Saturday, October 15, 2005
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“Now I’m a champion of the web – I began writing for Salon in 1995 from the first issue on. But the style of the web, not only the surfing and skimming style that you learn – dash, dash – you absorb information not by reading whole sentences. It’s flash, flash. Email, blog, everything is going fast, fast, fast. So the quality of the language has obviously degenerated. It’s obvious.”
- Camille Paglia
I’m trying to make sense of my thoughts today, but I’m having some difficulty. As I sit here now I’m trying to squeeze at my heart and soul, hoping that in the tension I’m creating the disparate pieces will come together.
The “great ones,” I’ve read somewhere, create only when they detach themselves from reality. Mailer drank himself into a stupor, sat down at a typewriter, and the words just flowed. Kerouac would vomit and follow that up with literary confessions. And, I suspect, Gertrude Stein had just finished a whole plate of Alice B Toklas brownies when she penned “rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” for posterity.
It seems to me that loss of identity is too steep a price to pay for a place in literary history. Me? I’d much rather be a “swinger of birches,” in the mold of Robert Frost:
“So was I once myself a swinger of birches,
And so I dream of going back to be
It’s when I’m weary of considerations
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate wilfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.One could do worse than be a swinger of branches.”
- Camille Paglia
I’m trying to make sense of my thoughts today, but I’m having some difficulty. As I sit here now I’m trying to squeeze at my heart and soul, hoping that in the tension I’m creating the disparate pieces will come together.
The “great ones,” I’ve read somewhere, create only when they detach themselves from reality. Mailer drank himself into a stupor, sat down at a typewriter, and the words just flowed. Kerouac would vomit and follow that up with literary confessions. And, I suspect, Gertrude Stein had just finished a whole plate of Alice B Toklas brownies when she penned “rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” for posterity.
It seems to me that loss of identity is too steep a price to pay for a place in literary history. Me? I’d much rather be a “swinger of birches,” in the mold of Robert Frost:
“So was I once myself a swinger of birches,
And so I dream of going back to be
It’s when I’m weary of considerations
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate wilfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.One could do worse than be a swinger of branches.”
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