Benjamin

I got in a discussion a few weeks ago with a woman I was dating at the time, a fairly dark conversation on her part, though more memories of things dark on mine than actually dark. But I was using Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Lautreamont, etc. as examples of the very peculiarly French celebration of the rational irrational, exuberant desolation, despondent elation, etc. The phantasmagorical, as Benjamin calls it in The Arcades Project, my just commenced post-Proust read. She didn't understand what I was trying to get at (thus the 'at the time' modifier), and recited the craziest text book of that period of French poetry I've ever heard, "It was all about the outpouring of an excess of emotion." Huh? An MFA in poetry from a respectable small urban college, a decent poet herself (if _very_ much a workshopped and MFA'd poet) and that? I was horrified. For it seems to miss _perfectly_ the essence of that poetry for me, and quite gratifyingly for Benjamin as well. I had a far longer, and more interesting, series of thoughts on the matter this morning. But a long busy day of the tedious and the useless, the use value-less, and I'm afraid they've all gone away.

La vida peripatetic recommences tomorrow. I'm curious to see if I can maintain my attempts to achieve productive stasis whilst stuck in the midst of my all-too-typical transience.