I need some new links. I love most of the folks over there in the column to the left, but they’re all pretty much holdovers from my old site, and I’ve noticed lately that some of them are no longer active –a lot of them, actually, which I’m sure is a reflection of the often frustrating disparity between labor and reward that dooms so many excellent internet galleries or ‘zines.
I’ve often pointed out how much I despise the term “blog.” I’m no longer quite sure why, other than that it means too many different things, and is a homely word. Lately, of course, blogs have made all sorts of news, most of which I’ve paid little or no attention to. When what people call the mainstream media starts talking about blogs, they’re virtually always talking about the Rock ’em-Sock ’em Robots world of political blogs. Many such sites are virtuous and even indispensable (i.e. Cursor, Daily Kos, Wonkette, and This Modern World), but though we may all be first and foremost political animals, however helplessly, I’m afraid I lack the spine to absorb the constant (daily, hourly, minute by minute) reminders of what wretched and ineffectual creatures human beings can be.
I’ll beat you to the punch: I’m fully aware that this thing (see lengthy official title above) is one more such reminder, albeit a reminder in the abstract, wearing the threadbare clothes of the microcosmic, the prosaic, the down-on-his-luck sidewalk fire breather or the bedraggled and gibbering organ grinder. I’m down in the basement building ships in bottles while upstairs my family starves from malnutrition and neglect.
I love people who build ships in bottles, though. I love, and am entertained by, too many things, even if there never seem to be enough of them to keep me entertained. I’m easily bored, and the internet is easily boring. I don’t have the slightest idea how to go looking for the things that might keep me entertained. In a perfect world I would have a curatorial office in a giant warehouse somewhere –a building that would be equal parts natural history and science museum, art gallery, rag and bone shop, and library– and I would have a team of interns and assistants who would come to my office each day laden with items of interest for my inspection. These people would understand that I am severely deficient in attention, attracted to all manner of peculiarity, and an incurable dilettante.
I don’t live in that perfect world, but I’ve never stopped dreaming of it. And, strangely enough, people do come to me –not each day, but often enough– laden with the sort of odd and beautiful wonders that sustain me in what feels more and more like a vigil. I’m always waiting for something more, connections, voices or objects that stir something in me, minor miracles, visits from entertaining madmen and oracles; I’m always hoping that when I open an atlas I will find its pages teeming with new countries, strange roads, entire worlds of the wholly unfamiliar. Every time I crack the pages of a dictionary my secret wish is that all the words will suddenly be transformed into a language understood by no one on the planet but me and a small group of my closest associates.
I’ve said before that my goal as a child was to create my own set of encyclopedias comprised entirely of entries on everything that had ever, however momentarily, claimed my attention, made my head spin, or given me a feeling of wonder or joy. Things that give me happiness literally make me leap around; when I am delighted my response is to try to leap as far from the surface of this planet as I possibly can, and when I am extremely delighted I can hurl myself again and again –straight up or, occasionally, at forty-five degree angles– into the air. I suppose I’m attempting to fly, or to “slip the surly bonds of earth,” as Ronald Reagan once said, cribbing the words of a dead World War II Canadian airman.
You can make me leap by sending along sites that might be of interest to me (and, certainly, to you), or that you think would make worthy additions to my list of links. I’m going to go through there sometime soon and reluctantly prune away all the dead branches. If you haven’t taken the time to explore what’s over there, I’d recommend that you do so. There are lots of people and places there that make me happy on a regular basis, people and places like Big Happy Funhouse, letting loose with the leptard, Life in the Present, Paul Collins, The Minor Fall, The Major Lift, wood s lot, Glubibulga, and Word Shadows.
Just today I discovered two more sites that I’ll be adding to my encyclopedia: the wonderful Village Eclair, and my pal Peter Schilling’s latest venture (a remodeled version of a lamented former venture), The Bug. Violet Horvath at Village Eclair has a voice that sounds like the sort of disembodied voices that comfort me at four a.m., and Peter would almost certainly be one of my associates in that museum of my dreams.
I should also mention that this site is merely an offshore subsidiary of the magazine I write for, The Rake. It’s a pretty damn good magazine, I think, and you should make a point of checking it out and letting me (or us) know how you think it could be better.
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