NEW HAVENIN’

As of May, I’ve been posting biweekly -- every other Wednesday -- at the online site for The New Haven Review, which is a lit mag published locally. The editors Mark Oppenheimer, Bennett Lovett-Graff, and Brian Slattery are working now to produce the 5th print issue. And they also post on the online site.

My first few posts were shortened versions of things I first posted on blogocentrism (I try to keep the NHR posts to 800 words max). But my most recent post, on July 1st, was specifically for NHR, I guess. In any case, I didn’t see the point in posting it separately on blogocentrism, but here’s the link for it: Whither Home? It consists of my thoughts about living in New Haven, after spending three weeks away among people and in environs that in some ways feel more like my home and in some ways don’t.

Meanwhile, there are some other topics I have in mind ‘exclusively’ for blogocentrism, and others that might be on both sites. I recently saw the show called "The Pictures Generation" at the Met, and of course I have to keep the world informed on my progress through War and Peace. But I’m a bit distanced from extended prose at present: it seems the only thing I can write are fourteen line poems ending in a couplet.

I wrote a couple back in February, then a couple in March, then April saw three. At the end of that month I read all those, but for one, at a reading featuring six, including me, of the ten people now blogging on NHR, plus other local poets. And now I’m up to twenty-three 14-liners, when I thought, initially, I’d end up with maybe twenty-four for the year. In fact, I just produced another eight of them, but I consider them not part of that sequence because they’re spoken by a particular fictional character of my acquaintance. Be that as it may, it still makes for a total of thirty-one, and the year’s not quite half over yet.

But prose will out. I’m sure there’s more I want to say about books I read, and maybe even about music (though I have to confess I’m starting to realize that everyone writes about music on blogs, and some people much better than I can ... as in: actually understanding how music is made, not just its effect on them), and also about movies. Movies, remember them? I did see a couple things in the theater, I’m pretty sure. But to tell you the truth, I’m not so eager to talk about whatever is being thrown up on the screen these days. Or it could be that the sheer volume of blogs, review mags (I seem actually to be subscribing to print media again these days), and so on has, at least for the time being, made me less bloggy.

But I really think it has to do with those 14-liners. That concision is so satisfying, like a meal where the serving is just enough. But, to alter the old saying from Frito Lay's potato chip commercials: 'bet you can't write just one.'