Delightful: the temperature drops. I’ve realized off late that whenever I have a massive mound of critical projects, I watch a monstrous amount of reality T.V. (ideally of the competition variety) and nonfiction T.V. On the docket for today: mountainous amounts of Man v. Food and Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations as I work on transforming a stubborn, reluctant paper on Plutarch, Cavafy, and historicism into what I actually want it to be; I’ve been watching Top Design since Saturday while I tear through Coleridge’s Kubla Khan; Deadliest Catch and Ice Road Truckers are solid, too, especially for reading the new John Serio collected Wallace Stevens alongside the not-so-new Library of America collected Wallace Stevens.
July 26, 2009 • 12:23 am 0
I just learned that Lamb Chop’s Play-Along was real.
Let me explain. As a kid, I didn’t speak much English and was mostly in my own head; everything had a bit of a disassociated quality to it. Most of my memories of cultural things–T.V. shows, songs, movies, social events, trips–are logged in my brain in a sort of fuzzy way, as though I experienced them while immersed in a fishbowl filled with water. I remember some of the books I read as a kid as if they were movies, and I remember some movies as books (I actually thought I’d read ”Fantasia” for the longest time).
So here’s what I remember. I’d turn on the T.V. and I’d watch a bunch of stuff, most of which I didn’t understand, one of which was a show involving a woman who wore puppets on her hands–a lamb, a horse, a dog–and they’d play and sing, and do things I couldn’t quite comprehend, and over the years I spent watching this show I never really understood the logic of it, but I loved it to death. I did over that period of time slowly learn more English, and I got the name of the show down. I got a couple of the song lyrics, too. And then over the years that passed after I stopped watching it I began to think I’d made it up, that maybe what had really happened was that I was just sitting there looking at the T.V. and making the whole thing up. It wouldn’t've been the first time.
I don’t know what possessed me to tell a friend of mine this over dinner. We were talking miscellanea and weird childhood memories. I was telling her about partial memories and things that were probably not real, which brings me right back to my original point: I just learned that Lamb Chop’s Play-Along was real, and I don’t know how I feel about this!
June 18, 2009 • 7:37 pm 0
Another take
A few ramshackle things about the past six months . . . I’ve discovered a fascination for the show Ice Road Truckers, and am eagerly awaiting the new season of that Everest show on the Discovery channel. I’ve also discovered fabulous furniture stores, Eddie’s in Somerville and his brother’s store Metamorphosis on Mass. Ave. in Cambridge. I’m more reclusive than usual off late. At the same time, though, I’m busy concocting elaborate plans to get in to this winter’s New York Fashion Week (the plans involve impersonating celebrities and police officers, imaginary foreign languages, imposing sunglasses, and most certainly will land me in jail if executed), and I’m writing about the problems and advantages that come with the idea of a “speaker” in poetry, especially contemporary poetry. I’m loving the assistant poetry editor gig at AGNI, and I cannot possibly be happier with the existence of a new BerryLine location a mere two blocks away from my digs. The very fine people over at Salamander and Free Verse have taken one poem of mine each, to be printed later this year, and I’ll have a microreview coming out in Boston Review some time soon. My little Mac is falling apart: one key is utterly bust (it’s the right arrow key, if you can believe it), and a gentleman caller had to essentially manufacture a new charger for me. I’m amazed that no one was electrocuted during the process, and even more amazed that the makeshift charger works; battery life is dwindling; oh, also, occasionally I get these fun little white lines that run all up and down my laptop’s screen, and the warranty’s long gone.
I’ve gone and wiped all the (six or something) entries from this blog that I’d written in 2008. In the next coming days, I may or may not (leaning right now toward “may not,” but who knows) post my clips on this under original pub. dates. (A friend of mine and absurdly brilliant critic, George Scialabba, does this on his site . . . I think it’s a swanky idea, and I also think that instead of reading my things, if and when I post them, you will have so much more fun reading his work at georgescialabba.net. Oh! Also! Definitely order his fabulous new book, “What Are Intellectuals Good For?” “What Are Intellectuals Good For?” is gloriously reviewed in many swashbuckling places, like here and here.) So it’s a new slate for “Deliberately”; a fresh start, or no start at all? Or an un-start? You decide. Speaking of the “you decide” phenomena, how on earth did Susan Boyle lose Britain’s Got Talent?
