The Naming of Things

So this is my first blog, and I haven't decided whether it's going to have a specific theme yet. It's not, as the title may suggest, a blog about pizza, although I do like pizza. I don't think it's going to be a blog about onomatopoeia either, but who knows, maybe they'll pop up in a post someday.

The name came to me the other night when, like many nights, I was caught in a fit of insomnia, and started thinking of clever titles involving literary terms (which had the complete opposite effect of counting sheep). So I guess the title came before the notion to create a blog. At the time I was getting images of pizza dough littered with moo's, cling-clangs, and vworps.

The subtitle is somewhat stolen from a poem by Frank O'Hara called, "Why I am not a painter," although the poem uses the word "oranges" rather than "pepperoni." In the piece, O'Hara talks about how artist Mike Goldberg was working on this painting and O'Hara stopped in during the creation process:

"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."

O'Hara comes back often throughout the painting process, and once it's finished, he asks Goldberg where "SARDINES' went, because only letters remain. Goldberg responds, "It was too much." O'Hara then goes on to explain how he sat down to write about "orange" and before he knew it, twelve poems evolved, not one of them about orange. He named them, "Oranges."

Anyway, I guess this is all to say that I like Frank O'Hara, I really like this poem, and this blog is not really going to deal with pepperoni. Why write about non-kosher meat anyway? For less of what this blog won't be about, and more of what it will, keep an eye out for future posts. Whatever they become, whoever you are...