Category: Wild Card
Whatever ‘it’ is
As Nora Ephron once wrote in the New York Times Book Review, “Fiction is chance to rework your life so that you give illusion of being intelligence at center of it.”
I’d settle for being either somewhat intelligent or at center of it – either one.
How ’bout you?
Regarding designer John Galliano
As he said: “It has to be raw and sophisticated at the same time.”
He often revised by looking at models in a mirror … would see the flaw … like looking through a camera, framing?
A lingering insight on marital splits
The Divorce Culture, by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1997, 224 pages, $24) – reviewed by Jean E. Milofsky, The Colorado Review, fall 1997:
“Whatever else divorce is, it is fundamentally a loss. As a writer friend of mine once said, ‘It’s like death except no one says nice things about you.’ In divorce one loses not only the relationship with one’s spouse, but also one’s location in the social fabric. Friends fade away, and families are thrown into turmoil. Then there are the inevitable economic losses, which Barbara Dafoe Whitehead rightly claims fall disproportionately on women. Nowhere in her polemic against divorce, however, does Whitehead conceptualize divorce as a loss. Rather, with increasing insistence as the book goes on, she views it as an expression of individual freedom in a highly libertarian age.” …
“Whitehead’s concept of divorce as an expression of unfettered liberty ignores what every divorcing individual realizes – no choice is without consequence, no decision is without obligation or work, and adult freedom never really comes from throwing off chains.”
~*~
Counter with James Dobson’s insistence that “love at first sight” is really just infatuation and therefore selfish, while love is other-focused.
As the Dewar’s ad would have said
MY SCOTCH: Grandfather Munro, on my mother’s side.
Kinisi 11
Simplicity and directness versus art/artifice.
Oh, there’s power in those dreams
The fantasy of power, of course, invokes control. The freedom to boss others, for one thing – something so alien in my own reality.
What’s the ultimate dream of power? Setting sexuality apart from everyday activity? Especially secret?
(Oh, secrecy! Now there’s a dimension of power.)
As is the appearance of knowing what to say, how to move. The willing response.
The great secret hunger you, alone, can fill. (More to the point: I alone can fill.)
In reality, I have no imagination here, and no language.
I think I’m finally getting the attraction of action-adventure movies for many males. That, along with Triple-X.
Either/or
A separate life, practicing our art?
Or integrated into everything we do?
In passing
“You’re always nervous.”
“I run on nerves.”
A twist in that dream of being discovered
Which part of my work would I most want “discovered”? Note, I didn’t say which part of me. How telling!
Apart from my journaling itself, it’s always hard for me to imagine writing that’s not intended for circulation, either among a small select circle or else a wide public. Anything else could be left as notes to myself. So I’m always surprised to hear otherwise, yet apparently there are many who practice the art purely for their own private pleasure.
On the other hand, I’ve also worked so hard, so long, to be invisible. To be among those sharply objective observers. The dispassionate yogi – even though ultimately, as I’m finding, passion is what counts, in life and in art. Read the Psalms, if you must, for divine confirmation.
For one thing, as I’m finally admitting, I’m finding how liberating and energizing the effort to candidly proclaim “I hate” x, y, or z can be. No more nice face requirement, but the full range of feeling, from noble to disgust.
Face it, there’s no visibility as a poet – and even novelists are surprisingly marginal these days.
So here it is, and there you are, doing whatever we do.
