Hartford and Vine II
Jim Lineberger's blog is up again. Do yourself a favor and go check him out.
I have to warn you, he's a sneaky bastard and he'll jerk the rug right out from under you after spending a good long time coaxing you onto it.
I have a physical, embodied reaction to his work most times. The surface of Jim's work is often deceptively simple and direct, but it only barely keeps the lid on a swirling maelstrom of conflicted and conflicting subcurrents that will drown a motherfucker in a hurry.
Like all good poets, he is wounded in an almost crippling way, but like all great poets, he doesn't make a big deal out of it, and refuses to make the woundedness anything like the subject of his work. Instead, it acts as a warping force on the lens through which he films.
It provides a wonderful, dizzying distortion.
The kind that shows us something more real than the real world.
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Last night I gave an hour talk on basic Criminal Law to a citizen's group. One of our people put the arm on me, and I couldn't think of an excuse fast enough, so I got suckered into it.
I had the best time.
I could have been a great teacher. Who knew?
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Well, after two seventy-hour weeks in a row, it is finally my friday. A ten hour shift ahead of me, and I'm off to the races...
In my heart of hearts, I'm just like the guy on "Office Space" whose highest aspiration is to do nothing.
I mean a serious amount of nothing.
We're talking world class.
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Had a long talk with my Dad yesterday. He's struggling with his diabetes, even though he's the most anal-retentive dude you'll ever meet (hidden under a surface of southern geniality and laid-backness). He's depressed and anxious, can't sleep, losing serious weight even though he's already too skinny. He's wrapped around the axle pretty tight.
Although it breaks my heart to see him this fucked up, I'm very grateful he feels like he can talk to me about his true feelings. He says he gets a lot out of our bullshit sessions, too.
I hope he can find his way to some kind of happiness soon.
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Mad Hot Ballroom.
If that motherfucker doesn't give you some serious soul-wrenching happiness, you are already dead.
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Today, there is hope for all of us.
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Even you.
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posted by tearful dishwasher at 5:01 AM
2 Comments:
scott, i like the way you've inserted at least one real-life figure in with these babes in toyland. we live such an unreal life nowadays, i halfway expect to come up on a Lionel pufferbelly chugging down the tracks at some RR crossing. cross-polination, that's what it is. i mean, when we have the capability to do an entire motion picture now with no humans actors at all, why not go live in a dollhouse somewhere and if anybody laughs, just shoot the muhfuckah.
Jim-
My brain is burning with this ficticious world and it feels no different from what I have been trying to move toward in both poetry and in the narrative work.
If I had a way to make movies.
Dolls in the real world, people in doll houses. Accidents of scale, distortions of focus, mistakes of classification.
On and on.
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