Reader, I [am collecting language.]

Really I'm eating popcorn and staring at a blank computer screen, but you've got to start somewhere.

Today for Advanced Appellate Brief Writing (that's a thing) we read and critiqued briefs for a case that was recently heard before the U.S. Supreme Court. That isn't important. What is important was that in one brief the attorneys used the word "solipsistic" and the phrase in media res. No one thought "solipsistic" was a good idea because no one knew what it meant (OED: self-centered, selfish, self-absorbed, you get the idea). Then my prof turned to in media res.

I love in media res like I love deus ex machina. How fantastic is it that we have terms for beginning the middle of the action or for the abruptly solved, often necessarily divinely solved, problem? For a moment, I was a well-read person again, extolling the virtues of literary language. And then someone made the point that you could just say "begins in the middle."

There is virtue in plain speak. I'm incredibly grateful that legalese is going the way of the dinosaur--it's painful to think that way. But does that mean that art has to be taken out? Solipsistic, I'll admit, is a little much. But in media res--that will always be a part of me.

Cue 1990s Mariah Carey dance break.

Yep. First video on the blog and it's not Jimmy Fallon being hilarious or Benedict Cumberbatch being Benedict Cumberbatch or even the Muppets. It's Mariah. I have no defense.

But (back to thesis) I do have words. There's a scene in one of my favorite novels, Possession: A Romance by A.S. Byatt (it's about literary theory and poets and history), where a character begins to build lists of words. And then the lists become poems--or what he knows will be poems. He finds the titles, starts to organize, knows that when he sits down to write, the poems will be there.

I tend to treat most writing this way. Collecting words and phrases, hoping that when I sit down to write, the words will form the arguments I need (all writing is argument--asterisk that for another blog post). Today, thinking about solipsistic and in media res, I was reminded of words I've been carrying around for a long time, words that don't belong in legal briefs. I'm not sure they belong in blog posts--maybe--but I know they belong in poems. I'm thinking it's time to write.

.

It's just plain mean to invoke Jimmy Fallon and not give you anything. Here's a recent (as of yesterday) favorite with Idina Menzel singing "Let It Go" and what's already contemporary classic with Joseph Gordon Levitt.