14 Down, ??? To Go
In early 1992, upon release of my first published novel, This Way Madness Lies, Fay Weldon, the British novelist and sexual provocateur, wrote: Madness tries to do something very extraordinary: that is to say, make sense of the human condition, define the human experience.
I did not think even way back when that this was extraordinary at all; I thought, and continue to think, that trying to make sense of the human condition is what life, and art, is all about.
But the damn difficulty, the slipperiness of it all, exacerbates.
So I keep watching. And waiting. And once in a while some small clue pops up. Here's one I found just a short time ago. It's a paragraph from a long article about Stevie Wonder and his pregame musical show at this year's Super Bowl.
"The music that changed Stevie's style in the seventies was nothing that you might expect, even though it offers a fair account of how the free-floating weirdness of American life will always escape any attempts to make us like a normal country rather than a furious human-wave assault on the farthest shores of reality."
And I thought it was just me and my prose having a tough time getting a grip.
(the article is called The Blind Man and the Elephant: Stevie Wonder, the Rolling Stones, and thousands of overweight teenagers party in the ruins of Detroit for Super Bowl XL. Harper's 6/06. It's some very funny and insightful shit. By the way, the music that changed Stevie's style was produced on the orginal Moog snytheizer.)
I did not think even way back when that this was extraordinary at all; I thought, and continue to think, that trying to make sense of the human condition is what life, and art, is all about.
But the damn difficulty, the slipperiness of it all, exacerbates.
So I keep watching. And waiting. And once in a while some small clue pops up. Here's one I found just a short time ago. It's a paragraph from a long article about Stevie Wonder and his pregame musical show at this year's Super Bowl.
"The music that changed Stevie's style in the seventies was nothing that you might expect, even though it offers a fair account of how the free-floating weirdness of American life will always escape any attempts to make us like a normal country rather than a furious human-wave assault on the farthest shores of reality."
And I thought it was just me and my prose having a tough time getting a grip.
(the article is called The Blind Man and the Elephant: Stevie Wonder, the Rolling Stones, and thousands of overweight teenagers party in the ruins of Detroit for Super Bowl XL. Harper's 6/06. It's some very funny and insightful shit. By the way, the music that changed Stevie's style was produced on the orginal Moog snytheizer.)
posted by Bill Simpson at 5/21/2006 08:30:00 PM
2 Comments:
Robert Hass was born in California in 1941. He's authored several collections of poetry, and served as the Poet Laureate from 95 to 97. Hass said, "Everyone wants to say in their own terms what it means to be alive. Poetry is the most common way, because the material of poetry is the stream of language that is constantly going on in our heads. It's very low tech. Anyone can do it." He also said, "Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day."
Thank you. And you are full of boom.
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