My wife told me that it might help my stress level to write. I dunno...it might. So far, I'm two sentences in, and I don't feel that much better, to be honest with you. But that second sentence wasn't much of one...in fact, technically, I think it's a sentence fragment.

I've got Eminem blasting in my ears..."8 Mile" soundtrack. It's an unlikely pairing, I guess, Eminem and I. After four years of high school AP English, a college degree in English Literature, and a couple of years of working in an evangelical Christian church, and I've got rap's whitest bad-boy swearing in my stereo phones about how he can't seem to get away from his trailer-park background. It seems unlikely...but there's something about the way the guy writes, the way he rhymes, the way he pens like someone like with an amazing command of the language and pushes it out of his gut like a poor kid with a chip on his shoulder and something to prove. I've got almost nothing in common with the guy, but I can't deny that I get the same thrill from Eminem's lines such as "like a cereal killer hiding murder material in a cereal box on top of your stereo" that I do from lines like Poe's "Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling / by the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore," and Browning's "She guessed not how / Her darling one wish would be heard. / And thus we sit together now, / And all night long we have not stirred, / And yet God has not said a word," and Dickinson's "If recollecting were forgetting, / Then I remember not; / And if forgetting, recollecting, / How near I had forgot!" I don't connect in any real way with Eminem's subject matter...(I have never, as far as I recall, locked my girlfriend in my trunk and driven off of the nearest bridge)...but good writing is good writing, and it's the emotion behind it that drives me, not the action itself. Why is this such a difficult concept for today's critics and English professors? Do we really feel like the story of the usurped king, marooned on a desert island with his daughter, who befriends a a tree-sprite and co-habitates with a witch really mirrors the experience of your average reader of Shakespeare? Of course not...most of Shakespeare's stuff was, at some level subversive and, at times, very silly. The line from Browning's "Porphyria's Lover" quoted above finalizes the short verse about a man who invites the love of his life into his apartment from the cold, and then strangles her with her own hair, pries her eyes open and lies there with her throughout the night, without the first tinge of guilt. Can most of us identify with this scenario? Of course not...nor can we identify with the man whose dead wife seems to haunt his every midnight thought and whose lonliness manifests itself in the form of a talking raven whose incessant single-worded mantra drives the man insane. But it's the emotion of the thing...it's the drive behind the story. Eminem has some of the most passionate, angry and insecure lyrics in popular music, written with a maturity and command that seems to extend far beyond his education. I hope that thirty years from now, someone is teaching this stuff to their English classes.

Maybe I will.

Peace,
Justin