The Stopgap Principle

I'm pretty sure it constitutes a direct violation of the rules of bloggery to write a considered if a little vainglorious introductory post and then follow it with over a week of silence -- which, let's be honest, seems like eons in our generation's welter of shortened attention spans and 140-character quips -- only to break said silence in the laziest way possible, i.e., quotation appreciation. But I will do precisely that, because it is 11pm and thus too late in the night to begin a proper post, as Farm Standard Time requires early slumber, and because, as always happens, someone else has expressed something I've been feeling in a manner so perfect it completely invalidates my desire to formulate my own words upon the subject.

In this case, that someone is Michael Chabon, the brilliant mind at the root of one of my favorite films (Wonder Boys, based on his novel of the same name), which I watched for the probably 27th time two nights before I left Providence. After a recommendation from my Chabon-enthusiast former housemate and four voraciously-devoured chapters of his copy of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, I was hooked. And while I have yet to finish that excellent novel, because apparently no bookstore in Metro Detroit seems to carry it, I have read two other Chabon books since returning to Michigan: A Model World and Other Stories and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. The quotation in question is the last paragraph of the latter, and though the act of posting a novel's last paragraph to a public forum, a novel quite possibly unread by an appreciable portion of the audience, seems rather oxymoronic and vaguely treasonous, I will nonetheless do so, as that brief, sparkling paragraph so perfectly encapsulates the memory of a year in Providence, of my senior year of college, of the end of my junior year of high school. And so I will let the novel's narrator, Art Bechstein, speak for me and for all twentysomethings seeking the appropriate words to recall a profoundly enjoyable and painful and intoxicating and poignant stretch of time:

When I remember that dizzy summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it seems that in those days I ate my lunches, smelled another's skin, noticed a shade of yellow, even simply sat, with greater lust and hopefulness -- and that I lusted with greater faith, hoped with greater abandon. The people I loved were celebrities, surrounded by rumor and fanfare; the places I sat with them, movie lots and monuments. No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything.

Beginning of the End of the End of the Beginning

Of all the self-professed writers you will ever encounter, very few will achieve literary success, and I will not be one of them. That distinction will belong to superiorly talented friends and friends-of-friends who will see -- or have already seen -- themselves published in newspapers, magazines, and silky-paged, prettily-covered books showcased in bright, sprawling big-box booksellers, the kind with built-in coffee shops and continuous underscores of vaguely obscure but still NPR-friendly indie rock soundtracking customers' browsing odysseys. If my words ever meet commercial shelves, they will likely do so as part of a disgustingly abstruse volume of dramatic criticism yellowing in a remote corner of a subterranean used bookstore plagued by ten-year-old dust bunnies and interminable ceiling leaks. Still, as an obsessively overanalytical, neurotically self-involved English major just over a year removed from college, hundreds of miles removed from nearly all of my closest friends (the usual unfortunate victims of these onslaughts of verbosity), and plagued by a sudden exponential increase in spare time, I feel compelled to mold my churning thoughts into sentences before they start leaking from my ears. And so I have designated as their receptacle this tiny corner of cyberspace, and you are free to read, skim, or ignore them as you see fit.

Leaving a deliriously enjoyable East Coast life behind for a forced return to the Michigan farm of my youth has certainly sparked a particularly prickly existential crisis, but if the ache of a prematurely-abandoned past and suspended future permeates every entry here, than I will have failed. While attempts to reconcile professional aspirations with personal circumstances will surely appear on occasion, they will hopefully mingle with literary analyses, cultural appraisals, sociological musings, random acts of performance theory, and perhaps even the odd outburst of creativity (do I dare re-attempt poetry or fiction after all these years?). I consider this endeavor part sorely-needed intellectual exercise and part self-indulgent psychological experiment, but mostly an attempt to communicate with friends across wires and waves and the dim blue-white glow of the screens standing between us. I would be humbled if they chose to join me on the journey.