…only the stuff worth talking about.
I used a charcoal Lamy Safari with a F nib for almost a year until it disappeared (!) a few months ago. I replaced it with a shiny black Lamy Safari with an EF nib, and suddenly my handwriting is so.. bubbly.
I’ve never had bubbly handwriting! Also, this happened right about the time that I switched to Noodler’s Habanero. Funny how these things can affect your handwriting…
We are beings-in-process. At every stage of self-discovery, we look back reinterpret the past, gleaning for clues that we would eventually come to here.
Back in Charlottesville, Virginia, I lean against the columns of the historic lawn at UVa to smoke a cigarette and shelter myself from the rain. I’m the only one standing still in the current of umbrella’d students scurrying to classes, restaurants, coffee shops.
Funny how a place is more emotion than geography.
I heard the other day that a close friend from high school is a creative writing major. Good, I thought, that he should end up where he should be. I wonder if he couldn’t shake the same impulse that I am always fighting—the sneaking knowledge that writing is the best way to sort through things internal and external. Things past and present. And did he sort through me the way I sorted through him?
I have a memory of pestering him to include me in an essay. I think I wanted confirmation that I wasn’t the only one encountering real life through writing. He said he did, but never showed me the result.
In Alderman library, I wonder how I would’ve been at a school of 30,000 students instead of 1600. I count down the days till I return to school, and from then until graduation. These sorts of anxieties are best calmed by a pen—this break has already produced ten poems.
I will write my way from Charlottesville back to Gambier, and from the past back into the present (and onward)
…with short and snarky commentary!
John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs
I’ve now written two extended critical papers on Berryman’s Dream Songs, and I keep wondering why I’m so attached to a suicidal, racist, sexist Confessional poet who completely infuriates me with his solipsism. But at the end of the day, what he did with race, sex, and identity in the Dream Songs is a thousand times more fascinating that Berryman’s actual [offensive] opinions.
The Complete Poetry of Frank O’Hara
Lunch Poems changed the way I thought about poetry. For my birthday this year, I received two copies of the complete poetry of Frank O’Hara. Double the queer city fun!
O’Hara is good to read: before bed, to take a study break, when you are in bed with a lover and wake up before them, if you’re queer, if you’re a hipster, when you are in love, and in cities.
I’ve had the flu. Today is my first day back out and about, so I’ll be back to posting in no time!
