Origin story

Any worthy superhero has a good origin story. Maybe even several. I'll go ahead and extend this somewhat inappropriate analogy, since it seems as good a time as any to explain the name of this blog.


As a teenager, I poured my angst into poetry. I know what you're thinking, but I wasn't just any emo hack – I was a serious student of "the craft." At the tender age of 16, I discovered the Beat Generation and, despite my desperate lack of life experience, found my literary home. I left home a long time ago, and I haven't been writing or reading nearly as much. (I'm a graduate student, so I've long lost the spirit for anything even remotely creative.) Nonetheless, a few things have stuck with me: the first time I heard Ginsberg read "Howl" and how I – and not he – was breathless, co-founding the suburban chapter of the Ferlinghetti School of Painting Sunlight, and my first workshop experience, where I learned to summon spirit Kerouac in the steam of a hot Valdosta summer. Ever the believer in irony, Kerouac distilled his technique for spontaneity into a series of guidelines. Here is his list of essentials (from "Belief & Technique for Modern Prose"; also, it's displayed in Courier because I am doing you the favor of sparing you from PowerPoint's typewriter sound effects): 


1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy 
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening 
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house 
4. Be in love with yr life 
5. Something that you feel will  find its own form 
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind 
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow 
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind 
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual 
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is 
11. Visionary ties shivering in the chest 
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you 
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition 
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time 
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog 
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye 
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself 
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea 
19. Accept loss forever 
20. Believe in the holy contour of life 
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind 
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better 
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning 
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge 
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it 
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form 
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness 
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better 
29. You're a Genius all the time 
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven


You'll see I've only stolen from numbers 20 and 29, but I do find new magic every time I read this list. Certainly, however, #29 is particularly relevant for writing for the Internets, where we somehow manage to lose all the inhibitions we learned as good Puritans. As a matter of course, everything I write here will be pure Genius, all of the time. 

Late to the party

Today, I feel compelled to share.


I am continuing my long-standing tradition of adopting a trend – although I'm not sure it's appropriate to call blogging a "trend" at this point – very late. I imagine my subconscious was waiting until Tumblr and Pinterest had captured most of the would-be internet diarists with the promise that image-based sharing is the best (cf. easiest) way to communicate with a public that is, at best, disinterested. And why shouldn't they be?


Like them, I will bring my "public" information that no gainfully employed person has any reason to care about. It would be safe to expect a string of links to things that inspire my rage, with a 75% chance of hilarity.


I like those odds...