Oh, so many.
Need to rewrite everything on the blog. This probably will take the rest of my life, so I’m more than happy to make gradual improvements when I can. I’ll start with a few tags and categories and let you know as they’ve been cleaned up. Only tag/category I’m feeling comfortable with right now concerns Charles Simic. Those commentaries aren’t perfect, but they’re clear enough. They follow the narrative of the poems closely and the poems, it goes without saying, are terrific.
Need to blog three times a week, and not like this. Real blogging, where I bring a poem, work of visual art, piece of music, essay, graphic novel – you know, something different – for consideration. The more I waste time online the more I’m convinced that what goes on here is unique. There’s lots of fancy prose everywhere. Lots of thoughts that are too clean and too sharp: they describe our more conventional ideas or our ideological positions. They don’t really grapple with others’ opinions, much less with reality. It goes without saying that I don’t, either. But there seems to be a virtue in not being polished enough to fool oneself with the beauty of one’s own sentences.
Things that I have lying around that I would like to write about:
- a book on Picasso and Degas. Apparently Picasso saw a bunch of paintings by Degas depicting the same area of Paris in which he lived. Picasso responded to those paintings with paintings of his own.
- Nietzsche, “Daybreak” – every time I go to it, it’s too dense, but I end up thinking about it all day.
- Herodotus – up to book 6 now, have even read a few secondary sources (very few, to be sure).
- Wislawa Szymborska, Charles Simic, Seamus Heaney, Dickinson, Buson, Czeslaw Milosz – this is the poetry lying around the apartment.
- A video game called “Endless Legend” which is a lot like Civilization IV. I’m messing up each time I play it, though.
Writing this little update feels so pretentious. I spent most of the day looking stuff up on Wikipedia and browsing news feeds looking for something to write. I also drank a lot of coffee for some odd reason. I wish I could say I lived in this realm of ideas where Dickinson talked to Yeats and witnessing that I learned something about the nature of the universe if it is conceived in 358 dimensions.
It’s more like this: I’m just looking for anything that is relatable. That’s a feeling, and putting it into words and describing it fully is chancy. I don’t envy anyone with the task of explaining why something has relevance.
P.S. I’m using twitter more – you can feel free to add me there – and if you want to help, I could use subscribers to this blog’s feed. I’m trying to update twice a week, at least.