Okay, in addition to leafing through old Vogue magazines, and tearing out pretty pictures, I’m still deeply hooked on David Foster Wallace. I’m reading A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, a collection of essays and arguments. I love his writing, his voice, his idiosyncratic thinking, and his appalling critical clarity, especially about television. In his essay E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction, he refers (on p. 45) to a book of poetry by James Cummins called The Whole Truth, "a cycle of sestinas deconstructing Perry Mason."
I first encountered the sestina form in college in Frank Bidart’s poetry class, and have frequently used it as a palate cleansing exercise as I wade through the swampy quagmire of my novel. There’s something very orderly and tidy to me about the rigid formality of this form, and I can complete a decent draft in about 4 hours — which feels so good after never ever ever never finishing my damn novel. (Yet.)
Of course, when you look around on the internet, you’re likely to find all kinds of things. Here are some sestinas written for a contest, as well as a sestina group and forum. No matter how quirky your taste (gotta real jones for those sestinas!?!), you’re not alone in the internet universe.
And I found a page of sestinas on McSweeney’s, which is another one of Dave Eggers‘ great things.
The irony of this whole essay for me is that I was raised in a television-free household, and have literally never seen a single episode of Perry Mason. I’ve caught up on a lot of other t.v. in hotel rooms and at home on my own ginormous flat panel 50" screen, but not Bewitched or The Partridge Family or The Mary Tyler Moore Show or Lou Grant or any of a number of other genres and periods, including our current "reality" tv craze. We don’t have a television here in our house in Homer, and I think of all the people I know, myself included, who all always claim not to watch "much" tv. Two entire solid months with no tv is a far cry from the 2-3 daily hours that folks who claim "not much" tv watching seem to watch. More time to read David Foster Wallace. Try it sometime.
Thoughts In Random Patterns 