Saturday, November 04, 2006

4: disclaimer

Dear potential anonymous internet readers,

I swear I'm not showing off in my reading sidebar. I really do read geeky books that are completely useless from a practical viewpoint. Like, um,
The American Quest for a Supreme Fiction: Whitman's Legacy in the Personal Epic. And Noam Chomsky.

And I don't generally count poetry books on my reading lists because who sits down and reads a whole book of poetry? Well, I do, apparently, but only when I'm trying to write about the poet. It's unnatural! Poetry books should be kept in your pocket and read in bits and pieces throughout a day or week or month or year! I'm not in school this semester, but when I was in Europe I became even geekier than I was to begin with: I realized how sincerely fun it can be to write interpretive essays on poetry.

I think the solitude went to my head. I memorized poems. And then I planned out the analytic deconstructions I would write about them. I never actually wrote them down because I was too tortured by my lack of resources. Seriously. I sacrificed countless midnight hours lamenting the absence of lexus nexus in my daily life.

So when I claim to be reading ridiculously obscure and intellectual things, I'm not making it up. I can't help it, it's a sickness! Or, more likely, a madness.

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