November Poem

Every year or so I write a poem. I expect nothing from them, because I don't know a damn thing about the process of making poetry and so have no idea whether what I write is any good. But here's the one I wrote this week. I thought it was appropriate for the November holiday.

--

Bird Woman


having done no
research at all on
the subject, I
often think of
Sacagawea, alone with
a passel of white men for
mile after mile of
total wilderness, whether
they passed her around
as men do, whether
she was untouchable, too
valuable
to spoil like the land
they crashed through,
searching for the sea mile
after mile, her steps
quiet on the earth, along
for the journey, another
item on the manifest, whether
she hovers
above the ghosts of
trees she sheltered them under,
gone now, above
the mini-mall, her skin
untouched or not, whether
she helped them, whether
they helped themselves

Excess, Both Mine and Hearst's

So wow, this past weekend was interesting. I:

• read most of Go Down, Moses 
• wrote an entire story nearly from scratch - used some of the characters and a little of the premise from the Girl Scout story, but expanded and rethought so significantly that it's a whole separate story, and no part of the 2,500 words of it existed previously outside my head 
• wrote a prospectus for a final literary analysis paper, which might be total crap 
• read a couple of chapters of Intertextuality, by Graham Allen 
• read or skimmed about a dozen scholarly papers 
• chose twenty sentences from a writing exercise to cut up and put in an envelope together 
• attempted to comprehend Lacan 
• wished Matt happy trails on a short trip he's taking with his parents, on which I'm going along as of [checks watch] this morning, and 
• finished off season 4 of The X-Files in my continuing marathon. 

It was a weekend that played to my strengths as a postmodern thinker, but I was pretty close to insane by Sunday night.

I'm disgruntled with what I did on the Girl Scout story. A radical revision was mandatory, per the professor (I guess that'd make it a required, requisitioned radical revision), so I did one, but I'm pretty eh about what I came up with. It was easy to write and hard to revise - the exact opposite of the original version of the story. Isn't that interesting? (In a few weeks I might come back to this and unpack it, because it may be worth expanding upon in a longer post, but I'm seriously dying of schoolwork, so let's call this parenthetical a Post-It note for possible further thought later.)

I put myself into a different narrative position, and found that although I didn't mind telling the story inside a certain character's head, it wasn't at all the story that intrigued me about the situation. I didn't work especially hard in drafting it, and the results were not especially appealing, so the revision was a kind of hapless clean-up on something that doesn't have a lot of integrity. I don't have the time to make it worthy of me, and anyway it's work I did for a class assignment, not work I did because I thought I needed to write a better story. So, I met the requirements of the class, which is fine for this story at this moment. End of line.

Thanks to everyone for their responses to my poll of last Friday. As of this writing I have three friends and ten traitors in my life. Ha ha, no, I don't mean to call you traitors (you rotten traitors) but the poll's answers certainly exposed what I actually wanted to do with my December as opposed to what I probably need to do.

Classes are proceeding as normal tomorrow, but I won't be at them. I'll be here instead. I'm going to try and mentally set aside everything that still remains for me to do in terms of school until I get back, and wallow richly in the excess of others.

Yeah, no, this level of excess is tooooootally normal

Happy [early] Thanksgiving, everyone.

Post-Gluttony

So, Thanksgiving yesterday went like this:

1) Baked and ate frozen croissants. Yum.

2) Read Joan Didion's Blue Nights from beginning to end. If you choose to read this book, that's how I recommend reading it. It repeats itself and loops back on itself to such a great extent that it might not be necessary if you're a close reader, but you won't miss a thing if you read it all at once. I read Play It as It Lays some years ago and didn't enjoy it; I felt more ambivalence about Blue Nights, but it made me think, for sure.

3) Ate small lunch.

4) Went to see Cloud Atlas before it was completely gone from the theaters. The theater we went to, in Sherman Oaks, was not the nicest I've ever patronized, but it had balcony seating, in which I have always wanted to sit for a movie. And we did. And it was a hell of a movie. It was pretty much exactly what I hoped it would be, not an iota less.

5) [redacted]

6) Heated frozen turkey/stuffing/mashed potatoes. Ate. Drank weird orange/almond champagne and got happily tipsy.

7) Watched Starship Troopers for no particular reason. Cloud Atlas was better, but honestly, every time I see Troopers I'm reminded that it's a surprisingly good movie. Its tone is utterly masterful, walking a difficult fine line between the characters taking themselves seriously and the audience enjoying the movie unseriously.

And then I read some more, until it was time for bed. In sum, I spent the day precisely as I wished to, and it was heaven.

On Wednesday I decided to stop reading the Patrick Melrose novels after I finished the second one, Bad News. It was a chronicle of 48 hours of intense, terrifying drug abuse, and had, in my opinion, few redeeming qualities. I wanted to keep plugging until I hit Mother's Milk, the fourth, which was on the shortlist for the Booker, but I just can't. The first two books dulled my interest in reading and generally harshed my buzz, so I'm done for now. I might revisit them some other time.

Today I am NOT going out. I hate Black Friday. I have friends who love it, and yay for you guys, but I think it's harmful and absurd and I'm going to cower in my apartment and read instead. Peace out.

Just Eat the Dang Chocolate

Phew, that's over. The secret project is completed, and I am so happy to be able to stop worrying about it until the spring.

I went back and read the urn story on Monday. The first half isn't working, but the second half really, really is. I think the contrast is between a half where the narrating character interacts with another person, and a half where the narrating character is mostly inside her head. I put in the bit with the other character because the rules of writing told me I sort of had to, couldn't write a story that was all internal, but it so clearly isn't working that I'm wondering if I'm supposed to just stay internal for this one.

My plan is to write the beginning a few different ways and see what fits, although I haven't put my money where my mouth is in that regard just yet. I was thinking it over in my thinkin' chair and I began to wish that I had a sort of twin writer-companion. Someone 100% available whom I wouldn't feel bad about nagging on a regular basis, someone with whom I could knead out the whole stinking thing through all its drafts without guilt for taking him/her away from his/her own life. "Do you think this adjective is better than that one? What if I strayed from grammar here? Is the sardonic thing working or is it just weird?"

No one has that. I just have to do it on my own. I mean, I could audition people until I find the right one, and then kidnap her and keep her in my closet, feed her gruel until her spirit is broken and she accepts her new role as my revision slave.

It provides thoughtful commentary or else it gets the hose again.

But there are laws against that sort of thing and I suspect I'd feel even guiltier ruining her life than I do about asking my friends to read my work and get back to me when they feel like it.

Yet I seriously considered sending the draft at this stage to my miracle reader and asking him if I'm right that the first half isn't working. I've found in recent months that I am a pretty crummy judge of what qualifies as The Good Stuff in my own work. People tell me that stuff I tossed off and don't care to revisit is the stuff they remember; they tell me that a character I felt eh about moved them more than the one I am devoted to. So maybe the first half of the story is working and it's just not particularly what I like about the story.

I dunno.

The other problem is that when the urn story is finished, I'll have four literary stories that I'm sure are ready for submission, and only vague ideas of where to send them. I have two markets in mind, but my confidence is super-duper-low and my brain's playing this dumb game where I'll "ruin" the markets if I send them the work. It's the same old hoarding instinct: if I use up the market by sending it a story and I get rejected, which feels inevitable, then the possibility of that market is gone. I know intellectually that this is stupid and the only way to enjoy anything is to participate in it - i.e. eat and appreciate that delicious chocolate you were "saving" before it gets chalky and bad - but it's a very old emotional habit and hard to break.

I don't mean to gloat, but I am so happy not to be traveling during this Thanksgiving, or putting on uncomfortable shoes, or awkwardly answering questions about myself, that I could break into song. I love my adopted family very, very much, but I've never felt connected to Thanksgiving and would have been just as content to stay at home in my PJs and eat leftovers like we did when I was younger. And this year I get to. Although I did buy a frozen turkey-and-stuffing entree from Trader Joe's, and have to go out today to get gravy. That'll be fun and stress-free, I'm sure.