Words

High summer in the city, and while that does mean sticky asphalt, it also means sno-cones and Natty Boh - and some relatively free time, as classes don't begin for another 50 days, and Cleo's happy at day camp. So I've had some time for the gym, and in fact I've even had a few spare minutes here and there to dig up our ancient IPod, and to upload some songs that make that extra set of flies go down a little more easily. But since our CD towers are essentially monuments that were constructed in the 1990s, any time with the IPod is essentially time spent in the Clinton years. And that means, in turn, a lot of drastic changes in volume, earnestly political lyrics, and, too, some wonderfully creative lyrics.

I'm thinking, for instance, of this brief segment of Eminem's 'Lose Yourself,' in which he evokes the anxiety of a white rapper in the intensely competitive arenas of inner-city Detroit. Rabbit's ambitious, and he's got talent, but as his moniker implies, he can also tend towards the timid, when his moment in the spotlight comes:

His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy
There's vomit on his sweater already, mom's spaghetti.

It's a classic, of course, and hardly needs my support. But check out the wobbling rhythm of the opening line, where the ellision of 'are' in the central clause implies the lack of strength in his knees. Check out the creative rhymes - three ways of echoing sweaty - and check out the final image, in which his panicked regurgitation acts as a proof of both his fear and his lamentable status as a mama's boy. No hardened gangsta, here.

And then the IPod pauses, and the next track is Dead Can Dance's American Dreaming, a beautiful ode in which Brendan Perry sings in a wistful mode:

We've been too long American dreaming
And I think we've all lost the way
Forlorn somnambulistic maniacal in the dark

Did he just say 'Forlorn somnambulistic maniacal'? He did, indeed - and in fact the audience breaks into warm applause at the end of the song.

Well, anyway: the gym has its pleasures, and sometimes unexpectedly ambitious wordings are among them. But they can turn up in other contexts, as well. Just yesterday morning Cleo surprised me when, waiting for me to cue up her DVD of Dinosaur Train, she pointed out that I wouldn't have to watch with her. "The next one will start automatically," she pointed out. Automatically? That's like an 18-syllable word, and yet it had just issued from my 4-year-old's mouth. And then, later in the day, she told me that when she and L. had returned home from the dentist, she had "discovered that my pink pinwheel is missing." Discovered that it was missing? Who was I talking to, a character in a Doyle short story?

Well. Eminem can turn a rhyme, and Cleo can say automatically. And I, in turn, struggle to put words together in my mundane manner. No blog entries recently, you coolly note. So I, in turn, point to a just-published essay on the alleged crisis in criticism in the inaugural issue of Kapsula, and just finished a draft of a curious extended essay on a memory of Richard Serra's. And, finally, Pearson's editor just contacted me to let me know that my book on criticism was their most-requested title, at a recent conference and book fair. Words, words. They do take time, but they carry rewards, of various sorts.