If I read or type the word(s) poetry/poems one more time in the next hour, I'm revoking my own literacy privledges

Just finished reading Chelsey Minnis's Poemland. I had been somewhat avoiding picking it up for a few weeks because both the back and front covers are printed with a close up of annoyingly pink fur and some confusing barcode type things (these, of course, are painfully relevant to the themes of the book. Go figure.).

Anyway, still not 100% on whether or not I like this book (certainly it did not ignite such distaste in me as Tao Lin's did), but at least now I feel significantly better about my struggle with writing poetry and the nature of poetry. This (along with money, and various shiny things) is what Minnis deals with in Poemland. Her way of grappling with this question is apparently by publishing a book with a lot of bizarre similes and more ellipses than, well, it is a lot of ellipses also. [I was going to put in some witty turn of phrase here but I cracked under the pressure of producing one. So there.] Not quite sure what my own way of dealing with my relationship with (to? no, with) poetry is, but to see someone else slopping around in their own poetic mud eases my mind just a smidge.

Mind, I don't feel particularly better about any future of my quoteunquote writing career (end result: probably hermitude), but its nice to have some breathing space away from the panic-weight for a while.

Of course, Chelsey Minnis lives in Boulder, Colorado. Obviously she can make money from publishing a book of lines fretting over said lines. That's what they do there in utopia.

So what, a lot of people sleep with writers

This is the anxiety like a binder clamp on the end of my esophagus as the mountains of digital accolades pile down on notme, all compiled of notme. These are the split ends and the bitten nails quietly cataloging the creeping triumph of notme. These are the ghosts of mistaken praises whose insubstantial feet I have seen dissolve.

Do not say failure, do not think failure, there will be enough of that from other sides. Do not look at other sides. There is a gold star on my calender for each day I write.

Do not put down that pen.
For God's sake,
Do not

this is what i think about tao lin and i might as well post it in the style of a tao lin imitation because i have to do one later and i need practice

tao lin is a pretentious douchbag

i would say he is a smarmy git because that also seems about right but he is so far immersed in the new york hipster scene that he is like a drowned rat in its sewers and i just don't think british slang is in right now

and it just seems wrong to me to judge his poems

as poems

because mostly they are just insufferable clumps

of snarky word-lines

coated in 20something writer stream of consciousness

but the thing about pretentious douchebags is

i kind of have a soft spot for them

like the guy everybody wants to set on fire

because he gave this 34 minute lecture on the moral necessity of evil

(or maybe it was the plot of a video game)

but i chuckle a little and say

"well but he's kind of funny sometimes"

so i keep them around

and i chuckle sometimes but mostly

i just want to throw them out the window onto a busy street

or maybe a strip club

and i'm like

jesus

this guy's published

a lot

By the way: It's cold.

I find it amusing and a little sad how Louisianians are completely unable to function once the thermometer drops below about, say, sixty degrees. That's when the "It's/I'm too cold!" sets in. People wear oversized jackets and sprint to their cars, shivering uncontrollably. (I admit I am a victim of the same phenomenon, but I try not to show it as much lest God bring back the hellheat to spite me.) Then when it gets to this point, about 35 and windy during the day, people literally walk around literally unable to say or think anything but "Cold. Cold. Cold."

Probably 80-90% of my conversations (as well as the ones I overheard) today went like this, pretty much verbatim:

1:"Jesus, it's cold."

2:"Yeah, it's freakin' cold!"

1:"No I mean like it's really cold."

LSU had to send out an email last night basically boiling down to "It's cold, but we're not cancelling classes." They sent out another one tonight saying, "Nevermind, it's way too cold. We're totally cancelling classes." Which means I get an actual day off tomorrow. Yay! Whew, I was tired of pretending I had outfits equipped to deal with this weather.

Don't get me wrong. I like the cold. For me, today way actually a lovely day in its own special, wintry way. I am of the opinion, you see, that winter is actually supposed to be cold. I am much more horrified by the days of summer when the sweat would boil off my skin if it could, but the air is already at 105% humidity (Which is hypocritical, I suppose summer is supposed to be hot as well but it really just gets gross.) Anyway, yay chilly weather, but since we only get about five days of that a year, I am woefully unprepared to dress for it and shiver my way through days like today in stacks of light sweaters.

Anyway, even though our "snow day" will be pitifully lacking in snow, I'm planning to enjoy it. Stay safe, everyone. Down here we barely know how to drive in the best of circumstances.

delta days

Semester progressing acceptably. Still trying to wrangle the details of advanced time management, but hey, it goes.

Finally finished culling the poems for delta journal. A surprisingly civil, (mostly) yelling-free process. Haven't seen the fiction, but it looks like we're going to have a pretty fine journal on our hands when all is said and done-and printed!

(Though I have to say, it kind of sucks when you're the only one in the room i.e. on staff who doesn't get published in your own print.)

In Fear of Old Irish

So in this coming semester (two days and counting--ergh) I signed up for a class of Old Irish. Why? Unsure. It is almost as related to modern Irish as Old English is to modern English. And I had no plans at all to learn/use Irish anyway (though its status as an endangered language is sad). But, hell, they're offering it, and when else am I going to get to learn Old Irish?

The professor (who, in addition to being the linguistics undergraduate advisor and the only linguistics professor currently teaching classes, has quickly become my favorite person at the university) is offering the class as an independent study for one of her grad students who needs it for her concentration, but is allowing some others to take the class too. End result: My being intimidated and/or amused by five super-smart graduate students and an undergrad senior. Professor advertised this class as one of the hardest languages she's ever learned, taught, or studied. But extremely linguistically interesting. Which intrigued me to the point of enrolling, perhaps foolishly.

Anyway, took a look at the book. I feel like I could learn the crazy arbitrary rules for orthography (spelling), if I could figure out how to pronounce half the consonants. I don't know how to palatalize l or n or f or really any other letters besides s and maybe g. Too bad! All of the consonants are sometimes palatalized and/or lentited! Or some combination thereof. Nor do I know how to make a voiced bilabial nasal fricative (m with slightly open lips? no idea.). My book even has cartoons of sheep being "amusing" put there specifically to try to ease the stress of learning this language. I find myself actively yearning for the simpler days of my advanced Latin textbooks.

This is swiftly becoming a matter of pride/stubbornness. My arrogance got my into this class and. by the gods, it's going to get my through it . Languages and the process of learning them and how they work has always been fun for me, or at the very least pleasurably interesting. Dammit, I will learn the basic grammatical structure of this language. And I will enjoy it.

One good thing: no graded work. So if I just look really earnest and eager and try really hard, I should be fine. Right?

Amateur poetry marathon!

Running the first leg of the literary marathon that is reading/judging the poetry submissions for delta, LSU's undergraduate literary journal. All 240 pages of them. I'm on page 97 of the first go round, and honestly just thinking of finishing this pile is a little exhausting. Doing the preliminary read-through now, then I'll go back and attempt to read them again and actually judge them in a day or two, but knowing my wishy-washy tendencies, it'll probably take at least one more read-through after that to get it nailed down.

That being said, I've been pleasantly surprised by the quality of the submissions--it's a completely open process, anybody can submit, so I was kind of expecting more angsty love poetry written in couplets, honestly. Good job LSU's writing community, I suppose. (Though, selfishly, I could wish for the submissions to be less impressive, so that mine would stand out more. But as a writer with integrity and respect for talent, of course I won't do that.)

This upcoming issue will be awesome, once we grind this all out. Back to it!