I've now put out all the most worrying fires that got started while I took the month of October off from reviewing. There are plenty of emails that need answering, and a whole chain of labor to do related to a relatively minimal chore (must print shipping label and proofs of freelancer pay, must move printer to desk in order to print, must organize desk in order to move printer, must organize rest of office in order to organize desk, must figure out bookshelf situation in rest of apartment in order to organize office), and o, the pile of books to read. But I feel okay about the future for now.
I do have lots of thoughts and ideas flying around in my head, which is usually evidence that I need to write a blog post. So here I am.
Showing posts with label CSUN. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CSUN. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 5, 2019
Thursday, January 31, 2019
Orange and Teal
First, I must note that I'm astounded by the response to my piece about Horse Latitudes books. The traffic has been of a different character than for any other piece of mine, ever. A whole lot of interesting encounters have come out of it, including this delightful blog post by a writer I admire. I don't know what I expected in terms of response, but it wasn't this; I wrote it for my own amusement. (My editor said it was a scoop worthy of a Pulitzer, but that's his sense of humor.) Hello and thank you, anyone who's reading this after finding me through that piece.
If you haven't, please sign up for my newsletter for a chance to win all twelve of the books I read and reviewed in the piece. A runner-up will win one of my literary tote bags. I have a lot of them. It's a problem.
Second, in case the news hasn't crossed your feed yet, I am now the book reviews coeditor at Barrelhouse, along with my long-distance pal Kamil Ahsan. (He's a good dude. Send him all your Kirsten Dunst gifs.) I'm REALLY excited to be doing this job, for undisclosable reasons as well as the obvious ones. And yes, you can pitch me. Please do.
On with the show.
Yesterday I went to see both of my mentors at CSUN. (It was sheer luck that both of them had office hours on Tuesday, so thanks, office hours fairy.) It was an interesting visit, because they gave me differing but caring advice, some of which proved that they really are just two sides of the same mentor-coin.
Chris told me that although it's great that I'm doing so many reviews, and thus helping the literary community so much, I need to figure out a way to get back to my own writing. "The world needs Kat's writing," he said, a little insistently. I hung my head. I do have essays that need extraction from my brain, but when I will have time for them I do not know. That's not a good thing, according to both Chris and me, but I'm in so deep on reviews that I don't know how to fix it.
Kate told me that she's happy for my success, and asked (politely) if I was making any money yet. Not really, I said. She asked if my goal was to land a paid position as a regular reviewer, and I said sort of. I do want that, but only if it will help me publish books, and/or slow down my reading pace. She kind of shrugged, and said well, I hope you can do that, but right now you're kind of an indentured servant. You're doing the grunt work and building up credit you can use to buy your freedom, and a little plot of land of your own. That was helpful of her, and sweet.
I asked both of them for recommendations on a certain kind of dialogue that appears in literary short stories, because I'm speaking about dialogue to a group of women writers in mid-February. (You can come if you want to, as long as you're close to LA and not male-identifying. Email me for details if you'd like them.) Both of them (separately) looked at their bookshelves for a long time and eventually realized aloud that they don't really like dialogue.
This will be funny to people who know them both, because as thinkers, they couldn't be more different. Kate is a structuralist, inspired by the natural world, a Baby Boomer with a fine-tuned ability to walk in and teach for three hours off the cuff. Chris is a poststructuralist, immersed in pop and digital culture, a Gen Xer who examines his pedagogy like narcissists examine their faces. They have both helped me immeasurably, and yesterday isn't the first time I've thought of them as the orange and teal of my writing life.
In other news, the overwhelm I felt recently lasted a while, a week+, but I dug out of it this week and got a bunch of things done. I'm not completely aboveground, but I'm getting there. Lots of good news ahead, lots of good books behind. Nice to have a fresh start in February.
Out in the world:
A review of one of the best books I read last year (out of 150, mind you): Thirty-Seven, by Peter Stenson, at 3:AM.
A short, cynical piece about the PEN shortlists and money in publishing at Book & Film Globe.
Books I Hate with Morris Collins, who wrote one of the Horse Latitudes books. I really enjoyed this interview. He's a smart guy, about writing particularly.
By the way, if you're reading this and you're one of the people who's agreed to a Books I Hate interview, email me, okay? I need to sort out the next few months. I promise I'm not mad.
If you haven't, please sign up for my newsletter for a chance to win all twelve of the books I read and reviewed in the piece. A runner-up will win one of my literary tote bags. I have a lot of them. It's a problem.
Second, in case the news hasn't crossed your feed yet, I am now the book reviews coeditor at Barrelhouse, along with my long-distance pal Kamil Ahsan. (He's a good dude. Send him all your Kirsten Dunst gifs.) I'm REALLY excited to be doing this job, for undisclosable reasons as well as the obvious ones. And yes, you can pitch me. Please do.
On with the show.
Yesterday I went to see both of my mentors at CSUN. (It was sheer luck that both of them had office hours on Tuesday, so thanks, office hours fairy.) It was an interesting visit, because they gave me differing but caring advice, some of which proved that they really are just two sides of the same mentor-coin.
Chris told me that although it's great that I'm doing so many reviews, and thus helping the literary community so much, I need to figure out a way to get back to my own writing. "The world needs Kat's writing," he said, a little insistently. I hung my head. I do have essays that need extraction from my brain, but when I will have time for them I do not know. That's not a good thing, according to both Chris and me, but I'm in so deep on reviews that I don't know how to fix it.
Kate told me that she's happy for my success, and asked (politely) if I was making any money yet. Not really, I said. She asked if my goal was to land a paid position as a regular reviewer, and I said sort of. I do want that, but only if it will help me publish books, and/or slow down my reading pace. She kind of shrugged, and said well, I hope you can do that, but right now you're kind of an indentured servant. You're doing the grunt work and building up credit you can use to buy your freedom, and a little plot of land of your own. That was helpful of her, and sweet.
I asked both of them for recommendations on a certain kind of dialogue that appears in literary short stories, because I'm speaking about dialogue to a group of women writers in mid-February. (You can come if you want to, as long as you're close to LA and not male-identifying. Email me for details if you'd like them.) Both of them (separately) looked at their bookshelves for a long time and eventually realized aloud that they don't really like dialogue.
This will be funny to people who know them both, because as thinkers, they couldn't be more different. Kate is a structuralist, inspired by the natural world, a Baby Boomer with a fine-tuned ability to walk in and teach for three hours off the cuff. Chris is a poststructuralist, immersed in pop and digital culture, a Gen Xer who examines his pedagogy like narcissists examine their faces. They have both helped me immeasurably, and yesterday isn't the first time I've thought of them as the orange and teal of my writing life.
In other news, the overwhelm I felt recently lasted a while, a week+, but I dug out of it this week and got a bunch of things done. I'm not completely aboveground, but I'm getting there. Lots of good news ahead, lots of good books behind. Nice to have a fresh start in February.
Out in the world:
A review of one of the best books I read last year (out of 150, mind you): Thirty-Seven, by Peter Stenson, at 3:AM.
A short, cynical piece about the PEN shortlists and money in publishing at Book & Film Globe.
Books I Hate with Morris Collins, who wrote one of the Horse Latitudes books. I really enjoyed this interview. He's a smart guy, about writing particularly.
By the way, if you're reading this and you're one of the people who's agreed to a Books I Hate interview, email me, okay? I need to sort out the next few months. I promise I'm not mad.
Wednesday, April 11, 2018
Never To-Done
First: sorry for the short notice: if you are in or around Cal State Northridge on Saturday, come see me give a presentation about a conceptual novel I assembled and am trying to place. I'm on at 12:10 in the Tujunga Room. More details here.
Regularly scheduled programming:
As I continue to publish things, by the grace of accepting editors, I pile up more and more behind-the-scenes stories. In the past month, I wrote a review while whacked and thinned out on Sudafed; I wrote a review where it got so ugly between me and the editor that I don't know if it'll ever see print, even though I was commissioned to write it; and I pitched an unwritten review on April 9 at 6 PM and sent back final changes on April 11 at 9 AM. (I'd worked with him before, but still.) I feel like these tales are interesting and worthwhile to writers who are new to their endeavors, but I doubt they're interesting to experienced writers, and I can't really tell them indiscriminately without wrecking editorial relationships or making authors mad. What author would want to know that I reviewed them on Sudafed?
There's other stuff I have to say, too. I'm mentally assembling a From Me to You column about hard truths. It will not be as much fun as the above stories, but, well. That's the point of hard truths.
For the past week I've been trying to catch up on my work enough to take it easy for a few days. I wrote three reviews in three days, and then spent most of a day finishing the draft of a very difficult hybrid essay I've been working on since last fall. I also wrote a short factish essay that has a deadline in, like, June, but I wanted to get it off my plate, and an even shorter essay that I thought would be something, but isn't, and will likely end up on Medium sometime soon.
By the end of all that I wasn't sure whether I even knew how to string a clause together. Switching from one register to another was exhausting. I don't know how you "daily pages" people do it; I am a binge personality through and through.
But I did catch up pretty okay. I've got two books to read and review plus four more to review that are time-sensitive, but almost everything else is June or later. It'll be nice to read a little more slowly.
(I kept editing that to add more of the books I'd forgotten that were due for May. There's actually another to read and review that comes out in May, but I'm feeling doubtful that pitch will get picked up, so I'm not rushing to read it. The to-do list is never to-done.)
Out in the world:
Oh I forgot to tell you I WAS IN THE MFING GUARDIAN. This one's got some behind-the-scenes to it, too, but the result is what matters. I reviewed Leni Zumas's Red Clocks in brief, and it was half persistence and half luck that made it happen. Truly.
I wrote a piece of criticism that is partly a review of Carl Frode Tiller's wonderful Encircling trilogy and partly a meditation on long books generally. This one mattered a lot to me, particularly because I placed it in LARB, which I thought I'd have to wait a lot longer to write for. It's a little...thick, but I'm proud of it. I wrote like hell to make it happen.
Fairly awkwardly: an erotica story I wrote long ago was published in a Portland local magazine, Exotic. Here are links to page one and page two (it's a two-page story); to see it in context, click here for a PDF of the entire issue, but be warned: it is 75% advertisements with full nudity. Like my story, it's not quite porn, but I think it's close enough for a court of law. The editor did some edits without my permission, including condensing two words into the dreaded "Alright". grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
For TRUE, I reviewed Jessica Friedmann's Things That Helped, a book so exquisite it kept popping my jaw open when I read it. Stunning writing.
I reviewed Tyler Wetherall's memoir No Way Home for Arts Fuse. It didn't blow my mind, but I liked it. Cracking story and rich emotional journey.
Finally, I wrote an opinion piece about Melania Trump for The Big Smoke. I have an insane level of fear about this piece being in the world, the worst of which was realized when a friend of a friend called it entitled white feminist fragility. Naturally, I don't think it's those things, but I comprehend that I'm calling for neutrality on a figure whom many people could never see as neutral. That's where I'm at, and I can't confer my privilege to everyone.
Now to get back to reading. Agh.
Regularly scheduled programming:
As I continue to publish things, by the grace of accepting editors, I pile up more and more behind-the-scenes stories. In the past month, I wrote a review while whacked and thinned out on Sudafed; I wrote a review where it got so ugly between me and the editor that I don't know if it'll ever see print, even though I was commissioned to write it; and I pitched an unwritten review on April 9 at 6 PM and sent back final changes on April 11 at 9 AM. (I'd worked with him before, but still.) I feel like these tales are interesting and worthwhile to writers who are new to their endeavors, but I doubt they're interesting to experienced writers, and I can't really tell them indiscriminately without wrecking editorial relationships or making authors mad. What author would want to know that I reviewed them on Sudafed?
There's other stuff I have to say, too. I'm mentally assembling a From Me to You column about hard truths. It will not be as much fun as the above stories, but, well. That's the point of hard truths.
For the past week I've been trying to catch up on my work enough to take it easy for a few days. I wrote three reviews in three days, and then spent most of a day finishing the draft of a very difficult hybrid essay I've been working on since last fall. I also wrote a short factish essay that has a deadline in, like, June, but I wanted to get it off my plate, and an even shorter essay that I thought would be something, but isn't, and will likely end up on Medium sometime soon.
 |
| bangin' out those to-dos |
By the end of all that I wasn't sure whether I even knew how to string a clause together. Switching from one register to another was exhausting. I don't know how you "daily pages" people do it; I am a binge personality through and through.
But I did catch up pretty okay. I've got two books to read and review plus four more to review that are time-sensitive, but almost everything else is June or later. It'll be nice to read a little more slowly.
(I kept editing that to add more of the books I'd forgotten that were due for May. There's actually another to read and review that comes out in May, but I'm feeling doubtful that pitch will get picked up, so I'm not rushing to read it. The to-do list is never to-done.)
Out in the world:
Oh I forgot to tell you I WAS IN THE MFING GUARDIAN. This one's got some behind-the-scenes to it, too, but the result is what matters. I reviewed Leni Zumas's Red Clocks in brief, and it was half persistence and half luck that made it happen. Truly.
I wrote a piece of criticism that is partly a review of Carl Frode Tiller's wonderful Encircling trilogy and partly a meditation on long books generally. This one mattered a lot to me, particularly because I placed it in LARB, which I thought I'd have to wait a lot longer to write for. It's a little...thick, but I'm proud of it. I wrote like hell to make it happen.
Fairly awkwardly: an erotica story I wrote long ago was published in a Portland local magazine, Exotic. Here are links to page one and page two (it's a two-page story); to see it in context, click here for a PDF of the entire issue, but be warned: it is 75% advertisements with full nudity. Like my story, it's not quite porn, but I think it's close enough for a court of law. The editor did some edits without my permission, including condensing two words into the dreaded "Alright". grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
For TRUE, I reviewed Jessica Friedmann's Things That Helped, a book so exquisite it kept popping my jaw open when I read it. Stunning writing.
I reviewed Tyler Wetherall's memoir No Way Home for Arts Fuse. It didn't blow my mind, but I liked it. Cracking story and rich emotional journey.
Finally, I wrote an opinion piece about Melania Trump for The Big Smoke. I have an insane level of fear about this piece being in the world, the worst of which was realized when a friend of a friend called it entitled white feminist fragility. Naturally, I don't think it's those things, but I comprehend that I'm calling for neutrality on a figure whom many people could never see as neutral. That's where I'm at, and I can't confer my privilege to everyone.
Now to get back to reading. Agh.
Wednesday, June 28, 2017
You Did That
Last week, my diploma arrived. The one from CSUN. It looks like this.
I posted it on Facebook, in what I hope is my final look-at-me-I'm-graduating post on Facebook. (Well, except for this one.) I said that I still didn't know how I felt about attaining this degree, and that there was a lot of baggage, but there's pride and the desire to show off in there - the one reasonable, the other ignoble.
People kept asking me this spring if I was excited, or if I felt good. "I don't know," I told them. Are you SO ready to be done? they asked. "I guess I could use a break, but I really like school," I answered. Are you going to miss it, then? "Yes, but I'm planning to stay involved next year," I said.
None of these conversations went well. I didn't know the answers they were looking for. I didn't know what kind of conversation I was meant to have with these kind people: were they asking a chitchat question, or were they truly asking how I felt? I felt weird, and that was pretty much the only sensation I was sure of, but I didn't think that answer was how the conversation was supposed to go.
When I finished my bachelor's degree and people asked me what my major was, I told them film studies and philosophy - interdisciplinary, not a double-major - and they almost always said "Wow, what are you going to do with THAT?" I took to replying "Live in a box, I think," because I found it an impossible question. And I sensed disdain at my impracticality (understandable, but still rude) in the question, so I made a joke that let them know I'd noticed.
After honors convocation, I put my medal on the coffee table and stared at it for a while. Matt told me he was proud of me, and that I deserved a medal, if, for no other reason, as a physical indicator of how hard I'd worked.
"You deserve that medal just as much as I do," I said.
"No," he laughed, in an oh-as-if way. "No, I don't. It was you. That's your hard work on the table. I didn't do anything."
"You supported me," I said, feebly. "You stood by me, and listened while I raved about theory. You studied with me! I wouldn't've memorized phonemes if not for you."
He leaned forward in his chair. "You did that," he said, gesturing to the medal, gazing steadily at me. "You did that. That was your work."
It was a very Good Will Hunting moment. I almost started crying.
Pride is hard for me. Because of the environment of my high school, I find arrogance the worst personality trait of all; I fear it, and guard against it, in myself. Multiple voices from the past and present, based on real people and events as well as made-up insecurities, whisper reasons why my MA is not a big deal, why I have no reason to be proud, why I should in fact hide away from the achievement represented by getting this diploma in the mail. Since the hubbub around graduation started ramping up - really since I started this whole thing in the first place, in 2013 - I've struggled not to listen to them.
It's just a Cal State. It's just an MA, not an MFA or a PhD. You'll never make anything of it. Why'd you get it if you didn't want to teach? What proof do you have that the time and expense did you any good? If you'd worked harder you would've won that award. If you'd slept less you could've done it faster, spent less money. Your husband resents you for the time and money you lost him on this stupid goose-chase. You'll never catch up to people with PhDs. You're not as smart as them. It's just an MA. It's just an MA. You have nothing to show for it. Who cares?
Getting over that is hard. I could've written another twenty sentences of those mean whispers.
Though based in experience, and on real humans who have spoken to me, these statements are not based in fact. "Just a Cal State" gave me a more rigorous education than the fancy Seven Sisters college where I got my bachelor's degree. The proof I have is the acceptances I've gotten over the past year, the written work that's made it into the world. Matt has been proud and encouraging from day one. "Just an MA" has enriched my life beyond estimation since 2013.
It's still hard to believe fact over insecurity. I'm still haunted by what I didn't do. And there's deep, heavy family baggage related to this pursuit that I have carried with me all along.
It bubbled up in my mind some weeks ago that the reason I don't know what I feel about finishing the degree is the muddiness of the reasons why I decided to get the degree in the first place. My reasons were somewhat baggage-driven, but mostly entailed the vague notions of "writing better and knowing more." I do write better and I do know more, but the quantities remain unmeasurable. (Which is the whole deal with the humanities, really.) My classmates got the degree so they could teach, or so they could check off the box between BA and PhD, or so they could get more money at their jobs, or so they could return to the passions they held in their 20s and deferred through motherhood or career. Those are much more definite. My goals float and bob and skitter away when reached for.
But I am proud that I did this. I don't have a place to hang the degree, because Tom Servo hangs over my desk and the spot above the mantelpiece is taken, but for now I see it leaning against my desk every morning and every afternoon.
Like everything else I've done, or attained, it will find its place in my life. People will stop asking questions about it that I can't answer. I'll assimilate this time as "when I was in grad school", like the times of "when I was in paralegal school" and "when I worked as a copy editor" and "when I lived in London".
Eras come and go; experience is permanent. This was a good one.
 |
| I whited out my last name to preserve what little everyday-life privacy I have. The name I write under is no longer my legal name, and CSUN told me they could only put my legal name on the diploma. Which is a shame, because I write under my maiden name, and I wanted my writing degree to list that one. |
I posted it on Facebook, in what I hope is my final look-at-me-I'm-graduating post on Facebook. (Well, except for this one.) I said that I still didn't know how I felt about attaining this degree, and that there was a lot of baggage, but there's pride and the desire to show off in there - the one reasonable, the other ignoble.
People kept asking me this spring if I was excited, or if I felt good. "I don't know," I told them. Are you SO ready to be done? they asked. "I guess I could use a break, but I really like school," I answered. Are you going to miss it, then? "Yes, but I'm planning to stay involved next year," I said.
None of these conversations went well. I didn't know the answers they were looking for. I didn't know what kind of conversation I was meant to have with these kind people: were they asking a chitchat question, or were they truly asking how I felt? I felt weird, and that was pretty much the only sensation I was sure of, but I didn't think that answer was how the conversation was supposed to go.
When I finished my bachelor's degree and people asked me what my major was, I told them film studies and philosophy - interdisciplinary, not a double-major - and they almost always said "Wow, what are you going to do with THAT?" I took to replying "Live in a box, I think," because I found it an impossible question. And I sensed disdain at my impracticality (understandable, but still rude) in the question, so I made a joke that let them know I'd noticed.
After honors convocation, I put my medal on the coffee table and stared at it for a while. Matt told me he was proud of me, and that I deserved a medal, if, for no other reason, as a physical indicator of how hard I'd worked.
"You deserve that medal just as much as I do," I said.
"No," he laughed, in an oh-as-if way. "No, I don't. It was you. That's your hard work on the table. I didn't do anything."
"You supported me," I said, feebly. "You stood by me, and listened while I raved about theory. You studied with me! I wouldn't've memorized phonemes if not for you."
He leaned forward in his chair. "You did that," he said, gesturing to the medal, gazing steadily at me. "You did that. That was your work."
It was a very Good Will Hunting moment. I almost started crying.
 |
| Medal, distinction sash, honors rope, CSUN sash |
Pride is hard for me. Because of the environment of my high school, I find arrogance the worst personality trait of all; I fear it, and guard against it, in myself. Multiple voices from the past and present, based on real people and events as well as made-up insecurities, whisper reasons why my MA is not a big deal, why I have no reason to be proud, why I should in fact hide away from the achievement represented by getting this diploma in the mail. Since the hubbub around graduation started ramping up - really since I started this whole thing in the first place, in 2013 - I've struggled not to listen to them.
It's just a Cal State. It's just an MA, not an MFA or a PhD. You'll never make anything of it. Why'd you get it if you didn't want to teach? What proof do you have that the time and expense did you any good? If you'd worked harder you would've won that award. If you'd slept less you could've done it faster, spent less money. Your husband resents you for the time and money you lost him on this stupid goose-chase. You'll never catch up to people with PhDs. You're not as smart as them. It's just an MA. It's just an MA. You have nothing to show for it. Who cares?
Getting over that is hard. I could've written another twenty sentences of those mean whispers.
Though based in experience, and on real humans who have spoken to me, these statements are not based in fact. "Just a Cal State" gave me a more rigorous education than the fancy Seven Sisters college where I got my bachelor's degree. The proof I have is the acceptances I've gotten over the past year, the written work that's made it into the world. Matt has been proud and encouraging from day one. "Just an MA" has enriched my life beyond estimation since 2013.
It's still hard to believe fact over insecurity. I'm still haunted by what I didn't do. And there's deep, heavy family baggage related to this pursuit that I have carried with me all along.
It bubbled up in my mind some weeks ago that the reason I don't know what I feel about finishing the degree is the muddiness of the reasons why I decided to get the degree in the first place. My reasons were somewhat baggage-driven, but mostly entailed the vague notions of "writing better and knowing more." I do write better and I do know more, but the quantities remain unmeasurable. (Which is the whole deal with the humanities, really.) My classmates got the degree so they could teach, or so they could check off the box between BA and PhD, or so they could get more money at their jobs, or so they could return to the passions they held in their 20s and deferred through motherhood or career. Those are much more definite. My goals float and bob and skitter away when reached for.
But I am proud that I did this. I don't have a place to hang the degree, because Tom Servo hangs over my desk and the spot above the mantelpiece is taken, but for now I see it leaning against my desk every morning and every afternoon.
Like everything else I've done, or attained, it will find its place in my life. People will stop asking questions about it that I can't answer. I'll assimilate this time as "when I was in grad school", like the times of "when I was in paralegal school" and "when I worked as a copy editor" and "when I lived in London".
Eras come and go; experience is permanent. This was a good one.
Monday, May 2, 2016
Dehydration
Another weekend full of writing. Remember how I said
and yes, that was exactly how I felt at the end of it. I drank some whiskey and played Spider and felt better, but I do not want to write this story again.
I'm going back to it either tomorrow or next weekend to add another short section and assemble it properly, and I think I'll be assembling with scissors and tape. The sections don't go together as I wrote them, and as of yet I don't know exactly how they will.
A talk with Matt yesterday forced me to confront the fact that I'm not sure this piece has an audience beyond the professor who challenged me to write it and maybe two other friends. I don't like the idea of putting my name on it in the public sphere, and Matt likes that idea even less (not because he's interested in censoring me, but because he loves me and doesn't want people picking on me).
I don't really know what to do about this, because I have never been much afraid of revealing personal stuff about myself in the past, but this thing - this subject - it's truly frightening for me. And what I wrote goes beyond me to people I love, which isn't fair to them. (I'm sorry to be vague, but that is the nature of the few subjects I'm afraid to talk about: I don't end up talking about them.) There may be a time for me to revisit this piece as something publishable, or it may be something I can send out anonymously, but in the state it's in, I can't imagine strangers knowing it was me who wrote it.
This is the first time I've ever been in this position. I try to be a warrior on the page. It feels weird to be so profoundly uncertain. I'm uncertain all the time about whether this is better than that or whether I'm doing writing the right way, but to be uncertain about whether it was a good idea to write this thing at all? That's new.
I have half a dozen other things to write - a piece about aging, revisions on the secret project, an academic paper that is little more than an attempt to go to Hawaii, at least one application for a fellowship, an idea that's not fully developed yet but that could be interesting if it doesn't turn out to make me look absurdly arrogant. I wrote a poem the other day, too. I think the transition into summer, and shifting all my brewing energy toward things other than school, may have begun.
In other news, I'm reading this book called I Hate the Internet, because the author is coming to my class tomorrow to talk about a different book and I wanted to read this one before I met him. It's misanthropic and hilarious and cleverly structured and I'm enjoying it. But I don't think it's a book for everybody. I haven't figured out whether its negativity is working for me or actually not working for me, whether or not it's other stuff in the book that is making me like it rather than its overwhelming cynicism.
In other other news, I filled out an application for graduation (with my M.A.) in spring of 2017. A plethora of things could happen between now and then that would push my graduation back to fall '17 or spring '18, but I think I can make it. It's kind of scary, because I don't know what will happen after that. But I also can't wait to see what happens after that.
it feels like I'm not digging down deeply enough into my own flesh to write it? Yeah, I don't feel that way anymore. I bled. It was terrible. I wrote a HALP-type email to a friend, and she conjured up the image of Spongebob and Patrick under the drying lights at Shell City
and yes, that was exactly how I felt at the end of it. I drank some whiskey and played Spider and felt better, but I do not want to write this story again.
I'm going back to it either tomorrow or next weekend to add another short section and assemble it properly, and I think I'll be assembling with scissors and tape. The sections don't go together as I wrote them, and as of yet I don't know exactly how they will.
A talk with Matt yesterday forced me to confront the fact that I'm not sure this piece has an audience beyond the professor who challenged me to write it and maybe two other friends. I don't like the idea of putting my name on it in the public sphere, and Matt likes that idea even less (not because he's interested in censoring me, but because he loves me and doesn't want people picking on me).
I don't really know what to do about this, because I have never been much afraid of revealing personal stuff about myself in the past, but this thing - this subject - it's truly frightening for me. And what I wrote goes beyond me to people I love, which isn't fair to them. (I'm sorry to be vague, but that is the nature of the few subjects I'm afraid to talk about: I don't end up talking about them.) There may be a time for me to revisit this piece as something publishable, or it may be something I can send out anonymously, but in the state it's in, I can't imagine strangers knowing it was me who wrote it.
This is the first time I've ever been in this position. I try to be a warrior on the page. It feels weird to be so profoundly uncertain. I'm uncertain all the time about whether this is better than that or whether I'm doing writing the right way, but to be uncertain about whether it was a good idea to write this thing at all? That's new.
I have half a dozen other things to write - a piece about aging, revisions on the secret project, an academic paper that is little more than an attempt to go to Hawaii, at least one application for a fellowship, an idea that's not fully developed yet but that could be interesting if it doesn't turn out to make me look absurdly arrogant. I wrote a poem the other day, too. I think the transition into summer, and shifting all my brewing energy toward things other than school, may have begun.
In other news, I'm reading this book called I Hate the Internet, because the author is coming to my class tomorrow to talk about a different book and I wanted to read this one before I met him. It's misanthropic and hilarious and cleverly structured and I'm enjoying it. But I don't think it's a book for everybody. I haven't figured out whether its negativity is working for me or actually not working for me, whether or not it's other stuff in the book that is making me like it rather than its overwhelming cynicism.
In other other news, I filled out an application for graduation (with my M.A.) in spring of 2017. A plethora of things could happen between now and then that would push my graduation back to fall '17 or spring '18, but I think I can make it. It's kind of scary, because I don't know what will happen after that. But I also can't wait to see what happens after that.
Tuesday, March 15, 2016
Bedlam Is Dreaming of Rain
This past weekend, I wrote the polyphonic story, and off it goes to workshop today. Eh. I kind of hate it, a little, though I like parts of it very much; I have no idea what my classmates are going to make of it; and I'm glad as hell that it's off my mind. That is, I'm glad it's outside my head, because the idea has been teasing me for months, and I'm equally glad my major assignment for that class is officially handed in.
If I weren't restrained by deadlines, I might have tried to do something a lot more difficult with this story: create a narrative solely through [pages and pages of] disconnected sentences that represent the thoughts of a half-dozen or so characters. Instead I did a little of that in between three longer fragments (less than 1K apiece), and ran out of time/patience/other intangibles to go deeper and further with a truly shattered narrative. If I don't run out of time again, this true polyphony may be how I revise the story before the end of the semester. Dunno. Depends.
This morning on my run I listened to Lydia Davis read a story of her father's on the New Yorker fiction podcast. I continue to learn all kinds of useful what-I-am-definitely-not-as-writer-and-reader from listening to this podcast, and today was no exception. But the combination of Lydia Davis and the above paragraph makes me think I should read some of her work and try again on the true polyphony. She knows a shattered narrative better than anyone I can think of.
Spring break is next week, but two of three professors have piled on the work, so I think I may actually be busier than if I had to go to class. Two long books, a presentation, a lot of studying. I'd hoped to get started on the scary story, which will be very hard to write (hence the name), but it may not come to pass.
That's all I have today. I'm looking forward to catching up with my life in late May. In the meantime, this is in my head, even though fire season is at the opposite end of the year.
If I weren't restrained by deadlines, I might have tried to do something a lot more difficult with this story: create a narrative solely through [pages and pages of] disconnected sentences that represent the thoughts of a half-dozen or so characters. Instead I did a little of that in between three longer fragments (less than 1K apiece), and ran out of time/patience/other intangibles to go deeper and further with a truly shattered narrative. If I don't run out of time again, this true polyphony may be how I revise the story before the end of the semester. Dunno. Depends.
This morning on my run I listened to Lydia Davis read a story of her father's on the New Yorker fiction podcast. I continue to learn all kinds of useful what-I-am-definitely-not-as-writer-and-reader from listening to this podcast, and today was no exception. But the combination of Lydia Davis and the above paragraph makes me think I should read some of her work and try again on the true polyphony. She knows a shattered narrative better than anyone I can think of.
Spring break is next week, but two of three professors have piled on the work, so I think I may actually be busier than if I had to go to class. Two long books, a presentation, a lot of studying. I'd hoped to get started on the scary story, which will be very hard to write (hence the name), but it may not come to pass.
That's all I have today. I'm looking forward to catching up with my life in late May. In the meantime, this is in my head, even though fire season is at the opposite end of the year.
Friday, February 26, 2016
Rejecting Heartattack & Vine
What follows is a response I wrote to this piece, Manny Farber's "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art". My words originally appeared on a private blog related to one of my CSUN courses. I am a little in love with what I wrote, so I can't leave it there all alone.
--
In 2015, I lost all interest in contemporary film. It was an abrupt falling-off, from running through two or three Netflix discs a week to having the same three on our shelf for months on end. Part of the reason for this was how stubbornly film seemed to be turning into spectacle, like the circus, rather than crafted narrative, like the novel. I came to feel that aside from balletic new car stunts and Bruce Willis's gradual transformation into his Unbreakable character, few elements remained in new movie releases that could surprise me. Someone was going to save the cat. Someone was going to get the girl, despite the girl's being given a few token gestures toward a personality. Someone was going to crack wise and someone was going to say "Let's get out of here" and someone was going to run away from an explosion in slo-mo. This predictability made me ashamed of American film, and I retreated deeper into opera, literature, and bad films (which are always surprising). Though I miss the rapture of sitting in the darkened dream-room, I don't miss the spectacle.
It's all white elephant art at this point. Sometimes Tarantino will release a film, or the Coens, and I will go see it and be reminded that termite art exists. But usually not. Usually someone will say "Let's get out of here" and I will obey. We have returned, artistically, to classical Hollywood, "the past of heavily insured, enclosed film art" (to quote Farber), in the early millennium. I do not know why.
I don't know why television has become the new frontier, either. Breaking Bad is termite art. (It is not Antonioni, but it doesn't need to be difficult to be subversive.) A character arcing downward eats holes in what you think you know about narrative.
But what's going on in television is not new. Unpredictable, but not new. Serials were popular a hundred years ago, in early cinema. Podcasts are radio (Allen and Burns, Little Orphan Annie, The Shadow) rejiggered for new media. Everything old is new again.
This itself is termitesque. The moment you think there's something new about One Direction, an old fart comes along and shows you a NKOTB video. Or a Monkees clip. Art's repetition and remixing eats holes all through our culture, weakens our foundations - what we think we know about architecture - such that a single realization can collapse the whole structure. (So that we may rebuild again. Grind it up into sawdust and pack it into particleboard and rebuild again.) The structure is illusive, allusive, elusive. It's wood, not steel. Something organic and fragrant and noisy beneath our feet.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance undermines every single film John Ford had made about the West, every beautiful frame of Monument Valley he ever put to celluloid. It's as stunning a disillusionment now as it was in 1962, and I'm going to disagree with Farber and say that's not John Wayne's achievement at all. Wayne is the man he always was, with his passions and his derangements buried under swagger and drawl. It's Ford, showing his hand. Showing that he knows his life has been in service of illusion. That he knows, full well, that the dreams he made manifest on a nine-foot screen are white elephants, but that too much termite art would have broken him. Would break us. Would eat at us until we were mere sawdust and insect shit.
--
In 2015, I lost all interest in contemporary film. It was an abrupt falling-off, from running through two or three Netflix discs a week to having the same three on our shelf for months on end. Part of the reason for this was how stubbornly film seemed to be turning into spectacle, like the circus, rather than crafted narrative, like the novel. I came to feel that aside from balletic new car stunts and Bruce Willis's gradual transformation into his Unbreakable character, few elements remained in new movie releases that could surprise me. Someone was going to save the cat. Someone was going to get the girl, despite the girl's being given a few token gestures toward a personality. Someone was going to crack wise and someone was going to say "Let's get out of here" and someone was going to run away from an explosion in slo-mo. This predictability made me ashamed of American film, and I retreated deeper into opera, literature, and bad films (which are always surprising). Though I miss the rapture of sitting in the darkened dream-room, I don't miss the spectacle.
It's all white elephant art at this point. Sometimes Tarantino will release a film, or the Coens, and I will go see it and be reminded that termite art exists. But usually not. Usually someone will say "Let's get out of here" and I will obey. We have returned, artistically, to classical Hollywood, "the past of heavily insured, enclosed film art" (to quote Farber), in the early millennium. I do not know why.
I don't know why television has become the new frontier, either. Breaking Bad is termite art. (It is not Antonioni, but it doesn't need to be difficult to be subversive.) A character arcing downward eats holes in what you think you know about narrative.
But what's going on in television is not new. Unpredictable, but not new. Serials were popular a hundred years ago, in early cinema. Podcasts are radio (Allen and Burns, Little Orphan Annie, The Shadow) rejiggered for new media. Everything old is new again.
This itself is termitesque. The moment you think there's something new about One Direction, an old fart comes along and shows you a NKOTB video. Or a Monkees clip. Art's repetition and remixing eats holes all through our culture, weakens our foundations - what we think we know about architecture - such that a single realization can collapse the whole structure. (So that we may rebuild again. Grind it up into sawdust and pack it into particleboard and rebuild again.) The structure is illusive, allusive, elusive. It's wood, not steel. Something organic and fragrant and noisy beneath our feet.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance undermines every single film John Ford had made about the West, every beautiful frame of Monument Valley he ever put to celluloid. It's as stunning a disillusionment now as it was in 1962, and I'm going to disagree with Farber and say that's not John Wayne's achievement at all. Wayne is the man he always was, with his passions and his derangements buried under swagger and drawl. It's Ford, showing his hand. Showing that he knows his life has been in service of illusion. That he knows, full well, that the dreams he made manifest on a nine-foot screen are white elephants, but that too much termite art would have broken him. Would break us. Would eat at us until we were mere sawdust and insect shit.
Thursday, February 18, 2016
Done, But Nowhere Near Done
Oh yes, it's true, TMZ told you right. I finished the draft of the secret project. On Tuesday in the late afternoon. There are now twelve stories.
There's miles to go before I sleep, to be sure. All the stories need revising, and I think some or even half need wholesale rewriting. But now that I've finished them all, I can type them, and have a better look at what kind of animal I'm dealing with.
Meanwhile, I'm doing good work in my creative classes. The exercises are loosening up my muscles nicely, and are helping me write more often and get more accustomed to the feeling of doing it a little bit at a time. Yet I'm still in a pickle-brine of indecision about my final story for each class. I have only one idea at the moment (and what it entails intimidates me), along with a whole lot of fragments that don't go together or are more suitable for essays. There need to be two stories, so I'll have to come up with another idea soon.
If you're wondering why I don't just put these two hands together and bring in one of the secret project stories to one of the classes, I might. One class doesn't allow novel excerpts, per the syllabus, and the other class's content has nothing at all to do with what the secret project's up to, and it's required that the final story engage with the class content. So I may not have a choice.
Otherwise, school is...discouraging. Class time is not bringing out the best in me. One of the classes is very heavily political, and I am not coping well. Two of the classes utterly contradict each other in method - one encourages literary analysis of the material, while the other insists against it - and they meet on the same day. I have made a fool of myself more than once in a third class (for instance, I mis-explained spoonerisms, because of something random I knew about Ringo Starr) and am almost resigned to just saying nothing in there for the next fourteen weeks.
It's not all bad. Part of the reason I decided to start grad school instead of fumbling along on my own is that I thought the structure of regular classes would do me good, and three years in, I seem to have been right. The structure is making me happy, and giving my life a spine.
I'll leave you with a[n unedited] bit of the twelfth story. I wanted to write like Jesmyn Ward at the end of Salvage the Bones. I don't know if I did, but I tried hard.
 |
| CraaaAAAAP |
There's miles to go before I sleep, to be sure. All the stories need revising, and I think some or even half need wholesale rewriting. But now that I've finished them all, I can type them, and have a better look at what kind of animal I'm dealing with.
Meanwhile, I'm doing good work in my creative classes. The exercises are loosening up my muscles nicely, and are helping me write more often and get more accustomed to the feeling of doing it a little bit at a time. Yet I'm still in a pickle-brine of indecision about my final story for each class. I have only one idea at the moment (and what it entails intimidates me), along with a whole lot of fragments that don't go together or are more suitable for essays. There need to be two stories, so I'll have to come up with another idea soon.
If you're wondering why I don't just put these two hands together and bring in one of the secret project stories to one of the classes, I might. One class doesn't allow novel excerpts, per the syllabus, and the other class's content has nothing at all to do with what the secret project's up to, and it's required that the final story engage with the class content. So I may not have a choice.
Otherwise, school is...discouraging. Class time is not bringing out the best in me. One of the classes is very heavily political, and I am not coping well. Two of the classes utterly contradict each other in method - one encourages literary analysis of the material, while the other insists against it - and they meet on the same day. I have made a fool of myself more than once in a third class (for instance, I mis-explained spoonerisms, because of something random I knew about Ringo Starr) and am almost resigned to just saying nothing in there for the next fourteen weeks.
It's not all bad. Part of the reason I decided to start grad school instead of fumbling along on my own is that I thought the structure of regular classes would do me good, and three years in, I seem to have been right. The structure is making me happy, and giving my life a spine.
I'll leave you with a[n unedited] bit of the twelfth story. I wanted to write like Jesmyn Ward at the end of Salvage the Bones. I don't know if I did, but I tried hard.
They sing for me.
The past, too, is slippery. Here, as it moves before me, I capitulate to its colors and textures, but nothing is how I remember it. As if what I see is someone else's story of me, and Corisande is not a real creature. As if she is a whole invention, forgotten further and further each moment, and what lingers here on the sand is the memory.
The earth moves. The tide turns. The light fades, and a thousand thousand living things surrender the capsules of flesh that carried them.
I want her to see me again.
Monday, February 1, 2016
Juice to Spare
It's Sunday night as I'm writing this, and I've had such a productive weekend that I don't want to pack it in and watch Rifftrax in bed like usual. I want to read some more, or write some more.
I did almost all of my homework for the coming week: I read an entire prose poetry book, I read Gertrude Stein and Deleuze/Guattari and Susan Sontag (though I think I barely understood the first two), I wrote two blog posts for one class and invented a neologism for another, I read Kafka's Metamorphosis for the first time since high school, I read a chapter of a linguistics book, and I wrote one-third of a little experimental story. Woo! That's so much that I should be tired, on Sunday night, but it's only week one of the semester, so I have juice to spare.
I also wrote a wee bit of the secret project, and read some of it out loud to Matt. That was pretty exciting. I have had trouble with the idea of sharing this, and with the idea of not sharing it. It feels like a lonely project, but rightfully so; I know it's very unpolished; and the segments of it I've sent to friends have been roundly ignored. This last could be coincidence (busy lives, etc.) but it's possible that it's actually that unpolished and I have kind friends who would rather say nothing. Reading this bit out to Matt felt so necessary, felt like a letting-in (that is, letting him in to the project, letting anyone have a foot in the door to it) that I needed to do in order to continue. When I was finished, he looked at me and gestured go on, but that was all I'd written so far, which I told him, and he made a sad face. I think that's a good sign.
The little experiment is with the idea of a sestina, which is CRAZY, did you know that?
Fitting words into such mathematically precise boxes sounds impossible to me, though I do understand how restriction can lead to a more interesting project and product. I am no poet, so I'm interpreting the form as loosely as possible, doing six prose sections with connecting narratives and repeating, at the close of each section, slight variations on a Biblical phrase that I haven't been able to get out of my mind for months now. So far it's interesting but not amazing, though I've got a ridiculously small word limit here and I look forward to trying this again elsewhere, with more room and characters who matter more to me.
Unrelated: I think that Magnolia may be a nontraditional sestina.
I looked through my notebook and I have a bunch of different ways to go in terms of creative writing over the next few months. Two of my classes will require a finished story. I have one idea that I think is very good, and which could probably work for either class, but I'm not quite sure how to start. I have other concept-ideas that need content. I have an essay simmering so hard that it's leaking steam and sizzling up the stove, but that won't do for either class, since it's not fiction and can't be disguised as such. One of the classes allows novel excerpts, but I don't really see how I can incorporate one of the secret project's stories with the course content, even if I do [re]write the whole story during the semester (which would only be fair).
I also need to get on submitting. Now that "The First Snow" has failed to win a short story contest in which I entered it, I need to look at it again and get it out. (It's so generic, in a way, so suitable for a variety of markets, that I'm not sure where to go with it first.) The Kathy Ireland story has to start going out, too, though I have one market specifically in mind for it that's not open now. And I need to gussy up this really difficult thing I wrote and start sending it, because if I wait until I feel ready to send it out, I never will be, and so it has to go. The difficult thing needs a title, though, because the current title sucks. Anyone got a title they're not using? Weird suggestions considered.
Did that read like bookkeeping, the last two paragraphs? Too dry? I'm sorry, if so. I'll get back to topics when my work gets a little more rhythmic.
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
Is There an Antibiotic for Perfectionism?
The internet and I aren't getting along lately. I snap at it, and it snaps back, harder. I expect too much of it, and it disappoints me. I keep crawling back, like a fool, because I need it, but what I need more is to separate our work relationship from our emotional relationship and put all my efforts into the former. This process continues, haltingly, hurtfully.
I've had middling luck with books lately. I was galloping along through two a week, or thereabouts, and then I read half of an uninteresting one and screeched to a halt. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I started Between the World and Me, which is quite short, but which I still haven't finished. I keep taking deep breaths between paragraphs, and I have quit a little over halfway through and can't seem to start again. Not just because of the subject matter, and the emotional difficulty wrought by my various histories held next to it, but because the writing is brilliant.
There's such a difference between good writing and full-on brilliant writing, and I always forget it until I am faced with the latter. Like an incandescent lamp (beautiful) against the morning sun (staggering). It's too much to take in quickly. The book, in multiple ways, is itself too much. Too painful, too many ideas too challenging to confront, too beautiful, too angry-making, too heartfelt, too guilt-inducing, too bright a star. I think this is part of the point, to overwhelm me, but that doesn't make it easier to read.
I've made an attempt to write every day, per my New Year's resolution, but I've written in six of 26 days in January. That is failure in any jurisdiction. I examined my failure this morning and came to a terrible conclusion: I don't want to finish the Ceremonials project.
In doing the math, I found that I could be done with a draft in maybe two or three weeks if I wrote a half-hour every day. I couldn't believe it, that this thing I've been putting off and chewing on and figuring out for going on two years could be over so quickly if I just sat down at the notebook for a ridiculously small amount of time each day (much less time than I waste onmy abusive boyfriend the internet), but no matter how I rejiggered the numbers, the math came out the same. I did this math six days ago, and in those six days I wrote zero times.
This is an upsetting habit I've developed in the last few years: stopping right before the finish line. I do it at work, at school, at home, everywhere. From laundry to research papers. It's when I'm almost done, when the remaining work is goddamn negligible, that I feel the strongest urge to quit. This was not my work pattern when I was younger, not in my secondary school years nor in my college years nor in my twenties. I think it's some kind of adaptive mutation of that old foe perfectionism, but I don't know how to stamp it out. MRSA defeats state-of-the-art hospital environments, after all.
Because I could be done in less than a month, could start on what I consider (this time) the exciting work of rewriting most of what I've written, and I'm remembering every day that I'm supposed to write every day, and I'm still not goddamn doing it, the only conclusion I can come to is that I don't want to finish. When that thought shot through my mind, I immediately agreed with it.
I think it's because I've put a lot of feelings into the success of this project, even though what constitutes that success is self-defined. If I finish, I might look back and find that I have not succeeded. If it's unfinished, I don't have this problem.
Yeah, that's perfectionism, all right. Shitballs.
In other news, school starts today. I think I've bitten off more than I can chew - three classes - but I have pretty much never regretted doing so. I'm off to explore.
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| Isn't this beautiful? I look at this picture when the internet beats me up and I feel sad. I'm one of those little lights on the other side of the mountain. Click to embiggen. |
I've had middling luck with books lately. I was galloping along through two a week, or thereabouts, and then I read half of an uninteresting one and screeched to a halt. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I started Between the World and Me, which is quite short, but which I still haven't finished. I keep taking deep breaths between paragraphs, and I have quit a little over halfway through and can't seem to start again. Not just because of the subject matter, and the emotional difficulty wrought by my various histories held next to it, but because the writing is brilliant.
There's such a difference between good writing and full-on brilliant writing, and I always forget it until I am faced with the latter. Like an incandescent lamp (beautiful) against the morning sun (staggering). It's too much to take in quickly. The book, in multiple ways, is itself too much. Too painful, too many ideas too challenging to confront, too beautiful, too angry-making, too heartfelt, too guilt-inducing, too bright a star. I think this is part of the point, to overwhelm me, but that doesn't make it easier to read.
I've made an attempt to write every day, per my New Year's resolution, but I've written in six of 26 days in January. That is failure in any jurisdiction. I examined my failure this morning and came to a terrible conclusion: I don't want to finish the Ceremonials project.
In doing the math, I found that I could be done with a draft in maybe two or three weeks if I wrote a half-hour every day. I couldn't believe it, that this thing I've been putting off and chewing on and figuring out for going on two years could be over so quickly if I just sat down at the notebook for a ridiculously small amount of time each day (much less time than I waste on
This is an upsetting habit I've developed in the last few years: stopping right before the finish line. I do it at work, at school, at home, everywhere. From laundry to research papers. It's when I'm almost done, when the remaining work is goddamn negligible, that I feel the strongest urge to quit. This was not my work pattern when I was younger, not in my secondary school years nor in my college years nor in my twenties. I think it's some kind of adaptive mutation of that old foe perfectionism, but I don't know how to stamp it out. MRSA defeats state-of-the-art hospital environments, after all.
Because I could be done in less than a month, could start on what I consider (this time) the exciting work of rewriting most of what I've written, and I'm remembering every day that I'm supposed to write every day, and I'm still not goddamn doing it, the only conclusion I can come to is that I don't want to finish. When that thought shot through my mind, I immediately agreed with it.
I think it's because I've put a lot of feelings into the success of this project, even though what constitutes that success is self-defined. If I finish, I might look back and find that I have not succeeded. If it's unfinished, I don't have this problem.
Yeah, that's perfectionism, all right. Shitballs.
In other news, school starts today. I think I've bitten off more than I can chew - three classes - but I have pretty much never regretted doing so. I'm off to explore.
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
A Postmodern Poetics Offers More Questions than Answers
Submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society: part of the culminating poetics paper I wrote for my workshop class last semester. These poetics papers are a critical assignment for this professor, with whom I've now taken two classes; she keeps complimenting me on them, but all they do is tread the same ground I've been walking in this blog for years. I have lots of practice writing about my writing.
The most recent paper came out somewhat differently, and I've been thinking of posting it here for weeks. It seems to belong here, even if a lot of the context around it is missing. Since I haven't gathered my thoughts on writing very well recently (I'm okay, I just keep butting up against bad timing and other things to occupy me), here it is.
--
Rachel Blau DuPlessis says a poetics gives us permission to continue. The 38 women in that workshop in Ojai: many if not most needed permission. They needed to be told that they deserved to take up space, that their stories were worth hearing, that they were loved, that their voices were beautiful. I did not need to hear any of this. I do not need permission to continue. I am continuing; it’s not a matter of deserve or desire. It is. Like the sunrise. Like the smog.
Filmmaker --> writer. That’s how I see my progression. My poetics was once obsessive recordation of eyelines, “was verbing” to give the sense of the reader having walked in on a scene, blocking, incessant narration from over the shoulder of the narrator. Film is how I learned to see, and seeing is how I thought writing worked. So for years I mashed the two together, film and language, and nothing I wrote was good.
Now I am interested in Woolfian and Proustian and Faulknerian sentences, and the infinite variety of English syntax, but I don’t know if I integrate a genuine philosophy of language into what I write. The Ceremonials project might help me to answer that. In the meantime, I listen. Carefully.
That goes for the conversation I want to have with other writers. I am not interested in political writing, except for the personal being political. I am not interested in the Great American Novel, or in experimentalism that is mainly, in one professor’s word, peacockery. I am interested in placing my work in a tradition, but I’m befuddled by what that tradition is, whether it is the Biblical and Roman and Greek stories that informed the entire Western canon until the mid-twentieth century, or…not. I really do think it’s a problem of American writers of this age, that we/they have no foundation from which to work, no agony of Bloomian influence. Should I get myself a classical education? Should I call the strange twentieth century itself my bedrock?
I am listening for an answer. I read and I listen. But there is no baritone note beneath so much contemporary American writing, no might that feels as elemental as Melville or Faulkner or even (George) Eliot.
We Americans, we are orphans. That’s fortunate, as I, a military daughter, am an orphan of place.
I’ve just reread my first strike at this poetics paper. I like it well enough. I wrote about film and language being my weft and warp (the linen is my life); later I found these words in What Our Speech Disrupts [my professor's book about writing]. The chapter on poetics convinced me to take the longer view in this essay instead.
Let me restate that permission to continue is not what I require. A dim understanding of what I do well and what I do better hampers me, often. Truth, and what is for me a maddening liminal space between nonfiction and fiction, is almost certainly my triggering subject, although I have not yet satisfactorily written about it in nine damn years.
I thought I wanted to write about pop culture, but I’m not sure of that anymore. Only inasmuch as John Haskell does, I suppose. I write probably too much about violence against women, and I doubt that will change. Hamlet is sewn into my synapses. Do I possess a missing Derridean center in the place where literary tradition ought to be?
The most recent paper came out somewhat differently, and I've been thinking of posting it here for weeks. It seems to belong here, even if a lot of the context around it is missing. Since I haven't gathered my thoughts on writing very well recently (I'm okay, I just keep butting up against bad timing and other things to occupy me), here it is.
--
Rachel Blau DuPlessis says a poetics gives us permission to continue. The 38 women in that workshop in Ojai: many if not most needed permission. They needed to be told that they deserved to take up space, that their stories were worth hearing, that they were loved, that their voices were beautiful. I did not need to hear any of this. I do not need permission to continue. I am continuing; it’s not a matter of deserve or desire. It is. Like the sunrise. Like the smog.
*
Filmmaker --> writer. That’s how I see my progression. My poetics was once obsessive recordation of eyelines, “was verbing” to give the sense of the reader having walked in on a scene, blocking, incessant narration from over the shoulder of the narrator. Film is how I learned to see, and seeing is how I thought writing worked. So for years I mashed the two together, film and language, and nothing I wrote was good.
Now I am interested in Woolfian and Proustian and Faulknerian sentences, and the infinite variety of English syntax, but I don’t know if I integrate a genuine philosophy of language into what I write. The Ceremonials project might help me to answer that. In the meantime, I listen. Carefully.
That goes for the conversation I want to have with other writers. I am not interested in political writing, except for the personal being political. I am not interested in the Great American Novel, or in experimentalism that is mainly, in one professor’s word, peacockery. I am interested in placing my work in a tradition, but I’m befuddled by what that tradition is, whether it is the Biblical and Roman and Greek stories that informed the entire Western canon until the mid-twentieth century, or…not. I really do think it’s a problem of American writers of this age, that we/they have no foundation from which to work, no agony of Bloomian influence. Should I get myself a classical education? Should I call the strange twentieth century itself my bedrock?
I am listening for an answer. I read and I listen. But there is no baritone note beneath so much contemporary American writing, no might that feels as elemental as Melville or Faulkner or even (George) Eliot.
We Americans, we are orphans. That’s fortunate, as I, a military daughter, am an orphan of place.
*
I’ve just reread my first strike at this poetics paper. I like it well enough. I wrote about film and language being my weft and warp (the linen is my life); later I found these words in What Our Speech Disrupts [my professor's book about writing]. The chapter on poetics convinced me to take the longer view in this essay instead.
Let me restate that permission to continue is not what I require. A dim understanding of what I do well and what I do better hampers me, often. Truth, and what is for me a maddening liminal space between nonfiction and fiction, is almost certainly my triggering subject, although I have not yet satisfactorily written about it in nine damn years.
I thought I wanted to write about pop culture, but I’m not sure of that anymore. Only inasmuch as John Haskell does, I suppose. I write probably too much about violence against women, and I doubt that will change. Hamlet is sewn into my synapses. Do I possess a missing Derridean center in the place where literary tradition ought to be?
Tuesday, December 8, 2015
Things I Plan to Do Starting Today
My semester is effectively over as of last night. So, a list.
1. Clean. Up. The. Apartment.
2. Subsequently, invite at least two pairs of friends over.
3. Make the greatest white chili ever.
4. Empty the bathroom closet of expired medicines and tubes of hardened unguents and bath salts never to be used.
5. Doze off on the couch while Matt plays video games.
6. Make Yes videos.
7. Start working on my New Year's resolutions.
8. Write letters by hand.
9. Revise some work I did this semester. Write out a theory of contemporary American fiction I thought of.
10. Read the following books:
a. Big Magic - Elizabeth Gilbert
b. Hopscotch - Julio Cortazar
c. The Argonauts - Maggie Nelson
d. The latest Tana French
e. The Marlon James book that won the Booker
f. At least one David Shields, maybe two
g. An Elena Ferrante
h. A book of poetry. Grace Paley?
i. Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov (but I might put it off for yet another season)
j. Cities of the Plain - Marcel Proust
Oh, it's going to be a terrific couple of months. Until I find out whether there will be school in February. I don't promise that I will do all ten things and read all ten books. But I honestly feel like now that this class is over, I'll have time to do anything, up to and including climbing Kilimanjaro.
1. Clean. Up. The. Apartment.
2. Subsequently, invite at least two pairs of friends over.
3. Make the greatest white chili ever.
4. Empty the bathroom closet of expired medicines and tubes of hardened unguents and bath salts never to be used.
5. Doze off on the couch while Matt plays video games.
6. Make Yes videos.
7. Start working on my New Year's resolutions.
8. Write letters by hand.
9. Revise some work I did this semester. Write out a theory of contemporary American fiction I thought of.
10. Read the following books:
a. Big Magic - Elizabeth Gilbert
b. Hopscotch - Julio Cortazar
c. The Argonauts - Maggie Nelson
d. The latest Tana French
e. The Marlon James book that won the Booker
f. At least one David Shields, maybe two
g. An Elena Ferrante
h. A book of poetry. Grace Paley?
i. Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov (but I might put it off for yet another season)
j. Cities of the Plain - Marcel Proust
Oh, it's going to be a terrific couple of months. Until I find out whether there will be school in February. I don't promise that I will do all ten things and read all ten books. But I honestly feel like now that this class is over, I'll have time to do anything, up to and including climbing Kilimanjaro.
Tuesday, December 1, 2015
Blood Clots
A couple of weeks ago I bought a $5 hematite bracelet from a hippie shop in Pasadena. I was drawn to it because its color, gray-black, was more appealing than any of the other colors on the t-shaped rack of beaded bracelets. The little crystals guide next to the rack said that one of hematite's main qualities was engendering balance, and immediately I was not surprised that it called to me. I am a Libra through and through.
I've worn it a bunch since then and it has never felt right on my wrist. It's felt kind of bad, in fact, as if it's actively unhelpful. Maybe I got a dud. Maybe it's not really hematite. Maybe I shouldn't trust a $5 bracelet to solve my problems.
--
Last night as I was driving home, a plane high overhead seemed to shine its bright center light directly through my windshield. This happened twice: two planes, one from the west and one from the north. I believe they were both landing at Van Nuys.
I worried, for a moment, about those bright lights. They looked like helicopter lights, they were so bright, and I actually checked to see if I was speeding, as if an LAPD helicopter could ever, in any rational universe, come and hover over my going-no-more-than-five-miles-over-the-limit car and bray at me through a loudspeaker to pull over, ma'am.
The light was so direct, though. You, it said. You, right there. I'm looking for you.
Twice.
--
Joanna Newsom released a new album recently. I've only just gotten to it; I wanted to wait till I had the space to listen. And so I am. Listening. And I wish I hadn't waited.
She is a profoundly healing force for me, when I listen. Some brew of her mastery, her weirdness, her unsubstitutable femaleness, and...like...all the other stuff that gives her the nickname Crazy Harp Lady in our household just makes me feel like whatever I do, whatever I create, it's fine, totally fine, the world will want it. Because the world wants her.
--
I think I'm going to write a story backwards in the next two weeks. I don't know what's going to happen. I am frustrated by this subject matter - have tried it three ways, now - and I realized the other day that it's problematic because I don't really know where the tale begins. I know the consequences of the tale very, very well, but I do not know the source, because I have poor memories of childhood. Since I know the end but not the beginning, it occurred to me that writing backwards might suit the story better. We talked about this method in class not long ago; I think I need to write "ERASURE" at the top of every page to remind me.
While Joanna washed my cells I thought about a handful of the stories from my youth that I do remember well. Images that are iconic in helping me remember who my parents were (then) and how they shaped their identities for me. I wonder if I can put them all in a story that I'm also writing backwards and half-making up. Probably not. But they'll keep.
A silk skirt. Christmas lights. A small bear figurine.
I do not write enough about objects.
--
Did I mention this before? I might not be in school next semester. I haven't been able to sign up for the right number or type of classes. People keep pulling sad faces when I tell them this, but I'm not sad. I'm a little frustrated, because I just freakin' started the real thing after doing the preparatory thing for two freakin' years. But there are pages I want to write. There is silence I want to sit in my apartment and listen to. There are books I desperately want to read. I would not be sorry for a break, even if it mucks with my plans a little.
Ironically, though, this potentiality would give me more time to finish my MA, because I won't be so gung ho about fitting all 30 units into two years. I would get an extra semester's leeway. (This might not make sense to you, but it does to me.)
There is still hope that I'll get to do the classes I need/want. I'm balanced pleasantly between the two possibilities, waiting to see what happens with little stress or favor toward one fate or the other.
--
Balanced. That's what I said. The bracelet is cold and stiff.
I also bought a ring from Etsy that looks like a wing. A valkyrie wing on my fuck-you finger on my writing hand. Take that, hematite.
I've worn it a bunch since then and it has never felt right on my wrist. It's felt kind of bad, in fact, as if it's actively unhelpful. Maybe I got a dud. Maybe it's not really hematite. Maybe I shouldn't trust a $5 bracelet to solve my problems.
--
Last night as I was driving home, a plane high overhead seemed to shine its bright center light directly through my windshield. This happened twice: two planes, one from the west and one from the north. I believe they were both landing at Van Nuys.
I worried, for a moment, about those bright lights. They looked like helicopter lights, they were so bright, and I actually checked to see if I was speeding, as if an LAPD helicopter could ever, in any rational universe, come and hover over my going-no-more-than-five-miles-over-the-limit car and bray at me through a loudspeaker to pull over, ma'am.
The light was so direct, though. You, it said. You, right there. I'm looking for you.
Twice.
--
Joanna Newsom released a new album recently. I've only just gotten to it; I wanted to wait till I had the space to listen. And so I am. Listening. And I wish I hadn't waited.
She is a profoundly healing force for me, when I listen. Some brew of her mastery, her weirdness, her unsubstitutable femaleness, and...like...all the other stuff that gives her the nickname Crazy Harp Lady in our household just makes me feel like whatever I do, whatever I create, it's fine, totally fine, the world will want it. Because the world wants her.
--
I think I'm going to write a story backwards in the next two weeks. I don't know what's going to happen. I am frustrated by this subject matter - have tried it three ways, now - and I realized the other day that it's problematic because I don't really know where the tale begins. I know the consequences of the tale very, very well, but I do not know the source, because I have poor memories of childhood. Since I know the end but not the beginning, it occurred to me that writing backwards might suit the story better. We talked about this method in class not long ago; I think I need to write "ERASURE" at the top of every page to remind me.
While Joanna washed my cells I thought about a handful of the stories from my youth that I do remember well. Images that are iconic in helping me remember who my parents were (then) and how they shaped their identities for me. I wonder if I can put them all in a story that I'm also writing backwards and half-making up. Probably not. But they'll keep.
A silk skirt. Christmas lights. A small bear figurine.
I do not write enough about objects.
--
Did I mention this before? I might not be in school next semester. I haven't been able to sign up for the right number or type of classes. People keep pulling sad faces when I tell them this, but I'm not sad. I'm a little frustrated, because I just freakin' started the real thing after doing the preparatory thing for two freakin' years. But there are pages I want to write. There is silence I want to sit in my apartment and listen to. There are books I desperately want to read. I would not be sorry for a break, even if it mucks with my plans a little.
Ironically, though, this potentiality would give me more time to finish my MA, because I won't be so gung ho about fitting all 30 units into two years. I would get an extra semester's leeway. (This might not make sense to you, but it does to me.)
There is still hope that I'll get to do the classes I need/want. I'm balanced pleasantly between the two possibilities, waiting to see what happens with little stress or favor toward one fate or the other.
--
Balanced. That's what I said. The bracelet is cold and stiff.
I also bought a ring from Etsy that looks like a wing. A valkyrie wing on my fuck-you finger on my writing hand. Take that, hematite.
Tuesday, November 24, 2015
The Mad Scientist at the Podium
By gum, I have SO much to say here. I got workshop news and Yes news and readin' news. I shouldn't've neglected this space for so long.
Let's start with the recent stuff, and maybe go backwards in future posts. Last Friday I gave a reading at CSUN, along with my poet colleague Khiem Nguyen, and I thought it went quite well. You can see video of two of the three stories I read on my YouTube channel, or you can just scroll down a bit.
The first video includes a little of the introduction the GRS leader, Freddy Garcia, wrote about me and then read. (The video cuts in a bit late, doesn't focus right away, and then cuts out the applause and the high-five I gave Freddy when I got to the podium.) He was so thoroughly complimentary that the first thing I could say when I got to the mike was "Holy shit." He said things about me being a mad scientist, Frankensteining genre in exciting ways, finding the wounds of the reader and tracing them without flinching. (I think.) It was amazing to hear those complimentary things about me together with stuff that I knew factually to be true.
Freddy and I are in a fiction class together this semester, and this makes me simultaneously very happy and very sad. I have a big friendcrush and a big writercrush on him, but he is near the end of his M.A. and I'm right at the beginning, so I think this is the first and last time we'll be working together. Also, he's a poet (a good one), and as I've told him, I do not understand poetry and I fail at writing it, so I don't know how much use I will ever be to him as a writer-friend. In any event, that's Freddy, speaking first, and then there's me. The story I read in this first video is "Shade," which you can find in Hobart right here.
By the way, you pronounce my name exactly like it looks, cold-iron, like you wouldn't want to iron your clothes with a cold iron. But it's not Freddy's fault that he didn't know that and I wasn't quick enough to correct him. (I go by Katharine Mason at CSUN because it's my legal name.)
Then I read a second story, "Infinite Space," which you can find nowhere but in this video, because it's racked up 15+ rejections. People kept telling me after I was finished reading that they didn't know why no one liked it, because they thought it was good. I think I see why after reading it and watching this video - it's kind of samey and it ranges without satisfying - but I like it enough as-is that I don't want to pull it to pieces and re-build.
I know these videos are a little hard to watch, with just my face surrounded by a pool of darkness, but the GRS readings always take place that way, the only light at the podium and the reader blind to the 20 or so people in the room. I like seeing people when reading, but it's kinder to do it this way, especially if this is the first public reading the reader has given, which is often the case.
Also, I feel that I look a little like a full-throated bullfrog, but that's all right. I read well, and that's the point. I read a third story, too, the Biff Tannen story, but Matt's phone ran out of juice so it is lost to history.
I really enjoyed doing this reading. I enjoy reading, in general. I get nervous ahead of time, but then it goes well, because I've loved reading aloud since I was a wee girl and have worked hard to be good at it, and then I am happy and can't wait for another opportunity to read to people. Hear that, universe? I'd love to read anytime you'd like me to.
Let's start with the recent stuff, and maybe go backwards in future posts. Last Friday I gave a reading at CSUN, along with my poet colleague Khiem Nguyen, and I thought it went quite well. You can see video of two of the three stories I read on my YouTube channel, or you can just scroll down a bit.
The first video includes a little of the introduction the GRS leader, Freddy Garcia, wrote about me and then read. (The video cuts in a bit late, doesn't focus right away, and then cuts out the applause and the high-five I gave Freddy when I got to the podium.) He was so thoroughly complimentary that the first thing I could say when I got to the mike was "Holy shit." He said things about me being a mad scientist, Frankensteining genre in exciting ways, finding the wounds of the reader and tracing them without flinching. (I think.) It was amazing to hear those complimentary things about me together with stuff that I knew factually to be true.
Freddy and I are in a fiction class together this semester, and this makes me simultaneously very happy and very sad. I have a big friendcrush and a big writercrush on him, but he is near the end of his M.A. and I'm right at the beginning, so I think this is the first and last time we'll be working together. Also, he's a poet (a good one), and as I've told him, I do not understand poetry and I fail at writing it, so I don't know how much use I will ever be to him as a writer-friend. In any event, that's Freddy, speaking first, and then there's me. The story I read in this first video is "Shade," which you can find in Hobart right here.
By the way, you pronounce my name exactly like it looks, cold-iron, like you wouldn't want to iron your clothes with a cold iron. But it's not Freddy's fault that he didn't know that and I wasn't quick enough to correct him. (I go by Katharine Mason at CSUN because it's my legal name.)
Then I read a second story, "Infinite Space," which you can find nowhere but in this video, because it's racked up 15+ rejections. People kept telling me after I was finished reading that they didn't know why no one liked it, because they thought it was good. I think I see why after reading it and watching this video - it's kind of samey and it ranges without satisfying - but I like it enough as-is that I don't want to pull it to pieces and re-build.
I know these videos are a little hard to watch, with just my face surrounded by a pool of darkness, but the GRS readings always take place that way, the only light at the podium and the reader blind to the 20 or so people in the room. I like seeing people when reading, but it's kinder to do it this way, especially if this is the first public reading the reader has given, which is often the case.
Also, I feel that I look a little like a full-throated bullfrog, but that's all right. I read well, and that's the point. I read a third story, too, the Biff Tannen story, but Matt's phone ran out of juice so it is lost to history.
I really enjoyed doing this reading. I enjoy reading, in general. I get nervous ahead of time, but then it goes well, because I've loved reading aloud since I was a wee girl and have worked hard to be good at it, and then I am happy and can't wait for another opportunity to read to people. Hear that, universe? I'd love to read anytime you'd like me to.
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
The Primordial Blobbery
Since we moved out of the 1970s in terms of the fiction syllabus provided to me this semester, a lot more light at the end of the tunnel has become visible. In three weeks, I read John Haskell's I Am Not Jackson Pollock, Dubravka Ugresic's Lend Me Your Character, and Karen Russell's St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. I loved all of them, for totally different reasons, and the first two gifted me with a plethora of ideas, and such an open-ended horizon, for what I can/want to write in the future.
That horizon will have to wait, though. School is not finished killing me.
Thing is, all the ideas dislodging from the soil and floating up and moving around, they're all interesting but unformed. I've taken notes, asked myself questions, created little tadpole blobs of associated words. I have a blob about Kathy Ireland, a blob about a specific memory of laughter, and a long essay-blob about my brain. I've done justice to none of these ideas and honestly, I don't even know what one of them means. They're blobs. They're not even really things yet.
There's a more shapely blob I've had in my head for about two years about Roland Barthes. It's not fiction, it's scholarly, and I'm not in any position to be advancing a scholarly idea like it in the format it deserves. But it won't let go, and I am wise enough to beware of the blob. It creeps. It leaps. It glides and slides.
The point of all this is that it's good that school is not finished killing me. I need time for these ideas to gestate, time for them to sink out of the primordial blobbery and solidify. I'm impatient to return to writing rather than schooling, but all things in their own time, I think. That's what I'm being told. Time is being given to me in different ways than I want it, but we don't get to choose how time works on us.
And the other point is that this is what school is good for. The laughter idea is going to be a big deal if it comes together the way I suspect, and it never would've floated up from the muck if not for what Dr. Chatterjee said when I was sitting in class on Monday night. I never would've read John Haskell and thought you mean I could just do this and call it a short story? if not for Dr. Haake's unusual method of creating a syllabus. Education is no small help.
Other news. I meant, but failed, to post on Sunday that it was St. Crispin's Day, and the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt. I mentioned this in my Your Friday Yes video, which I also did not post timely in this space.
So there's the video, and here's the St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry V. My original idea for last Friday's Yes was to read the whole speech into the webcam, and I think we can all be glad I came up with a different idea.
There's more to say, but I'm out of time. Natch.
That horizon will have to wait, though. School is not finished killing me.
Thing is, all the ideas dislodging from the soil and floating up and moving around, they're all interesting but unformed. I've taken notes, asked myself questions, created little tadpole blobs of associated words. I have a blob about Kathy Ireland, a blob about a specific memory of laughter, and a long essay-blob about my brain. I've done justice to none of these ideas and honestly, I don't even know what one of them means. They're blobs. They're not even really things yet.
There's a more shapely blob I've had in my head for about two years about Roland Barthes. It's not fiction, it's scholarly, and I'm not in any position to be advancing a scholarly idea like it in the format it deserves. But it won't let go, and I am wise enough to beware of the blob. It creeps. It leaps. It glides and slides.
The point of all this is that it's good that school is not finished killing me. I need time for these ideas to gestate, time for them to sink out of the primordial blobbery and solidify. I'm impatient to return to writing rather than schooling, but all things in their own time, I think. That's what I'm being told. Time is being given to me in different ways than I want it, but we don't get to choose how time works on us.
And the other point is that this is what school is good for. The laughter idea is going to be a big deal if it comes together the way I suspect, and it never would've floated up from the muck if not for what Dr. Chatterjee said when I was sitting in class on Monday night. I never would've read John Haskell and thought you mean I could just do this and call it a short story? if not for Dr. Haake's unusual method of creating a syllabus. Education is no small help.
Other news. I meant, but failed, to post on Sunday that it was St. Crispin's Day, and the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt. I mentioned this in my Your Friday Yes video, which I also did not post timely in this space.
So there's the video, and here's the St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry V. My original idea for last Friday's Yes was to read the whole speech into the webcam, and I think we can all be glad I came up with a different idea.
There's more to say, but I'm out of time. Natch.
Friday, October 2, 2015
Your Friday Yes: It's Just a Ride
I got pretty frustrated recording Your Friday Yes this week. I did a take I really liked, but it was 7.5 minutes long, was unkind about Jem and too revealing about work, and had weird color problems. I did another take that was ruined because a plant-killing squirrel kept dancing around on my balcony, taunting me, and I was so angry at the thing that I couldn't be appropriately lighthearted in the video. I did more takes that I screwed up for other reasons. I ended up with this one, which I like less than the 7.5-minute one, but which will do, and anyway by the time I was finished with it I was out of time to do any more.
Say yes to imperfect yes videos.
Another story to be workshopped is due in six days. I have about 200 words of it. My mental image of myself is of a Hanna Barbera cartoon character in deep trouble.
This is not to say that I've done no writing in the recent past. I wrote an essay last week that was serious business, something I'm quite proud of, but it's too short and probably way too personal to be workshopped. The story I have in mind shouldn't be a serious trial to write, but, natch, finding the time is going to be a challenge.
But hey, it's just a ride.
Say yes to imperfect yes videos.
Another story to be workshopped is due in six days. I have about 200 words of it. My mental image of myself is of a Hanna Barbera cartoon character in deep trouble.
This is not to say that I've done no writing in the recent past. I wrote an essay last week that was serious business, something I'm quite proud of, but it's too short and probably way too personal to be workshopped. The story I have in mind shouldn't be a serious trial to write, but, natch, finding the time is going to be a challenge.
But hey, it's just a ride.
Tuesday, September 22, 2015
Ceci N'est Pas une Blog Post
 |
| click to embiggen, but the clearly readable top text is the point (Calvin & Hobbes is obvs drawn by Bill Watterson, not me) |
The number of strategies I have in my pocket for when I can't sit down and pour out prose in a beautiful river continues to grow. One I learned about two years ago still fits extremely well with my personality: make a list. To-do lists are a daily part of my life (otherwise I forget everything), and incorporating them into creative work is useful, too. If you can't write a paragraph, you can write a list. I'm certain of it.
Like, for instance, today I can't write a blog post. And the reasons why fit conveniently into list form. This week's tasks:
- Get going on second story for workshop class
- Write response to yesterday's workshop of first story
- Put together facilitation for another student's story for next Monday
- Read Foucault
- Reread Lacan
- Write detailed, specific summary (like 2,000+ words) of Caleb Williams, which I hated
- Finish The Age of Wire and String, one of the most baffling books I've ever read (I see what he's up to, I'm pretty sure, but it's not a breezy read)
- Write comprehensible response to The Age of Wire and String
- Finish setting up new computer, a process which is alarmingly slow this time around
- Set up new webcam
- Do Friday's Yes video
- Complete and workshop second story
- Get back to the last two stories of the secret project before the spirit of them leaves me
- Write nine-page braided story (started, very curious to see where it goes) for Labor Day workshop homework (I don't think I can use it as the workshop story, for various reasons)
- Prepare detailed presentation on "the theories of Rubin, Irigaray, Cixous, and Kristeva" as applied to The Piano, which I've seen, but not in years (note: I have never read three of those theorists)
- Either throw large and fun St. Crispin's Day party, or ditch the idea
- Read three or four more experimental books
- Workshop other people's stories
- Do more Yes videos
- Live life, in there somewhere, like meals and vacuuming and sleep
I'm happy! I really am! Life is awesome and full of friends and good prose and bountiful ideas and joy! But still. Augh. I need to stop sleeping, maybe?
Friday, May 1, 2015
That Comfort in the Kitchen
Last Saturday I was in my kitchen, preparing lunch: beet wraps from this cookbook. (A version of the recipe using European measurement standards may be found here; translating it should not be difficult for American cooks and is worthwhile, if you don't want to buy the book. Which is a good and useful book, if, oh, just a little pretentious. Now, back to our story.) I've made the recipe a number of times before. It is not a small amount of trouble, because it has so many elements that must each be prepared individually - cook the quinoa, toast the walnuts, zest the orange, blitz the beets with the goat cheese (measuring all the while), grate the apple, slice the avocado. The resulting flavor combination is so unique, though, that I enjoy making it when I can manage to get all the ingredients together.
The prior week, I'd made a strange chilled borscht from this book, and I bought and boiled too many beets for the recipe. So I had some leftover cooked beets. I also had a whole package of unused herbed goat cheese from yet another recipe; I'd bought the right amount of bell peppers to roast, but twice as much goat cheese as I needed. This is how my kitchen often operates: I get the amounts wrong when I'm shopping, or I find when I'm on the point of making the dish that I should halve the recipe or we'll be eating weird borscht for weeks. This M.O. means that the following week I need to search my cookbooks or the internet for recipes that will use up last week's excesses. Never a dull evening.
So I had leftover beets and leftover goat cheese, but they were in different proportions than the recipe called for. I also had herbed goat cheese instead of plain. Also also, I didn't have any walnuts, nor any raisins, so I was using pecans and just going without raisins. My common practice for cooking quinoa is to use half vegetable broth (or chicken broth, whatever's on hand) and half water to cook it in, because it makes the quinoa more flavorful. When the recommended cooking time is over, I turn off the heat, drape a doubled dishtowel over the pot, and put a lid on top. I let it sit for 10 to 15 minutes or until I need to serve. This is a trick I learned from a rice pilaf recipe years ago, and it keeps the quinoa from being either soggy or undercooked. The beet wrap recipe calls for cooking the quinoa in plain water with no after-steaming.
I was considering all these changes with amusement as I was grating the apple (half an apple, I've found, is plenty), and a lightbulb went on over my head so brightly that Matt noticed, from the living room, where he was occupied with something else. I stood perfectly still and let the light penetrate every brain cell it could, and then I noticed Matt noticing me.
"You okay, there?" he said.
"Yeah," I said. "I just figured something out."
"I can see that," he said.
The prior week, I'd made a strange chilled borscht from this book, and I bought and boiled too many beets for the recipe. So I had some leftover cooked beets. I also had a whole package of unused herbed goat cheese from yet another recipe; I'd bought the right amount of bell peppers to roast, but twice as much goat cheese as I needed. This is how my kitchen often operates: I get the amounts wrong when I'm shopping, or I find when I'm on the point of making the dish that I should halve the recipe or we'll be eating weird borscht for weeks. This M.O. means that the following week I need to search my cookbooks or the internet for recipes that will use up last week's excesses. Never a dull evening.
 |
| I cannot read the caption on this and I badly want to |
So I had leftover beets and leftover goat cheese, but they were in different proportions than the recipe called for. I also had herbed goat cheese instead of plain. Also also, I didn't have any walnuts, nor any raisins, so I was using pecans and just going without raisins. My common practice for cooking quinoa is to use half vegetable broth (or chicken broth, whatever's on hand) and half water to cook it in, because it makes the quinoa more flavorful. When the recommended cooking time is over, I turn off the heat, drape a doubled dishtowel over the pot, and put a lid on top. I let it sit for 10 to 15 minutes or until I need to serve. This is a trick I learned from a rice pilaf recipe years ago, and it keeps the quinoa from being either soggy or undercooked. The beet wrap recipe calls for cooking the quinoa in plain water with no after-steaming.
I was considering all these changes with amusement as I was grating the apple (half an apple, I've found, is plenty), and a lightbulb went on over my head so brightly that Matt noticed, from the living room, where he was occupied with something else. I stood perfectly still and let the light penetrate every brain cell it could, and then I noticed Matt noticing me.
"You okay, there?" he said.
"Yeah," I said. "I just figured something out."
"I can see that," he said.
Thursday, April 16, 2015
The Cleanest, Ripest, Prettiest Banana
I wrote part of a post about precision, and part of a potpourri post, but what's really foremost in my mind right now is Virginia Woolf, so please allow me to write about that and let's see what happens.
My class this semester is British Modernism, so we're studying Woolf and Joyce and Eliot and a couple others. A few years before World War I, right in the middle of the Modernist period, an Italian artist named Marinetti introduced an idea called Futurism (which bears no relation to futurists you hear about giving TED talks or working for Google). Immediately before the war, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound introduced an idea called Vorticism. These two strains of Modernism are sort of opposed to each other, and in order to learn about them more thoroughly, our professor has set up a role-playing game to take place over the next week and a half, a literary salon in which various points of view will make themselves known. Real individuals - Eliot, Pound, Marinetti, etc. - are portrayed by students in this game, and more general groups of people are represented as well: New Women, book publishers, Welsh miners. The salon takes place in mid-1914 in London and is hosted by Virginia Woolf (who, in life, spent much of 1914 in the grip of a terrible mental breakdown, but anachronisms abound in this game).
I think this is wonderful. I think this is the best idea for helping us learn that I've encountered in a long while. I don't care much for either Futurism or Vorticism, but I'm really looking forward to the game, which starts today.
But did I mention I was given the role of Virginia Woolf?
I don't exactly know what my responsibilities entail, but I can tell from the game materials that they're different than those of the other personalities in the game. I can also tell that the other students think I've been singled out, somehow. I feel singled out. I feel like the professor publicly named me the smartest person in the class. (It may not seem that way out there in radioland, but the context of the class is largely what gives me this impression.) It makes me feel two sensations in equal measure: strutting peacocky pride and enormous discomfort.
This mix of emotions is not unfamiliar. It's how I feel about the upcoming magazine release and reading, and it's often how I feel (in smaller measures) when I get compliments. When I work hard, I'm aware that I worked hard, and I take pride in people recognizing it. But I also feel squirmy about the idea that other people are noticing that I did something good, or - as in this case - that other people are noticing that I've been picked, like a banana from the bunch, for something good. I'm proud that I was the cleanest or ripest or prettiest banana, but I also wonder if maybe some of the other bananas weren't going to be better for the job. What if I'm not so ripe after all?
The metaphor's going south a bit, but the point is, if more people than just me are aware of something I did that was worthy of recognition, I'm going to look all the stupider if I fail or fuck up. Impostor syndrome is only sometimes a problem for me, but fear of failure is powerful bad juju. The voice in my head as I've been preparing for this game over the last couple of weeks is straight-up Tweek from South Park, "Agh! Too much pressure!"
And I know it isn't, that it's all going to be over in like two weeks and no one will remember or care what went on and I'll get a B at worst and everything will be fine. But I still feel like something big is expected from me because the professor's put me in the shoes of one of the great writers of the 20th century, one of the great feminist thinkers of all time, a writer she fairly gushed about when we were reading To the Lighthouse last month. The pride kicks in and I feel like being Woolf (for three days) suits me, and then I feel like an inadequate, arrogant jerk for even thinking that she suits me because see the last sentence, and then I feel like, well, I didn't trick the professor into thinking I'm something I'm not, and then I feel like, oh God, how am I going to be Woolf for three whole days without doing something dumb or off-key? And simultaneously I'm kind of shifting in my seat because everybody knows that I (probably) didn't trick her.
All of this seesawing, I'm feeling it all keenly this morning, getting ready to dress up in my Woolf costume and head off to school with my fountain pen and reasonably period-appropriate notebook. It's comforting that Woolf herself was sort of an emotional mess, no matter how controlled and crystalline her writing was.
Oh, I guess I forgot to add that we get extra points for cosplaying. Yes, this game is serious fun. Wish me luck.
My class this semester is British Modernism, so we're studying Woolf and Joyce and Eliot and a couple others. A few years before World War I, right in the middle of the Modernist period, an Italian artist named Marinetti introduced an idea called Futurism (which bears no relation to futurists you hear about giving TED talks or working for Google). Immediately before the war, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound introduced an idea called Vorticism. These two strains of Modernism are sort of opposed to each other, and in order to learn about them more thoroughly, our professor has set up a role-playing game to take place over the next week and a half, a literary salon in which various points of view will make themselves known. Real individuals - Eliot, Pound, Marinetti, etc. - are portrayed by students in this game, and more general groups of people are represented as well: New Women, book publishers, Welsh miners. The salon takes place in mid-1914 in London and is hosted by Virginia Woolf (who, in life, spent much of 1914 in the grip of a terrible mental breakdown, but anachronisms abound in this game).
I think this is wonderful. I think this is the best idea for helping us learn that I've encountered in a long while. I don't care much for either Futurism or Vorticism, but I'm really looking forward to the game, which starts today.
But did I mention I was given the role of Virginia Woolf?
I don't exactly know what my responsibilities entail, but I can tell from the game materials that they're different than those of the other personalities in the game. I can also tell that the other students think I've been singled out, somehow. I feel singled out. I feel like the professor publicly named me the smartest person in the class. (It may not seem that way out there in radioland, but the context of the class is largely what gives me this impression.) It makes me feel two sensations in equal measure: strutting peacocky pride and enormous discomfort.
This mix of emotions is not unfamiliar. It's how I feel about the upcoming magazine release and reading, and it's often how I feel (in smaller measures) when I get compliments. When I work hard, I'm aware that I worked hard, and I take pride in people recognizing it. But I also feel squirmy about the idea that other people are noticing that I did something good, or - as in this case - that other people are noticing that I've been picked, like a banana from the bunch, for something good. I'm proud that I was the cleanest or ripest or prettiest banana, but I also wonder if maybe some of the other bananas weren't going to be better for the job. What if I'm not so ripe after all?
The metaphor's going south a bit, but the point is, if more people than just me are aware of something I did that was worthy of recognition, I'm going to look all the stupider if I fail or fuck up. Impostor syndrome is only sometimes a problem for me, but fear of failure is powerful bad juju. The voice in my head as I've been preparing for this game over the last couple of weeks is straight-up Tweek from South Park, "Agh! Too much pressure!"
 |
| I think my brain is Cartman in this scenario |
And I know it isn't, that it's all going to be over in like two weeks and no one will remember or care what went on and I'll get a B at worst and everything will be fine. But I still feel like something big is expected from me because the professor's put me in the shoes of one of the great writers of the 20th century, one of the great feminist thinkers of all time, a writer she fairly gushed about when we were reading To the Lighthouse last month. The pride kicks in and I feel like being Woolf (for three days) suits me, and then I feel like an inadequate, arrogant jerk for even thinking that she suits me because see the last sentence, and then I feel like, well, I didn't trick the professor into thinking I'm something I'm not, and then I feel like, oh God, how am I going to be Woolf for three whole days without doing something dumb or off-key? And simultaneously I'm kind of shifting in my seat because everybody knows that I (probably) didn't trick her.
All of this seesawing, I'm feeling it all keenly this morning, getting ready to dress up in my Woolf costume and head off to school with my fountain pen and reasonably period-appropriate notebook. It's comforting that Woolf herself was sort of an emotional mess, no matter how controlled and crystalline her writing was.
Oh, I guess I forgot to add that we get extra points for cosplaying. Yes, this game is serious fun. Wish me luck.
 |
| If you, too, want a beautiful handmade wood pen for a remarkably low price, visit PennTexPens on Etsy. The notebook I can't help you with; it was a gift. |
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
Getting Underwater
This is the truth: I'm not really enjoying the single class I'm taking this semester.
I've tried on several different explanations for size and have settled on two unrelated reasons. 1) The material is not engaging me really at all, in ways that are not the professor's or anyone else's fault. I liked studying Ulysses closely - the sensation was a series of reliefs (relieves?), an experience I might unpack in a later post - but it didn't really light up my brain. Our most recent read, To the Lighthouse, I found impenetrable (probably my own duncery there) and thus I did not enjoy studying it. It was like I'd come to class having read a completely different book than the one the professor discussed. Although I loved the first book we read, The Good Soldier, we really used it as an example for wider literary issues rather than reading deeply into the book itself, which disappointed me.
Merrily we roll along into The Waste Land, which I've read, and I liked the actual poem but found myself bored by what seems to be the point, which is all the allusions and notes and etc. And the latter is, I'm sure, what we're going to focus on in class.
2), just as crucially, I'm itchy to write and I want to be doing that instead. Between work and recovering from work and school and recovering from school and doing so many social things lately and keeping us in groceries and clean laundry, though, I'm having a hard time finding space for it. It's making me disgruntled and that's bleeding over into my experience of school.
I need to do better at elephant-eating. A hundred words a day, or something. But when I think about working that way, I think about my mom, and virtual reality.
When my mom is working, there's this effect of a satellite delay between when you speak to her and when she responds. "Hey, Mom?" [one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi, five Mississippi, six Mississippi] "Yes, honey?" She doesn't even necessarily look at you or stop typing when she responds; it just takes her that amount of time to come out of the fifteenth century and back into the present moment to recognize that someone has spoken and she's bound to reply. She's explained to me - although it didn't really need to be explained, because I've watched it happen - that she has to go through a definite process of disengaging to answer whatever it is that you need from her, and then it takes time to re-engage with the work before she's back where she was. Even an interruption like "Where's the extra soap?" or "Want another cup of coffee?" will lose many precious minutes for her.
She says it's like being underwater, like scuba-diving: all above the surface is dull and far away, and she'll get the bends if she comes up too fast. My own metaphor for this phenomenon is like The Matrix, or some cybermovie from the 1990s where people have to plug into the New-Fangled Information Superhighway with a complex set of gear - something over your eyes, fingers into stable gloves that don't move, ears and nose plugged, something down your throat, etc. Body horror machinery that you need an assistant to get into and out of. Not just a little plug in the back of your neck, and not quite as immersive as that gross red goo with a jillion wires where you live until Morpheus wakes you up: something in between. Disengagement takes time, and re-engagement takes time. It's a process, an effort, an upsetting bother.
When I'm really, totally inside my fiction writing, my immersion is as intense as my mother's. But it takes much more time than a satellite delay to get me inside that zone - over half an hour, easy. The process of plugging in is often so laborious that I buck at the idea of doing it just to write a few hundred words before I have to stop and meet an outside responsibility. Especially for the secret project, which is such a different kind of writing than what I've done before that I need 110% of my concentration to even do it.
I must learn how to overcome this, though, and write a little at a time. I must. That's how my life looks right now, that all I have is dribs and drabs of time, not chunks of it, and I need to be using them.
Sigh.
In book news, I read Middlemarch over the last four weeks. I totally loved it. It was a pleasure. Beneath its old-fashioned exterior is a pen of such strength and wit and insight that it blew my mind.
Middlemarch was also my Big Book for 2015, so that's out of the way. I'm thinking of one of those huge Russian novels for 2016, Anna Karenina or War and Peace or some such book. I've heard all good things about those novels and I even read about a third of Karenina at one time, but I just don't have a lot of interest or motivation regarding them as of yet. Meanwhile, it's shaping up that I'm going to read the other two volumes of Remembrance of Things Past over the next two summers. Three years of Proust! I wish I could have read it all at once, but this is an acceptable compromise.
Wish me luck at getting underwater in April. My self-imposed deadline is starting to look unrealistic. :(
I've tried on several different explanations for size and have settled on two unrelated reasons. 1) The material is not engaging me really at all, in ways that are not the professor's or anyone else's fault. I liked studying Ulysses closely - the sensation was a series of reliefs (relieves?), an experience I might unpack in a later post - but it didn't really light up my brain. Our most recent read, To the Lighthouse, I found impenetrable (probably my own duncery there) and thus I did not enjoy studying it. It was like I'd come to class having read a completely different book than the one the professor discussed. Although I loved the first book we read, The Good Soldier, we really used it as an example for wider literary issues rather than reading deeply into the book itself, which disappointed me.
Merrily we roll along into The Waste Land, which I've read, and I liked the actual poem but found myself bored by what seems to be the point, which is all the allusions and notes and etc. And the latter is, I'm sure, what we're going to focus on in class.
 |
| I think we can all agree this is beautiful, but pretty weird |
2), just as crucially, I'm itchy to write and I want to be doing that instead. Between work and recovering from work and school and recovering from school and doing so many social things lately and keeping us in groceries and clean laundry, though, I'm having a hard time finding space for it. It's making me disgruntled and that's bleeding over into my experience of school.
I need to do better at elephant-eating. A hundred words a day, or something. But when I think about working that way, I think about my mom, and virtual reality.
When my mom is working, there's this effect of a satellite delay between when you speak to her and when she responds. "Hey, Mom?" [one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi, five Mississippi, six Mississippi] "Yes, honey?" She doesn't even necessarily look at you or stop typing when she responds; it just takes her that amount of time to come out of the fifteenth century and back into the present moment to recognize that someone has spoken and she's bound to reply. She's explained to me - although it didn't really need to be explained, because I've watched it happen - that she has to go through a definite process of disengaging to answer whatever it is that you need from her, and then it takes time to re-engage with the work before she's back where she was. Even an interruption like "Where's the extra soap?" or "Want another cup of coffee?" will lose many precious minutes for her.
She says it's like being underwater, like scuba-diving: all above the surface is dull and far away, and she'll get the bends if she comes up too fast. My own metaphor for this phenomenon is like The Matrix, or some cybermovie from the 1990s where people have to plug into the New-Fangled Information Superhighway with a complex set of gear - something over your eyes, fingers into stable gloves that don't move, ears and nose plugged, something down your throat, etc. Body horror machinery that you need an assistant to get into and out of. Not just a little plug in the back of your neck, and not quite as immersive as that gross red goo with a jillion wires where you live until Morpheus wakes you up: something in between. Disengagement takes time, and re-engagement takes time. It's a process, an effort, an upsetting bother.
 |
| Pictured: my mom's metaphor mixed with mine. A.k.a. the cyber-dolphin from Johnny Mnemonic. |
When I'm really, totally inside my fiction writing, my immersion is as intense as my mother's. But it takes much more time than a satellite delay to get me inside that zone - over half an hour, easy. The process of plugging in is often so laborious that I buck at the idea of doing it just to write a few hundred words before I have to stop and meet an outside responsibility. Especially for the secret project, which is such a different kind of writing than what I've done before that I need 110% of my concentration to even do it.
I must learn how to overcome this, though, and write a little at a time. I must. That's how my life looks right now, that all I have is dribs and drabs of time, not chunks of it, and I need to be using them.
Sigh.
In book news, I read Middlemarch over the last four weeks. I totally loved it. It was a pleasure. Beneath its old-fashioned exterior is a pen of such strength and wit and insight that it blew my mind.
Middlemarch was also my Big Book for 2015, so that's out of the way. I'm thinking of one of those huge Russian novels for 2016, Anna Karenina or War and Peace or some such book. I've heard all good things about those novels and I even read about a third of Karenina at one time, but I just don't have a lot of interest or motivation regarding them as of yet. Meanwhile, it's shaping up that I'm going to read the other two volumes of Remembrance of Things Past over the next two summers. Three years of Proust! I wish I could have read it all at once, but this is an acceptable compromise.
Wish me luck at getting underwater in April. My self-imposed deadline is starting to look unrealistic. :(
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