20-something

I just posted the 20th episode of my podcast. It isn't about anything in
particular, like most of my shows. But there are now, 20 of them, well
21, if you include episode zero.

I like the idea there are 30 or so people who intermittently listen in.
But I'm a success junkie. I want to be Big. Seems, though, I don't have
anything Big to say.

I think you really need some sort of unique and interesting content, and I
don't have that, except to a minimal level, maybe a 26-person level. I
wish, and yes that's a very good word for it, that I had something to
contribute to the universal mish-mash of Web content that would be of
particular value, and that hundreds or thousands of people would say gee,
that's kind neat, I wanna see what happens next.

But I'm not a fiction writer, I'm not a poet anymore (not since high
school), so the sum total of my original content is me talking about
myself. Not earth-shaking, by any means.

Then you have couplecasts like Dawn & Drew that have been around for a few
years now and have hundreds of listeners, and talk about nothing in
particular. But they're in the prime demographic. I ain't. I'm 48, I'll
be 49 the end of the summer -- prime demographic for the AARP crowd, I
suppose.

I'm very nearly tempted to start trying to write poetry again, just to
have some unique original content. Sure, talking about people can be
interesting. But there's just me, and there's nothing unique about me.
Much.

But back when I used to write poetry, the 1970s, it was all about form
defining content, sort of a Marshall McLuhan thing. I wrote a couple in
the then-current form, which was more about typing than writing, putting
the words in a particular format on the page -- the form was more
important than the content. Now, you actually have to say something. And
about the time I got tired of the format stuff, I also lost confidence in
my own ability to produce really worthwhile content.

And it seems like a lot of Really Good Poetry is based on the more strict
standards of some of the poetry forms, sonnets and whatnot. I don't know
that I have the patience for many of the more strict forms of poetry.
Once I've devoted the time to a more strict form, I feel like I stopped
writing poetry and started typing. I type very well. While it's been
profitable for me to be able to type, I don't think it's particularly
artistic or inventive, and I don't think of it as poetry. It's typing.

At the time, I was in a "imagist" theatre group called Blackthorne
Repertory Theatre. We did just about everything in the way of content.
We did a lot of Shakespeare, we performed the American Debut of a Gertrude
Stein play, we did a few written by our director, Seamus Caine, we even
did a couple plays I wrote myself. But it was "imagist" theatre, and the
performances were more driven by visual imagery than by words -- though
certainly the words were there; hard to do Shakespeare without the words,
though I'd bet somebody's done it.

But it wasn't about the words, and quite frankly I was better with words
than the imagist crap -- er, stuff.

So I stopped writing.

Now nobody'd know what an imagist theatre would be. All the form-based
poetry would look pretty archaic these days. I miss writing poetry,
somewhat, but I think often my poetry would fit -- well, exempli gratia,
in an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," Data is discussing his
poetry (about his cat) with Jordi, and Jordi's comment is "well, it's
clever..."

My poetry was clever. It was even funny, sometimes, if you think clever
is funny. But I don't know if I ever wrote anything that was worthy of
any further attention. But that was high school, it was a long time ago,
and since then, I haven't written anything of any great interest. Just
talking about me. And work stuff.

I might just give it a shot. I probably shouldn't. If I do, though, keep
in mind that "90 percent of everything is crap," and that writers have a
whole lot of crap they need to write somewhere, just to get it out of the
way, so we can get to the good stuff we'll (theoretically) write
eventually. OTOH, keep in mind I might write -all- crap. That happens,
too.

But yeah, I have that on my list to do. Stay tuned. But don't hold your
breath for brilliance. Probably have to hold your breath to avoid the
stench.

"Well, it's clever..."

--

Grizzly's Growls Podcast: The Life and Times of a Minor
Local Celebrity <http://grizzly.libsyn.com>
iPods? We don' need no steenkin' iPods!
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