hello friends.

I decided to start a new blog. I feel ambivalent about this project-- the Internet is already clotted with vanity projects, etc. etc. -- but I also have a lot of ideas and the occasional unprompted essay cluttering up my word processor, Facebook doesn't seem like the appropriate medium to convey serious thought, and, well, what's a girl of the "me" generation without her own heaping helping of vanity?

So here is a blog.

The title, in case anyone is curious, is based off an extraordinary stanza from an extraordinary poem. It's by Ilya Kaminsky, a Ukrainian-American poet and one of my personal heroes (he's partially deaf and speaks with this thrilling, super-loud Slavic slur that's to die for--cf. recordings here http://www.fishousepoems.org/archives/poems/ilya_kaminsky_at_bowdoin_college_february_2_2006.shtml). The poem is called "My Father Between Yes and No," it's very long and glorious and also Googlable, and to my knowledge unfinished. Here is the stanza:

" I imagined myself a caravella
sinking towards sleep,
four-years-old on a summer night,
listening for my father's return.
He steps into the darkened room,
touches my cheek.
Father the wind. Child the boat.
Wind touches the sail!
In the morning secretly, in his ear,
I whisper the dream.
And he smiles, saying, Lada.
"Dear" and "Ship," two words in one,
dynasty of green light.
A word harbor welcomes us, saying:
in this we can hide, we can live.
Lada, my father's voice. This sea.
This sail. This tender wind. "


"A word harbor welcomes us": I've felt the longing for that word harbor since I could read, I think; call it the product of a troubled mind or an active intellect (often hard to distinguish, let's be honest), my literacy has always been hungry, restless, full of an animating desire for refuge. I hope to write a novel this summer. A lot of writers say that reading is the key to writing well, that if you read enough, the words fill you up and start tumbling out of their own accord. I think this is true to a certain extent. Really Good Writing, the kind worth the capitalization, certainly sets my nerves stinging. Sometimes, when I'm reading something transcendent, I go outside and my blood is so excited I get a kind of auditory hallucination: I imagine I can hear the hiss of plants growing, and the cars rushing by sound like the surf. I've spent a lot of hours of my little life reading, and all those words upon words are, well, present. Even emphatically. And maybe jostling out. But there's a lot of audacity in turning from the reading to the writing--in saying, I can create a word harbor for others, instead of just resting in one already made for me. It's pretty crass to assume you're worthy of an artistic destiny (or any destiny or calling at all). Desire has a lot to do with it, but I have also got to summon up the chutzpah from my tummy. Which may be overlarge, but quails easily.

So this is a space--impermanent, easy to click on, easy to overlook, and maybe just for myself--to put a hold on the frightening assumption of that destiny and get to work thinking out loud.

I hope to write posts in the next few days about:
the history of ideas since the nineteenth century;
why I hate Vladimir Nabokov;
some kind of breathless hagiography of Ilya Kaminsky and/or Isaac Babel;
a few musings on Hebrew poetry in the early twentieth century;
a confused 'how-to' for defining yourself against a canvas of generational apathy;
what I learned herding sheep for a summer;
and other things that will be determined by unpredictable measures.

It's the province of the poet--and now, the blogger--to create imaginary countries with abandon, with no inhabitants to take responsibility for, and furnish it with wonky and imperfect inventions. I intend to fill this blog with wonky inventions, and I hope to hear some of yours, too.

-Talia