkhole under the south end of the University Bridge.

Funny

Anyone who has been in a writing workshop has seen someone distort his gift by trying to make his writing funny. This always fails. The writer might be able to eke out a yuk or two, but you can tell when someone is exerting all his will and all his intelligence toward comedy, and the feeling of self-consciousness, of forcing, is murder to a joke. For some people the anxiety of this extends to all areas of life; others are funny in conversation but their writing is serious. Anyway, it's a terrible bind to want to be funnier than you are.

I always felt I had kind of dodged this bullet. I have a quirky sense of humor I would describe as weird but square, which amuses some people a lot and most others not at all. I'm usually fine with that. Unlike some of my friends, I've never felt like a failure because I'm not, you know, told I should do stand-up or something (god forbid! even the thought makes me queasy). I'm not a funny writer and, with the exception of a few one-offs and occasional poems or whatever, I've never tried to be.

But recently I've been (squarely) thinking about humor and writing, and thinking that it may be necessary after all. Not for the reasons usually associated with funny writing--rebellion, truth-telling, etc.; as a square, I don't like trickster-type figures, and I think "Fuck you, society!" is a dumb thing to say. I like my humor inclusionary, as far as that's possible.

What I've been thinking is that humor may be the only way to leaven a bleak worldview without conceding anything to consolation. If meaninglessness is the precondition of your writing, it's easy to end up in nihilism, and this is both irritating and boring. Humor avoids nihilism because it is of the tangible world, but it operates outside belief systems: the feeling you get when someone slips on a bananna peel doesn't suggest that there's any explanation for anything, that suffering has any purpose or reward, that we will all be reunited when we die. But it's still a nice feeling, an empirical feeling--it tells you you exist and that something outside of you exists. There are other pleasures like this, but they are physical, sensory, abstract--humor is the only one that does it in language and in connection with other people.

To laugh makes you feel alive. To be alive is tragic. As one of my writing professors (I forget which one) used to say, you can take that to the bank.

Mean grumpiness

Monday nights, post tutoring, are all the same. I sit in the kitchen, I eat some approximation of dinner, I flit around the internet, and I think about my apartment getting broken into. It was a Monday night that that happened, and I had blogged some cheerfully inane ephemera about tutoring that in retrospect looks self-satisfied and clueless. Hindsight. Changes things. So now as I write this I think, what will this look like to me if two hours from now I have a traumatic experience? I guess that's not so hard to figure out . . . it will look like self-satisfied, clueless meta-ephemera.

In other news, I'm going to train with two friends for a half-marathon. We're also going to run a 5K in Vancouver (Canada) in a few weeks just for the hell of it. In still other (pseudo-) news, I've been super social recently. However, I'm experiencing an strong wave of misanthropy. Not toward individuals, mostly . . . and not really toward the species either. Maybe I just mean grumpiness.