The Prufrock is in the Pudding

My dear friend Sarah Lenes refuses to read my blog (or any other) because, she says, it’s like reading a person’s diary; it’s too personal. Anything she needs to know about me, I can tell her, she says. But as she knows, I would never invoke images of fairy dust or liken myself to Cinderella in my day-life, and I probably wouldn’t even discuss with zeal the swelling pride I have in my country (overall). She’s right, though, that my scribbling here may verge on the personal or confessional. In fact, hitting that “Publish” button for the first time a week ago, to dispatch my first blog into cyberspace for all the world to see, was crushingly nerve-racking for me. Until now, the fear of rejection or critique has left me in a state of expressive paralysis, like an incarnation of T.S. Eliot’s indecisive, self-deprecating character J. Alfred Prufrock. I am not an aging, sexually frustrated man, of course, but like Prufrock, I have been afraid to let loose the things I want to say, to become vulnerable.

In an internal monologue, Prufrock weighs his decision to “force the moment to its crisis” and suggest an intimate encounter with his female companion:


And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse


As a writer of short fiction, the fear of charges like, “How her adjectives and verbs are growing thin!” keep me up at night. So when considering writing a blog (a much less formal style), I wondered, as he did, “Do I dare?” Prufrock admits to himself in the end that he is no Prince Hamlet, nor is he meant to be, and here I likewise proclaim that I am no William Faulkner, no Flannery O’Connor. This will be a compilation of nothings and somethings, of meandering and non-polished writings. So judge away. This will not be an attempt at perfection but an unabashed celebration of my bald spots. After all, this is places i’ve gone barefoot, not places i’ve gone in prada.