an attempt at destructive writing, because creative writing is overplayed...
...whereas glib titles never go out of style!
I’ve been busy, ok?
The thing about writing is that you have to do it to get better at it, or at least that’s what I have been told by better writers and it’s what I tell myself, in the hopes of joining that category, even if merely by association.
There was something I wanted to write about, and then something else, and some other things which got written down in a journal, some in a notes app, but their resurrection will have to wait a few more paragraphs. This is a newsletter after all, so I’d better tell everyone the news. <I think the news-letter is ‘T’ …doesn’t it just seem authoritative and pro-social yet teetering, tottering, easily tipped one way or another? Even the slightest brush of bias should reveal the top-heavy terror for what it is, a two-way cultural hammer always about to fall.>
Anyway I moved to Brooklyn in mid-August so we’ll see just how inevitable those expected increases in my insufferability, upon beginning becoming different in my newfound New-Yorkerdom, really are. I am officially attending NYU as a graduate student pursuing a PhD in German. German what? German why? I’ll be studying cultural-wise: philosophy, literature, poetry, and art. In sooth I can’t say I understand what a PhD in a language means, especially given my feeling (affirmed by experts involved) that while I will learn and relearn the language itself, the language itself isn’t too terribly germane. Forgive me.
Have you forgiven me? I won’t move on until you do. Or rather, you don’t have to move on until you do, since I will move on actually right now. Except you can move on with or without the thing that is the having-given-me-forgiveness, it really isn’t relevant to the reading of this newsletter, it isn’t germane. I wouldn’t forgive me either.
In even more sooth I will admit that I am not sure German is what I want to study. I was pretty hyped-up on that vanity MA in creative writing. It was much easier for me to say to myself, “do the fun thing for 2 years, take the chance, you can always apply to a long-term PhD afterward” than it is now for me to say “after 6 years of Deutsch you’ll want nothing more than to apply to spend money on a vanity degree in creative writing.” ‘Ease-of-saying’ is hardly a worthwhile metric, outside of public speaking and tongue-twisters I guess. So try to forget I mentioned it. “Why German?” Keine Ahnung.
I really can hear the heart beating as one, and it’s not just Yo La Tengo on the soundsystem. It is that, but not just that. It is also a sense of interaction with other young people who are impatient with pretention but not dismissive of pretentiousness, who are in a desert but know where the cacti grow. Maybe soon I’ll know too, and I’ll have my garden all set up, the moisture sloughing off of densely arrayed plant matter, misting into humid clouds. I long for the fog to drench me in sentimentality and quench my wasteland thirst.
In other words I am one of millions of people, and sometimes it really feels like that.
One or two more rounds of worry over inadequacy leading to desperate malformations and retrospective reaffirmations of delusion, then deletion, later… I long to continue, and short to stop.
In any case I feel an itch to produce something here and witness its departure from me. If this stands by itself for posterity then I’ll feel a fool, so I’d best not let that happen, eh?
My sign-off prosopopoiea… not really, just pompous prose or poetry or prose-poetics…
leaving mummenschanz
i often feel
sometimes it feels often that i am looking
away from things, screwing
down my face, pasting
together my joins and hinges who become
crumpled things, only slightly, still
quarter-bent and skewed as
if (more than mere) moments away
from the posture of modest horror
shocked nudity, its witness is
screaming about the players i am in concert with,
only these whose imagined beauty will always seek to win against the beauty undeniable.
and still i shape every four stars dipperly, alas
that constellation’s myth seems crafted selfishly,
seen not by others dipperly, dipwise, since i won’t believe that
they aren’t me.