It's ALIVE!!!

"by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs." -- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Chapter 5

I was foiled last year, a whole year ago, trying to write a post about my experience seeing Cabaret and a variety of ruminations I had about my younger self, feminism, life, and Sally Bowles. It got all tangled up and I could never get it to say what I wanted it to, and it killed my already frail blogger self.

That post on Sally Bowles was really not appropriate for a blog. It would have made a nice ruminative essay for some kind of schmancy boheme mag.

The whole point of this place here is not to be a solipsistic schmancy boheme mag in miniature. As the title suggests the whole point is for it to be a solipsistic collection of things that catch my fancy. Quick bits of shiny.

I will take a cue from The David, King of All Blogs, and will incorporate some basic guidelines and templates. Call it the Reanimated Magpie Manifesto, if you will:

Rule #1 I will write about whatever strikes me the given day I am blogging. If something spills over, a la Sally Bowles, into some lengthy meditation, it will be immediately amputated and moved to a place more appropriate for essayistic ambitions.

Rule #2 I am allowed to spend no more than 20 minutes on the enterprise. Bits. Shiny, shiny bits.

Rule #3 Though I can and will write about whatever has caught my fickle eye, I will surrender myself to my major preoccupations: reading, writing, food, music, and the pleasure of odd things and will allow space for specific notation of these items, in specific I will do this:


Reading:
Almost done with Oscar Wao, also a chapter of Bird by Bird, and lots of internet stuff about leftist politics, objectivism, anarchists, the American Indian Movement, and radical feminism.

Writing:
1000+ words of new stuff, finally getting out stuff that's been in my head but not the page.

Dinner:
Beef brisket with dried fruit and aromatic spices (http://bit.ly/SqVFTG), egg noodles, green salad. Happy fourth night of Hanukkah! 
(Brisket was yummy but disappointingly tough after all the marinating and slow wet cooking.)

Soundtrack:
Weirdly, a Spotify station based on Eric Burdon and the Animals. (Has to do with a scene I thought I was going to work on and then promptly did not.)

Random thing:
My friend Barry, on his own obsessive tear, asked me to track down the subject of an Ezra Pound essay for him. I don't own the book of Pound essays in question, but I managed to find the full text online (http://bit.ly/Ro6BDF) in less than 5 minutes. Barry bowed down to my Google-foo.


And so, we will try this for a while. Having already broken rule #2, I will now go do something else.

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