Culty.

I'm doing it again. Last night I fell asleep on my essay and on Bjork on SNL, not really finishing this essay, and thus putting in jeopardy the possibilities of hangouts with Mom or the swoon-ee. I woke up at 6AM but still haven't managed to get much more than a solid idea and two more paragraphs. That's not so bad, I guess.


But it is time to blog again, because the porch door is wide open and the birds are my music this morning and how lovely is the world when it finally defrosts and oh my I have to seriously think about moving to/living in a warmer climate if something like a 20° difference affects my mood so much that I start to sound like an optimist or something sappily similar and I'm sorry that this sentence is so long, but I was reading Ginny Woolf last week and these things happen.

I'm thinking much about said swooning, probably too much, probably impractically, and how we were chatting about Vonnegut, like everyone else (even Fox News) last week. Like anyone who'd taken an English class in high school, we were surprised at how emotional the news had made us, how his writing was sort of chummy and relateable and culty and nice. In my moments of grief-induced hyperbole, I think I had mentioned that there really wasn't an author who had the same sensibilities today, but I take that back. In hindsight, there's Palahniuk and Saunders's rock star followings and friendly writing. Yes, friendly. I was going to vote Pynchon, but that's a different beast, and any high schooler who's reading him really needs to check their hormone levels or some such because there's plenty of underage drinking and screwing in the back of cars that should happen in the span of time it takes to read Mason and Dixon. Just sayin'.

Also, there's Mike Topp, who gets the culty and cool treatment for sure. Look, a whole page on McSweeney's! I'm torn about what he is- is he a poet or a minimalist comic genius? I'm not sure. His junk is all over the internet, and by junk, I mean like genitalia, and by that I mean high praise and not disdain. This adds to the cool thing, as well as the fact that I hear about him through friends and not professors.

I like this one, which you can find on this page, which you should certainly go to:

HOW TO WRITE A HAIKU

A well-known American poet was asked how to compose a haiku.

"The usual method is three lines," Ron explained. "The first line contains five syllables; the second line, seven syllables; the third line, five syllables. One of my poems illustrates this:

First: five syllables

Second: seven syllables

Third: five syllables

----

Back to writing my sad essay on "literacy." Shoot me.