sarcasm is the body's natural defense against stupid.

mark cox says that "irony (is) the intellectual posturing of a mind afraid of genuine tenderness," that irony and sentimentality are the downfalls of a writer who is not ready or willing to investigate and develop honest emotion.

i always felt that carolyn forche was too honest. reading her poems felt like staring directly into the sun for seasons, for decades. and, to a point, that remains true. if forche's work were my lover, it would be my natural inclination to sneak out in the middle of the night to meet up with an episode of "flight of the conchords" or a copy of "instyle" or, hell, a mix cd consisting only of akon and t.pain.

she is remarkable, all the same. in her introduction to the anthology, "against forgetting," she states that we are a society on the brink, that to hold political and personal poetry in mutually exclusive realms is irresponsible, that those who turn their backs to the stories of witness are those who lack compassion. it was synchronistic that i read this yesterday, on the anniversary of katrina.

so at times hannah and i seem flip (i mean, we're f-ing bloggers). and at other times, perhaps, we will seem too earnest. but anything written, i guess, is the translation of experience into form. forche writes that translation is "an attempt to mark, to change, to impress, but never to leave things as they are."

which brings me to the james taylor tribute i watched on ETV last night with my parents. i get through the dixie chicks covering something or other. i only seriously lose it when sting sings "you can close your eyes." i had made that ugly-claire-danes-in-my-so-called-life i'm-about-to-cry-face for, like, the previous hour. by this point, it's all over. but this is the truly embarrassing part. this is my karmic fate for making fun of john mayer and james blunt and the like: keith urban comes on stage. KEITH URBAN. and he performs "country road." sobbing. KEITH URBAN. the guy who sings, "take your bags but leave my sweater, cause we've got nothing left to weather."

so how is it that hannah and i make it through an entirely tragic summer without so much as a watering of the eyes, and yet...ETV. i guess it makes sense. we all have that artist or writer or musician who remains the soundtrack or backdrop or dialogue of our childhoods. that one band or singer who returns us to the backseat of our parents' car twenty years ago. who knows. keith urban. jesus.

oh, and owen wilson???!!! what is happening?