Blogging, Reading, Saying

Most successful blogs have an identity. They run the gamut from socio-political orientations to photologs to fanciful, imaginary worlds. I participate in several blogs as a regular comment poster or as a guest author (if you care about the environment, please visit Radical Noesis listed on my sidebar, if you are galvanized by social issues check out Uncommon Thought).

If there is a heart to my blog, it is meant to be an exploration of the signifed as expressed through my favorite signifier--the written word. I stray here sometimes, but I want to send out (on a semi-regular basis) a dialogue about literature and what is being artistically expressed, via words, in today's print media.

To honor that intent, I often weave written passages I've lifted from literature with either something happening in my life, a current event, or a pop-cultural trend. I hope if I have any regular readers, they share my passion for both classical and current lit.

Today I'll keep my entry pure. I'm reading Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, a novel I recommend to anyone who has, or can appreciate the dynamics of, a dysfunctional family (and its metaphorical relevance to society as a whole). I was moved by this section:

"One by one the lights of St. Jude were going out.
And if you sat at the dinner table long enough, whether in punishment or in refusal or simply in boredom, you never stopped sitting there. Some part of you sat there all your life.
As if sustained and too-direct contact with time's raw passage could scar the nerves permanently, like staring at the sun.
As if too-intimate knowledge of any interior were necessarily harmful knowledge. Were knowledge that could never be washed off.
(How weary, how worn, a house lived in to excess.)"

I feel that way, sometimes, about this my formerly beloved United States. As if I have sat at its table, trying to partake in the feast set before me, but only able to gag on the spongy, overcooked vegetables.