poetmercurio.bsky.social
Poet. Founder and curator of What The Universe Is: A (Virtual) Reading Series, which happens monthly on Zoom. Also writes A Slight Case of Overthinking at https://damncurious.substack.com/
Find out more at https://www.poetmercurio.com
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It's gonna be weird! But in a fun way, I hope.
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Not a movie, but the comic strip Bloom County by Berke Breathed is the foundation on which much of my worldview rests. What doesn't come from Bloom County comes more or less from the novels of Daniel Manus Pinkwater.
(I guess there's a little of Disney's 1979 flop The Black Hole in there, too.)
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It's truly the worst form of "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" — and that was never a good philosophy to begin with.
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Why does this remind me of my favorite Raymond Chandler quote from The Lady in the Lake?
“Police business is a hell of a problem. It’s a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there’s nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get.”
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Hmm. If I think of it as a puzzle, will I be tempted to never solve it and just live in Keats' "negative capability" forever? (And if I do that, will it still produce a readable and enjoyable book?)
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You could just come by it the Canadian way. You know, through hockey!
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Once I was able to separate my knowledge that this book is time-bound to 2006, I was able to step back from it and piece together the moments that needed to happen — and, in understanding that, was able to start writing them out of order. (Do I have a spreadsheet & calendar for tracking it all? YUP)
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Whenever I tried to write a novel before this current one, I couldn't imagine approaching it any other way than linear/chronological - this current one is working better than its predecessors, I think, because I've been able to step out of that mindset. It's a lot more fun this way!
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My response to your Substack post is too long by far for me to shorten without losing something in translation, so I'm following your lead here:
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I will say this: I figured out I might not be a forever Catholic during my 1st year at a Catholic college - the priest who taught my theology class showed up on a Wednesday with a smudge on his forehead and I asked him if he'd slipped and fallen on the way to class. (Still stand by my earlier post.)
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As someone raised & enculturated & educated Catholic, I am find there to be something comforting & also countercultural about the fact that she made this statement on Ash Wednesday with the ashes still on her forehead.
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Not to sound too much like Goody, but Shoresy is unbelievable. I'm not a sports guy, but I absolutely love everything about that show.
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Amen to all that! One of the most enduringly important friendships of my life was with my undergrad poetry mentor, who remained friend and chosen family for 30 years, until she died.
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The question of art/craft doesn't intersect for me with aesthetic or moral assessments of good/bad art. They're Euclidean parallels, I guess. Plenty of art out there I recognize as such without liking or enjoying - even if I understand it. Taste is an eternal mystery! (A fun one to ponder, though.)
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& I realize that some would suggest I'm perhaps not a purist for this, but what I'm interested in from art (& craft) is the sense of participation in an ongoing conversation across media and time - the reminder that we're all feeling beings! - & so I'm not a purist. (one more thought below!)
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I mean, Henry Darger developed his own craft; so did the Philadelphia Wireman (to name just 2) - the craft allows the art to emerge, but there's no art without something to say.
I'm a big jazz guy; I think interpretation & transformative play are valid arts, so DJ remixes count for me. (cont.)
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Give it time! With a brain as big as yours, thoughts have to travel across a lot of territory!
I think about art/craft a lot (& have been working on an essay about it forever) and I think that too many people denigrate craft. Does art truly exist without it? It need not be formal (continued below)
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Which is to say, I guess, that it's intention, exertion, and execution that are the fundamental actions behind art.
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Unless you're deliberately going about things the most difficult way possible as part of a performance art piece about the difficulty of making art, there is such a thing as overdoing the difficulty. Making art - or anything! - requires some exertion beyond the baseline. Art arrives in the making!
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How I picture @cantocomics.bsky.social processing your comment:
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A version of the Village People's YMCA but the hook is replaced with Morrissey singing the second half of the refrain from the Smith's song "Half a Person," starting with "YWCA"
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The average adult reading level in the United States hovers around 6th grade, which means roughly half of American adults read at less than a 6th grade level. That's just traditional literacy, not even considering information literacy and media literacy.
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As the other noted philosopher Mike Patton once sang, "What is it? It's it!"
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Precisely. Or, as the philosopher Edie Brickell once said, "What I am is what I am. Are you what you are, or what?"
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Thought for a moment you might've been listening to this: astonishinglegends.com/al-podcasts/...
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I won't disagree, but I do really enjoy Sam as Cap.
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Reminds me of the Australian poet Gwen Harwood's sonnet-based acrostic attack on an exclusionary journal in the '50s: meanjin.com.au/essays/lette...
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If nothing is part of everything and everything is real, then nothing is also real.