Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Telling Fiction
Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney fame is the lecturer before my workshop class tonight, so I’m definitely going to get there early to make sure I get a spot. She’ll be talking about writing, music and culture. I love how they just stuck this little gem in there for our colloquium.
I go to at least one lecture a week, but this week I’m also dying to hear the readings from The Apocalypse Reader, which includes a piece from Shelley Jackson. I’ve made a fuss about Miss Jackson (if you’re nasty) before, but not everyone knows of my affection for all things apocalicious (from a sociological and historical point of view, not that of a believer). I had started one piece that approached it from a certain angle last fall. It’s still a work in progress. My ideas remain firm… just had to step away. It started to inspire another piece, about David Duchovny (from the point of view of a believer). And then also a third, about Amelia Earhart’s opinion and philosophy of the end of the world. That might be as close as I get to a good exercise in fiction.
Writing for pleasure, like reading for pleasure, is taking a bit of a hiatus. It’s funny to me that now I separate things I do “for money” from that which is “my work” while before my work was for money and what I called my work went much farther (further?) than that. Now I take pleasure in finding work for money even when I rather not do it, helping for the sake of helping, and in general having long and lovely conversations with folks, so much more often than my previous Head Down in front of the Computer While Writing or Coding has ever allowed.
This past weekend I went to the fun, touching and dramatic wedding of my friend (and former workshop teacher) Rebecca. It was held at a ranch where we were able to take the place over to do whatever we felt like: ride horses, eat, be merry and get married. I met so many wonderful people, including writers and rock stars. The air was what I’d describe as warm, comfortable and generous, for the way everyone shared stories, ideas and general adorableness. It wasn’t just the endless food that left me feeling very happy and oddly nurtured. I think it was one of those rare times when I fall in love with everything at least little bit.
With a lingering sense of optimism in the face of busy normal New York lives, I hope to keep the friends I made. I know that after vacations we tell ourselves fictions, just like we do at New Years. I tell myself at least a little fiction every day, and sometimes it’s the wilder story that comes true, not the mundane. These are the ideas you have to keep in your head for a while, the words you try to say with a mouthfull of marbles. You master the mouthful, spit out the rest, and let the story flesh itself out.
Monday, October 01, 2007
The Salvation of Billy Wayne Carter
I am a week late announcing the news that my friend David M. Hornbuckle has published his novella The Salvation of Billy Wayne Carter, as an e-book. It’s a very entertaining story, but perhaps what is most entertaining, but not nearly as shocking, is that the editor chose the naughty sweaty-making-feeling sex scene as the excerpt. This may explain the evil grin on David’s face in the author photo.
I know how you feel, David. You mention for instance, how your ladyflower feels just once in a piece, and wooosh, there it is in the pull-quotes. Editors can be such rascals!
The first day this was available to download, the site to purchase took so many hits it went down, so I delayed my congratulatory post.
In other “wow that’s so great and nice” news, DM Hornbuckle came out to Brooklyn from Manhattan to help me transport a magically real dresser I bought off of craigslist, and saved me from trial and suffering. Turns out it’s not so easy or pleasant to deal with men with vans off the internet. David with a Volvo station wagon is infinitely better, plus you get to discuss making work while riding around with the windows rolled down.
David is a not just busy and kind man, he writes fabulously every day, and of interesting things to boot. He makes me wish I could write fiction.
Check out and buy the ebook The Salvation of Billy Wayne Carter, or I’ll not like you anymore. I promise you’ll like it, unless you’re my mother.
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Discoveries
I have discovered caffeinated gum. It’s mostly made of that blue putty used to stick posters to walls, coated in a hard minty shell. At first, the prescribed two pieces feel bigger and more bubbalicious than you really want, and then they feel too small and hard, but when you try to spit it out, it won’t even ball up neatly. This gum is horrible stuff. You’d think I’d not have “tried” it more than once. The warning label says quite clearly: If you have some before classes at 8pm, you will still be thrashing around in bed at 2am, hot and frustrated and with a brain that won’t stop humming. You will give up and read, and fall asleep with all the lights on.
I practically can’t sleep without the lights on now. It feels productive.
My nights and mornings got ruined this week. I can’t sleep before almost 3 now, and then I dream with such ridiculous vitality and action, of such wild all-sorts, places, people, chewing gum, then I wake at 6am, full of ideas and needing to pee, before crashing out again, horrifically, until almost 11am (typically i wake at 7:30am, alarm or not).
My back is killing me. I might have a kid, so it can walk on it for me until it’s big enough for junior high.
I’m enjoying the compilation of my grandmother’s writing. I have a letter from the author Carl Glick, in response to a review she wrote of “Shake Hands with the Dragon” when she was probably a junior in high school. He wrote her back, very nicely, and said he would show her review to the publisher, and include it in his scrapbook. He sent her a Chinese New Year card. I just googled him, and found that he in fact was a die hard scrapbook keeper, and they are part of a collection of all his works. Super cool.
She wrote the fashion column for her high school paper and calls her readers “kittens” the way I call you folks “bunnies”. I like it. I can’t imagine the Lucy I know calling anyone “kitten”, but then, I’m not surprised either. I feel like we will have a little tradition, she and I. We have a lot in common, tastes, flaming swords of justice, a resolute belief in our own perseverance, tea, drinks, purple things, I like it.
She fell in love with a drummer when she was 14. He was 18, and asked her mother if she was allowed to go for a walk. There was “necking” on a bench up behind the Hudson River Museum. She was in love.
He went to college and she to high school, Her first “real” love was some hottie named Hans. The drummer showed up at her prom with another date, whom he immediately ignored once he saw my grandmother.
They’re still married.
She was editor in chief of the yearbook for the United States Cadet Nurse Corp, a special uniformed service formed in 1943 to respond to the dire need for nurses during WWII. She joined when she was 17, signing up for 12 hour rotating shifts, plus nurse training, and classes. And she looked stunning in her uniform. Amazing to me, since my new hobby is finding time to do things that I love or feel are important, and they are all related at the moment.
Right before I moved to NY and she moved down to Florida to finally retire, she volunteered at the Bedford maximum security women’s prison, and wrote about that. The associate director of my program has authored a handbook for writers in prison, that I will mail to her. Finding all these random connections might be one of the nicest feelings there is.
Alright bunnies, my brain is drifting elsewhere. xo
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Little Water Song
My hair is on fire, but thankfully not like that time I leaned over a candle to better hear someone in a restaurant. That fire, I could just pat out.
It’s exhilarating to have every second of my time suddenly accounted for, between my new school work and freelance web developering. I don’t think I’ve ever had so many trains of thought going at once, and it’s just started. One moment, I’m trying to figure out what to right, or what needs to be read next (a very order-of-operations prioritization) and the next I’m falling asleep and being haunted awake at the last minute by some annoying bit of code I need to enhance to handle some unforeseen condition, and the best way to write it.
Throw in estimated taxes, a friend’s wedding, trips out of town, trips across town, and the totally new budget (so long cable, hello bit torrent) my brain is just chock full o’nuts.
I almost wrote something yesterday, since my current gig has me working about two blocks from Ground Zero, to comment on the extraordinary quiet of the streets in the morning, how they were fully lined with emergency vehicles, EMTs, firemen, police, and mourners. I’d never seen New Yorkers walk so slow. Inside Champ’s Deli were more cops, more personnel, but also the familiar baritone dispatch of breakfast short orders. “Manny, gimme a toasted English!”
I spent the weekend in Naples, FL for my grandmother’s 80th birthday, getting hugged, fed, and slipped hundred-dollar bills by my godfather. For years we’d begged my grandmother to compile all her writing. She finally did, and had it printed and bound. It’s amazing to get to know her on this level, and to read everything she’d written from 6th grade to recent years. Her high school newspaper, her work for 20 years with women in prison, hilarious accounts of Bobby Short getting freaky in a hot-tub, her thoughts on God.
Friday night I saw Romance and Cigarettes at the Film Forum, and afterwards the director John Turturro did a little Q&A. He was great. The music aspect is that it’s not so much a musical, as that characters have their own personal soundtracks. It was real, crude, funny and understandable. Once it slipped into the realm of a Walter Middy oppression complex, but mostly I found it poignant. If I describe more it will give too much away, and I don’t want to take the experience from anyone. The soundtrack was overwhelming to me, so much music. Go see this movie.
Thursday, September 06, 2007
The New School
I’m having a heart attack!
I just found out I’m accepted to the The New School’s MFA creative non-fiction program!
They’re blessing me with a two-year merit scholarship!
*!*!*!*
My head is melting! I can’t stop galloping around the apartment, now that I’ve stopped happy-crying and hyperventilating.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Romance and Cigarettes
An alarm has been set to remind me to buy tickets for Romance and Cigarettes, with the optimistic idea that I won’t be working too late on a Friday or Saturday night. As my Film Forum newsletter says in their awesome all-caps lo-tec email fashion: it’s “JOHN TURTURRO’S BAWDY, HILARIOUS MOVIE MUSICAL STARRING JAMES GANDOLFINI, SUSAN SARANDON, AND KATE WINSLET.”
Dear Film Forum, let me re-program your emails, please?
Roger Ebert called it, “A comedy suffused with melancholy. A slice of life crossed with magical realism.” I think I can dig it.
When that newsletter hit my inbox I thought, holy crap, is it Wednesday again already? I’ve been measuring time by the chipping of my black manicure.
I’ve read a ton of books recently, particularly of the magical realism kind. Riding the train and reading is my main sport these days. Susan thrust Haruki Murakami‘s Wind Up Bird Chronicles at me. It was exactly what I needed, I loved it, and followed it up with Kafka on the Shore and Norwegian Wood. Norwegian Wood is his more “realistic” one, with no passing through the walls of deep wells, but in its realism felt just as surreal as any condition of loneliness, romance or mental struggle might. I need to read more Murakami.
Finally I read Death by Chick Lit by Lynn Harris, which at first I hated, probably because at first, it felt like it wasn’t written for me and it was the wrong time for me to read it. But then I liked it, dug the satire, and it all worked out in the end. I had a moment of less personal or emotional self-knowledge during a scene in which she’s talking to her “cute computer nerd husband” and he tells her how to hack a login… and i recognized his instructions as a SQL injection attack. And also that it wouldn’t have really worked.
I bought Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters for a friend while I was visiting DC, but didn’t see her again as planned so I kept the book and read it myself. I knew it was about lesbian stage performers at the turn of the last century, but I honestly didn’t know what Tipping the Velvet meant. I thought it had something to do with pulling back the curtain on stage. That’s not what it means. heh.
kthxbai
–
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
48hr Film Best of NY
Our 48 Hour Film has made it to Best of NY!
Charles and Jason rock so very much, I’m so proud.
If you haven’t yet seen this short film we made in the span of 48 hours, check it out on Virb or on Charles‘ site.
(my only self-centered regret… I was getting over the worst cold ever and sound super congested. heh)
Sorry for the lack of posts lately, I’ve been romancing the on-site freelance. And life reflects art. Yes, I am the new girl. Except I don’t miss-behave.
Yay for Double Stunt Double!
xoxo
~ back to work
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Shelf Life
There are a few good things on the internet, despite its many foibles. This morning Wired had a funny article proving how silly and ridiculous we all are.
I have a response to said article:
Another valid response: online book swaps.
As I pack for Miami I realize two things. First, my lack of commitment to the concept of summer means I have very few things to wear and should buy summer clothes.
Second, what I’ll probably buy is a paperback novel. Probably “After Dark” by Haruki Murakami.
I was just adding books I’ve read to Facebook (don’t ask) and looking over my piles of brutalized and bent paperback books. Most probably won’t be read again but hold on to them. They’re small and light and have a special way of matching: The Exorcist, right up next to Call of the Wild or Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays and Poems.
I can’t qualify this judgment, or prove that they match in any way other than if aliens came to Earth, the aliens would indeed agree that these were Earth books specifically… American, from a relatively recent blip of time. The books cover animals and spirits and something in between. Wolves fight, little girls pee, and every living thing walks alone amidst beauty and injustice.
Better let me talk to the aliens when they come. Mi gente.
Aiming to be a person of logic and action, I believe I should join one of the book-swapping sites I read about in Bust magazine: PaperBackSwap.com, BookMooch.com and FrugalReader.com. (Etsy gave a free copy of Bust in our goody bags, and I’d forgotten how good it is. Mi gente!)
If you’ve ever stuck books under your AC unit (i hate summer) and then come winter, wanted to loan the book to someone and realize with guilt that you’d been willing to destroy something of unforeseen value, then this might be a better way to get it out of your house.
I wish I’d not thoughtlessly destroyed “Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Doctor Kassler, J.S.P.S” when I needed something “old” to prop up the AC with. No excuse, and I’m sorry.
I think the act of mailing a book, and the act of paying a little bit of postage so that someone may enjoy Thing X enhances its value. Rather than it rot in a landfill or use shocking amounts of water and energy to recycle, someone is making an effort, someone’s request is being fulfilled. This makes the world a better place where people feel more connected and involved.
It is global, there are 91 countries involved on the PaperBackSwap.com site alone. Ever wanted to read Madame Bovary in French, allez-y. Or try BookMooch.com or FrugalReader.com
