hell yes. of course we can.

Tuesday night, at Jimmy’s, it felt like this. It was all jumping and yelling and crying and hugging and then me getting really drunk and emphatic about things. The crazy thing is: it still feels like that.

This morning, a man I don’t know greeted me on the street. People are friendly in the midwest. This happens a lot. But this time, he didn’t say “Hi.” He didn’t mumble “How’s it going?” He just looked right at me and said “Yes we can.”

My feelings are complicated, to be sure, by the defeat of Prop 8 in California. It breaks my heart in a way that's made all the more personally crushing for its resonance with my first political experiences, working (just barely unsuccessfully) to attempt to add GLBTQ folks to Maine's nondiscrimination law. But all the same, it feels good around here. Really, really good.

(And now I'm going to go back to your regularly scheduled never updating my blog ever.)

one word

I used to write poems that reveled in brevity, poems that maxed out at three lines, three short lines, even. They weren't easy to write, unless they came to me entirely whole, already created out of the ether. Those were lovely, to be sure, but the majority of them were heavily polished little gems, careful creations masquerading as feats of inspiration.

Sometimes, the titles were longer than the poems. Other times, the titles were the only things shorter. Sometimes, they just had numbers. Lately, I can't write like that, but this delightful post (found via Bookslut) about short poems reminds me of how satisfying it was.

Last night, we were talking about The Fear of Losing Eurydice and AVA, because I'm re-reading the first and always thinking about the latter, and because there is a resonance between them that I was trying to explain. I think it boils down to this: each sentence in each book is as dense and vivid and carefully self-contained as one of these poems. Even in Eurydice, where they're not set apart visually, each sentence is a separate revelation, a discrete and lovely work that is linked thematically but not grammatically to the surrounding text.

Last night, I said they were similar "flights of language," a phrase I meant to reference the irresistibly infectious quality of flights of fancy, but also the delicious experience of flights of wine: words that take wing, and words that allow you to taste a range of ideas and images. Each word a rare bird.

an unexpected bard

Amid my dreams of paper and paragraphs, I made a surprising discovery last night. It wasn't Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, Edward de Vere, or even the Queen herself who wrote all those sonnets and all those plays. Shakespeare, as it turns out, was actually Camille Paglia.

Note to self: more sleep, less studying.

an american pastime (pastoral?)

Dream world: An Americana class (lit & song) taught by Don DeLillo and Tom Waits, the latter at a piano, the prior at a podium. The auditorium packed with students, and I’m stuck with a broken seat, warned of its danger by my childhood nemesis, sitting beside it. "Thanks," I whisper, and perch on the floor. The lecture is amazing.

Real world, precipitating events: Falling asleep reading DeLillo, thinking about how he weaves reality into Underworld; it’s not exactly deft, that’s just the word that pairs with weave. To expand, it’s well done, but almost a cheap trick, the way the drama pulls us along not because we wonder what will happen, but because we know. The Giants will win the pennant, and the world will explode with joy and wonder and defeat, all at once. A little boy will steal a baseball, and a bomb will drop.

He wrote (all this, in 1997) about the building of the World Trade Center, the way the towers felt joined and inevitable, about a plane flying past. It’s in these scarce and scattered moments that the trick is revealed, all the more because he was unaware of it. They read as something more final, more important, more clearly implicating all of us in their collapse, than they could possibly have felt or been at the time.

TV world, an aside: I don’t follow baseball, and I never would have read the opening pages of this book this way were it not for Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night.