Go Fug Yourself

[Sorry I did not blog yesterday; I take Jogtheblog as my model here and try to blog every weekday; like him I do Saturday and Sunday when I can. That has been the last few Saturday and Sundays. Yesterday just did not work out. Here I am going to continue with my using the Sunday blog for frivolous stuff -- silly stuff that would never make it into my weekday posts.]

Today a simple post, linking to another blog. [Jog does this kind of thing all the time.]

http://gofugyourself.typepad.com/

Stephen Frug (one of our regular commenters here) tells me he could not care less about clothes. I talked too much about clothes in my issue-by-issue dissection of Grant Morrison's New X-Men run for some people's taste. I thought I did not talk about it enough. I think that superhero comics have always made the clothes -- those crazy outfits -- fairly central, and I think Morrison was right to make them a central part of his run.

My interest in clothes is fairly recent, but I see it as a minor rebellion against my fellow academics, too many of whom just wear all black all the time, going for a Darth Vader-Hamlet-Johnny-Cash-Jeff-Goldbloom's-character-from-Jurassic-Park thing. I see an interest in fashion as an important extension of my interest in aesthetics. If aesthetics matters -- if it matters in poetry and music and film and comics -- then it must matter in clothes as well. I do not think it is quite right for us to look at people who read novels and look down on comics as snobs, but then turn around and look at people who care about fashion as frivolous (frivolous in a pejorative sense). So I put a bit of effort into caring about this subject and I think it is fun. It certainly makes walking around New York more fun. Also watching TV and movies. Things that make your life more fun should not be brushed aside in haste.

Go Fug Yourself is a fantastic blog about fashion, updated with these little posts all the time, more than once a day. It is funny and striking and well written and engaging even for someone like me, on whom many of the subtleties of fashion are lost. It does not take itself too seriously. And it is very focused: it is not like a lot of gossip magazines, which spend a lot of time talking about what some of these minor celebrities THINK -- where it is better just too look at the pictures. It is writing about clothes: what works, what doesn't, and why.

I am pretty sure that, on the subject of poetry, my classroom is built around this same principle: here is a poem -- what works, what doesn't, and why.

If aesthetics matter than fashion has to matter too. I could be crazy about this.