Greetings, just getting my feet wet...

The title of this blog is drawn from a Wallace Stevens poem titled Man and Bottle. It comes at a point in the work where Stevens situates the poet in terms of a history of poetic thought. The writer, the poet, can not be satisfied with the images of the past or with the complacent use of those images. He must destroy the architecture of metaphor and symbol now serving as the hovel in which we comfortably sleep.

It is my hope to feel the limits of this hovel and to stretch my arms beyond the bounds, possibly even to stand up and iron out the swollen knots in my back. Whether or not I’m successful will be up to the faceless world of internet dwellers to decide. I will be content to put my petty notions into the world.

The old delusion present in our days of hope and change, of stubborn G.O.P rhetoricians driving the working man to an incestuous political cannibalism for fear of seeming nervous and weak, of activists mimicking bygone days of protest with a sense that slogan repetition and drum circles will humanize the threads of our blanket capitalism, can be found in our collective inability to assert our right to mind. It is present in the constant shower of advertisements implicitly claiming to cure the creeping fear that we are more isolated than ever in human history, if we only consent to seek popular products. I fear that this delusion is even present in my nagging hope that language can be redeemed from the gross aberration it has become. Though, the first step to any recovery is to confess having a problem. To break from what we wish the world was and work voraciously to create what we would like the world to be, genuinely leaving aside the waste products of the 20th century, is what I believe to be the purpose of identifying, claiming and ultimately eradicating old delusions.

So much unsubstantiated ranting is what is in store for this ol’ blog. Hopefully the ever present irony of such a brand of social and cultural criticism here will draw a smile from time to time.