Where I'm From

Let's pause for station identification. This may or may not turn into a new occasional feature. "Where I'm From" was a blog post that never got finished, itself an idea to change the way I was using sorryforboringyou dot blogspot dot com. The title was the echo in my head of reading the title of Joan Didion's Where I Was From on Wikipedia. Now, writing this, I'm perhaps (hopefully) at the most likely place for this blogaday to fall apart. Sensical, isn't it? Once I began mentioning "blogaday" here and once I started creating blank posts to run out the end of this little tear, I would be stressed. Hmm... I'm just paranoid, I know. Somehow I did something seriously to my ankle today. It hurts but is maybe getting better. "Where I'm From" is an amalgam-style-post. After the jump, I will quote my original concept from the drafts page of this blog.

Thomas Jefferson is the perfect representation of America: beautiful ideas colored by distasteful actions.

This is going to be an alternating assortment of thoughts presented artistically (not to say "well") and annotated link dumping, occasionally perhaps a blending of both. You have been warned.

I think the Jefferson bit ends up here. It's a little less developed there than above. I'm sure everyone is saying stuff like this. But then again, I love Jefferson. He's the one to which you can relate, rather than Washington, the statue, and Adams, the...I think I'll cut it there. Let's take a step back; I didn't mean the "statue" as a slight. I just mean, like, he pulled the Tom Brady, getting unanimously voted into office (USACiC or NFLMVP can both be put into six letter abbreviations that really don't make any sense, right? They're basically the same thing).

Pff. The sound of breathing out after holding a breath for a while, not very long, but a little while. Let's imagine that this post just did that. The idea being that, at least in the world as I see it, this sort of action is one of the ways we concentrate on the matter at hand, or change the subject of our minds. I'm just going to throw this out there: what is the poetry equivalent of the victorious tennis player signing the camera? That's the kind of swagger I want to capture in a segment of a future book called The State in Which I Hate You which is a parody title of Li-Young Lee's The City in Which I Love You, but playing it a bit different of the complete ripoff I did for the title of my first book. Which doesn't need another link here. It could be any of the segments, really, I think I wrote them out as "Man, by nature," "The Dust Bowl," Chasing Victor, "Iconoclasm," and "shoegaze." Obviously Chasing Victor has sort of evolved on its own, the Justin Timberlake of this group, but this book'll get written, and in all seriousness, with the sort of concision obsession I'm starting to get, cutting a whole chapter out of the book sounds like a real good idea. Sometimes. Writing sounds fun, easy, and enjoyable. Sometimes.

Sometimes. I once became very interested in the words created from "some." Somewhere, somehow, someday, sometime(s), something, someone, somebody, someplace. You start trying to list all of them and don't want to forget some and all of a sudden you realize you are listing all kinds of fake words. Somewhen, somedays, someother, somelover, somecarcus, somewritercan'thelpbutmakeajoke. Somedays is always the one that gets me because it's a Regina Spektor song. As you would know if you clicked. Or, you know, if you knew. I'm not saying I'm the only one holding this info before making clicking on a link.

It's getting much too late for this. I'm not sure if this is readable but at least it's not scrawled on a cocktail napkin and will probably be legible. Whose number is it that is formed by all the numbers rubbed off of napkins from bars? Grant Morrison could tell me. That seems like something I would think was cool in Doom Patrol. Sometimes, that is, it would be interesting. It would be "innovative." It would be that feeling I get where I think to myself, "just fucking wow. someone did that. wow." And yes--well, I'll admit I don't really know, but it just seems to fit--I think this in lowercase.

My interest in the words deriving from "some" had to do with a sentence. It was the final sentence of a book that was never written. Let me tell you, my mind is cluttered with a lot similar. "And somewhere, somewhen, somehow, someone was typing..." This was to be written over the dying corpse of Pandrio Androtti. I had forgotten about that. Not lying. I can't even remember how, can I say "I"?, I got shot in my office and bled out on the carpet. I mean. I'm not sure if that's what happened anyway, but I don't know what it was that took place to put me there. Maybe I never did. Hence "never written." I think I just realized I was imagining, even then, writing a comic book. Because you can't help but see that quote in a caption at the bottom of a panel pasted over a leg lying awkwardly and above the rest of a body bleeding out. Am I repeating myself?

When I read ketjak and then followed it up with The Names, following Silliman with DeLillo, I literally felt myself losing language. It was an interesting phenomenon. I ended up writing a few what I think of as really good poems in those few days where I relearned how to read a book. Because this is what the type of poetry I like to write sometimes. Sometimes not. Sometimes I think my best poems were written before I got into the whole abstract/nonsense jig. Someone is calling out Radiohead for the same thing and I'm saying I love it. Because this is what the poetry I like to write sometimes does. It's a collection of ideas that link perhaps only in the mind of the writer. It could even be this blog post, now that I've written that.

I somewhat like the idea of art as discussion, discussion as art. The interesting part of the work I described above could potentially be what you think of as the final product. It could be the poems but it could also be what is under the poems. A description I have stolen. Ron Silliman has a book called Under Albany, which does just that, walks in under the poem and shows you the roots. It in fact puts you into the mind of writing the poem. Or not. Sometimes I'm right when talking about books I've not read. Sometimes not. Albany is the first part of Silliman's The Alphabet. My first book begins with a section called, if my mind holds, An Alphabet. (Just checked and I'm right.) The second word in the titles of these two works are not the only things they have in common but they probably might as well be. I haven't read The Alphabet.

Let's close on some Pasha Constantine, just another stage name. "All writing is coxicombical."