Let's Get This Party Started

Oh boy, do I hate airplanes.

Grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change
the courage to change the things I can
and the wisdom to know the difference.

I saw this prayer tattooed inside someone's forearm once. I'm glad there are tattoo artists out there who will do text, even though they'd prefer to be doing art. I have heard many tattoo artists complain bitterly about being artists not typesetters, but I'm still glad there are some who need the money badly enough to make a compromise. They get money for dinner, and maybe the vast majority of tattoo recipients get what amounts to a cheaply borrowed sentiment that only goes skin deep. I'm going to guess that for every 25 cheaply borrowed sentiments, there's one person who needs that tattoo like an A.A. meeting needs coffee. Who on earth needs the serenity prayer tattooed on their body somewhere easily viewed by the wearer? People who have a hard time doing what it says. People who have trouble accepting that there are things they can't change. People who know what needs changing, and who have trouble finding the courage to make that change. People who have trouble telling the difference. That's me, me, and me.

I've spent a lot more time in the past year writing about not being able to write than writing about anything else. I've spent most of three years thinking about and raging against things I can't change. I've hurt myself doing it. When I sat down to write this blog post, I saw that there was an unfinished draft of a post: more complaints about not being able to get unblocked, and I freaked out reading it. It finally hit me, finally. How much of my life am I going to spend thinking about how to spend my life, and complaining about not being able to spend it the way I'd prefer? How much of my life am I going to spend wrestling with the things I can't change? Maybe a little more, here and there. Sometimes, you have to turn your thoughts over in order to see what's going on. But honestly, once you know it's time to make a decision. You can't wish away reality. You can wait for reality to change, but you might be waiting for a long time. You might be waiting forever. You might get to the end of your life and regret all that waiting; I know I will, if I don't get my act together, accept the things I can't change, and change the things I can, to live a better life right now. I've taken enough time to ponder my choices. Now it's time to get out there.

I'm not altogether sure what this will mean for my blogging. This blog has been my sole creative outlet this year, and I've enjoyed making posts. I'm quite certain that I will not be able to post every day if I'm doing other creative things in addition to going to work, keeping house, tending my responsibilities, etc. I may need to move to a weekly model instead of trying to keep the daily posting going. Like I said, I'm not sure what's going to happen, but something must. It's time. It's past time, but it's time. I'm going to London in a few days, and I've just finished charging all of my electronics, printing out all of my confirmation pages, setting up my international cell phone service (all with a lot of help from someone special). I'm going to lay down and look at my travel book now, and then maybe I'll poke around the Internets to see what I can see. People keep saying, "Oh you MUST see the Tower of London." Well, I may, but again, I may not. I may instead go to places like the Museum of Broken Relationships, the Doctor Who Experience, the Tate Modern, the London Eye, and various and sundry restaurants (yes, we will have Indian, yes, we will have pub food, yes, I will let my daughter order something alcoholic). We will see David Tennant in Much Ado About Nothing. In the middle somewhere, we will attend the Leeds Music Festival.

Art. Music. Architecture. Food. Photography.

This is it. Let's get this party started.

The Future

Saturday's film was The Future, by the performance artist Miranda July. You can see the preview here. Maybe the preview makes the film look weird, partly narrated by a cat named Paw-paw, who is most often shown in the film as two disembodied paws sitting on a sheet of newspaper, one in a plaster cast. Let me tell you: this film is weirder than that. The narrative lurches along from one idea to the next as if the story-boards were a free-association game, some sort of random series of events based on snippets of song on an alternative radio station. There's this mid-30's couple living in a modest city apartment as if only recently graduated from college. The scene opens with a soft-conflict over a glass of water, as they both sit entranced by the internet. "Will you get me a glass of water?" "I wasn't getting up; I was just changing position." "If we had a crane, we would be able to get a glass of water without getting up." "How would you turn on the faucet?" "With my brain." "It's sad that you aren't doing something else with your brain."

My companion watched the entire film wearing what she calls the "WTF face." Yes, the couple goes to the animal shelter and adopts a sick cat, who presumably only has six months to live, unless he bonds with them, and maybe it's five years. The reality of commitment, of maturity, rocks the couple's world (Sophie and Jason). They say that in five years, they'll be 40, and "40 is basically 50," and "that's it for us." What does an immature, 30-something couple do with their lives when they think they only have 30 days to live? One quits his job to sell trees door-to-door, the other quits her job as a dance instructor to make a series of YouTube videos of herself dancing. Both fail spectacularly. A desperate Jason stops time, and creates a parallel world in which he and Sophie sit frozen in their apartment, while another Sophie continues an affair with a divorced manufacturer of signs and banners. I feel bad about giving any more of a summary than this, because I wouldn't want to ruin the splendid "this is SO WEIRD" vibe that may or may not get while watching the film.

In his review, Roger Ebert says, "On the surface, this film is an enchanting meditation. At its core is the hard steel of individuality." It seems to me that Ebert took the film on its own terms and refused to critique it for what it's not. He's a smart guy; he's got better things to do. Instead, he saw the film for what it was, a quirky self-portrait, but a self-portrait of shadow things, stones skipping in the mind to create emotion-scapes. It's silly to expect a linear story in the shadow realms. Of course we will find our mirror selves there, emotional grotesques who do flips on ego-trapezes. There is part of me who is twelve years old, who will always be twelve, who would have understood why it was important to bury herself to the neck in her back yard while her father stood at the grill in his apron. The containment would have felt safe, when otherwise the world was blowing her apart. Talking to the moon? Stopping time? Well, sure. That's what happens on the inside of you, inside of me, in those turbulent shadow lands. Especially when those insides don't look so much like other people's outsides.

I'm given to wonder what we human beings would look like, if more people's outsides looked like their insides. If we would all be hunted down, seduced, and dragged from our hiding places by our security blankets, to return us home. Home, where we don't know what scary truth we will have to face next.

Exploding Spaceships

There's an image of me that clings like Saran Wrap: Joy doesn't like stories (whether in book or in film format) that prominently feature explosions. There's an element of truth to this, but it's not an absolute correlation. I tend not to prefer stories that have a high explosion-to-dialogue (ETD) ratio, but it's not that I don't like explosions. What I look for in a great story is more often than not absent in films and books with a high ETD ratio, though there are several notable exceptions (see Band of Brothers and any number of war-themed films). To me, a great story comes from great characters thrown into difficult situations. A great story questions the meaning of my existence, and gets me thinking about my own life, my own choices, and whether I'm living the way I want to live. The stories that make me think stay with me long after I'm done watching or reading, and more and more, I'm prioritizing stories that make me think over stories that merely entertain.

I've been reading the Miles Vorkosigan books because they are important to someone I care about. I read Cordelia's Honor and The Warrior's Apprentice a long time ago, in high school, but I stopped seriously reading science fiction in my early twenties. I was going to college at the time, and my reading tastes changed as my mind matured. Back in high school, I wanted to be entertained; I didn't want to think about much. I disliked the required reading: Hawthorne, Melville, and Fenimore Cooper; it was too much work for too little pay off, where pay off was entertainment. George Orwell was not enough of a bridge between science fiction and "the classics." By the time I got to college and started studying Latin and Greek (and works of great literature such as The Odyssey, The Illiad, and The Aeneid), I was ready to think, I think. I'd gone through many phases of pleasure reading: science fiction, fantasy, horror, romance, mystery, true crime, techno-thrillers, and I discovered that what I liked reading best (and still like) was a certain kind of fiction that was most often shelved in with the "general fiction," but that had a certain weird resonance of the fabulous: Murakami, Oates, Proulx, Roth, Updike, Irving, Fowles, Alex Garland, and so forth. I liked thinking about big things, and these authors made me think. Sometimes they made me think really hard. Sometimes, reading changed my life.

By the time I circled back to Lois McMaster Bujold at almost 40 years old, I didn't want to go back to mainstream science fiction shelved in the ghetto in the back of the bookstore behind the romance novels. I was accustomed to thinking and accustomed to improving myself, and I had prioritized what books I thought would help me do that best. I felt that reading SF was not a good use of my time, because it was too hard to search the chaff for the wheat. This time around, I said to myself, I would read the Vorkosigan books as a favor, and nothing more. I had them on e-reader, and I had tidied up my office and put away the to-be-read pile in favor of making a clean slate for myself and starting a novel writing project, and knew I could procrastinate my way through the series if nothing else. Unexpectedly, these books are giving me a lot to think about.

So far, I've read the following Miles Vorkosigan books and short stories, using the omnibus method:

Shards of Honor
Barrayar
The Warrior's Apprentice
"The Mountains of Mourning"
The Vor Game
Cetaganda
Ethan of Athos
"Labyrinth"
"Borders of Infinity"

I'm in the midst of the beginning of Brothers in Arms right now, which I've been told is "where it starts to get good." Apparently, I'm paying my dues so I can enjoy the payoff later. The novels and short stories have been firmly rooted in the space opera tradition so far, with lots of combat scenes and exploding space ships. Nonetheless, I have developed especial affection for Miles Vorkosigan's parents, Aral Vorkosigan and Cordelia Naismith. Aral and Cordelia aren't perfect; they are fully fleshed characters that I care about. They do things that they regret. They get enmeshed in things they'd prefer to leave alone. They're heroic indeed, but they're scarred by their heroism. They have a particular pathos that I recognize from my own life. At one point, Cordelia scolds herself for a momentary lack of acceptance in her relationship with Aral. She tells herself that if she wanted to be the wife of a happy man, then she ought to have married a happy man to begin with. Instead, Cordelia fell in love with the unbearable beauty of pain, and she only has herself to blame. Aral is Aral, and loving him is hard for a multitude of reasons, and loving him is worth the pain.

There are, perhaps, too many exploding space ships so far for my taste, but there is meaning in these books so far, if I have the energy to dig for it. There is a reason to believe that these characters have something interesting to say about the problem of pain. They have plenty to say about dignity, honor, compassion, integrity, and love. So much that I need to work hard while I'm reading to remember that the people in these books are not people, but the idealized workings of a liberal female mind. It's easy to fall in love with the romance in these books, to wish to be a little more heroic, a little stronger, wiser, and more compassionate. It easy to overlook the opportunities for heroism in a quiet life, where there are no spaceships, lower risk of death by squashing or plasma arc or starvation. Where people do not carry swords or walk around with devastating scars from life-changing trauma. It's easy to be seduced by the opera, and forget that real life is full of heroes, and opportunity for heroism. It's full of opportunity to love where there is no love, to accept where there is no acceptance, to fight the terrible gravity of anxiety, boredom, and mundane frustration.

I can see through the spaceships, and will do so if the reward is worth the cost. In this case, it's worth it.

What Do I Do Now?

After giving that sermon on creativity, where did I go? I'm not blogging, so what am I doing about it? Am I taking my own advice on this creativity stuff? Shouldn't I be talking about that here? Well, yes, probably.

Here's what I've been doing about it:

With help, I cleaned up my office. The boxes of stuff were sorted and the stuff put away. The stacks of "to be read" books were shelved. There are now many, many books on the shelf with bookmarks in them. So be it. If they are on the shelf, out the way, they can't hurt me. Strangely, if they are piled on my bedside table, with bookmarks in them, they are officially "unfinished" and so on my to-do list. If they are shelved, they are no longer on my to-do list.

I unpacked the box of bathroom stuff into a big basket, which I put in the bathroom closet, where the box of stuff used to be. That was bothering me, something also on my to-do list. I cleaned the refrigerator downstairs, and the refrigerator upstairs, and put vegetable matter on the compost heap. I purchased a wine cabinet for my kitchen, and a small dresser for my bedroom, and reorganized some stuff to fit them. I put my clothing through the dry cleaner. I switched my winter/summer clothing from storage (all the sweaters are in a bin under my bed now). One of my companions did a reorganization of my CDs and DVDs. I try to keep up with the weekly delivery of organic produce from Silverbrook Farm.

I invited friends over for a BBQ. It threatened rain, so I sent out for BBQ instead, and it was delicious. We sat around talking, playing card games, doing nothing at all in particular. It was fun, the first time I'd had non-family guests in my new house. I hope they will come again.

All of that done, I put 1.5-hour blocks of time on the calendar, called "creative hour." It usually takes me 30 minutes of hemming and hawing before I settle down to work, so 1.5 hours is really just an hour. When those time blocks have arrived, I've looked at them, yawned, and picked up a book to read. Yes, you heard it here. What I'm doing with my beautifully reorganized life, and the momentum generated by giving an actual sermon on creativity: reading. I've read three books in seven days. You see, it's another thing that's been on my to-do list for a while, reading this series of books so I can talk about them with the person who recommended them. I've wanted to do it, and just not had the time. Guess what? I got things organized, and now I have the time to knock things off of my to-do list.

There are so many items on my to-do list, I think it could encircle the planet, and I just keep adding more to it. "Write a novel," is on the to-do list, but it has been deprioritized, because I haven't been able to figure out how to think on that scale. At home, I want the instant-reward system. Take out the trash, and get my brownie points. Success! It's satisfying. At work, I have very few of these instant-reward moments, because I'm a middle manager. It's my job to slog along, day-in, day-out, to cope with ongoing issues. It's like being chief of laundry in house of six people. If you work all day, you can achieve a moment where all of the laundry is clean, folded, and put away. But it only lasts for a moment, and then someone puts on a fresh pair of socks, and then it's over. I have those moments of rest at work, but they're rare. It's tough to get home from a job like that, and not want to just attack something easy on the to-do list, one you can do in five minutes or three hours. Attacking one that will take a year just feels like getting home from work, and doing the second job, only you don't get paid for the second job. In fact, you have to pay for the privilege in terms of energy, time, and relationship nurture. It's hard to nurture a relationship when you're glued to a computer.

Where this post finds me is having knocked many, many items from my to-do list, in preparation for having dedicated creative time every day. And there it is, on the calendar. Creative hour. And there I am, too. I stand there, look at the time I've blocked off, and then pick up another book to read. It's been such a long time since I could just read a book for an hour and go to bed early. I go to work, I come home, have dinner, do a few chores, go to my room, look at all of the well organized things that no longer need organizing, ignore my computer, read a book for an hour, and go to bed early. Lather, rinse, repeat, until I'm so bored I need to create something or die. Maybe that's the trick. The doing needs to be less odious than not doing. So, I sit and read for a while and enjoy it. Rest, read, think. Give it some time, see if the reading packs down into the muck to ferment, and start producing the ethanol gases on which the engine runs.

All of this is a fancy way of saying that I cleaned my desk, I cleared my calendar, and I haven't started yet. I still have all those inner enemies, yawping away, and I need to figure out how to get started anyway.

After Ever After

Remember when I wrote about the 2011 Rhysling Award Anthology?

One of my writing friends commented on that post, and then went out and wrote this post, which is an invitation to discuss speculative poetry. She has invited a sort of link around, and so I'm closing my little part of the loop. It looks as though it's a kind of "anonymous author" sort of blog, so I'm not going to name names, here (though I suppose anyone with even a little Google fu will be able to figure things out).

Someone has already done some hard work assembling a list of URLs for online speculative poetry, so please consult the Wikipedia entry for speculative poetry to see that list.

Manifesto

My copy of Manifesto came from the Newbury Comics in Peabody, MA. I was there to take a small boy window shopping, and I can't remember if I bought anything but the little white book. It's two hundred pages long, perfect bound with plain white card stock. It has no graphics, inside or out, no title on the cover, the spine, or the first page. The only identifying mark was the store's UPC sticker, and publishing contact information on the bottom of the last page, facing into the spine, a phone number, a PO box in Northampton, and an e-mail address (dedrabbit@yahoo.com) . My copy did not come with the flyer insert, but I've linked to the insert, below. I picked up the book because it looked like a mistake, a plain white spine with no writing, next to books by the Chucks (Klosterman and Palahniuk). Last time I'd seen plain little books bound in blank card stock with no titles on the spines, I was studying Russian at the Defense Language Institute.

Here is everything of interest I've gleaned from the internet on Manifesto:

Review from Perfect Porridge: Manifesto

Review from OC Weekly: Manifesto

A College Essay: Manifesto

Website, consisting of a list of vendors that carry the book: http://www.dedrabbit.com/

A copy of the flyer (typically printed on red paper) found inserted in some copies of the book: Flyer

Those other reviews do a good enough job of describing the book, analyzing its contents and speculating on the mystery of the author, so I'm going to skip all that. Instead, I'm going to poke at the marketing of the book. The flyer has three lists: 1) Manifesto is: 2) Manifesto is about: and 3) Influences. You can check out the flyer yourself by clicking the link, above. You could probably use the flyer as a checklist for my various media libraries: books, films, music. If he grew up in the east, and I grew up in the west, still it seems we've walked a parallel path through pop culture. I'm sure I'll be interested in the stuff on his list that's not on mine, and I'd put money down that he'd be interested in the stuff on my list that's not on his. If you liked ..., you may also like....

The flyer is calculated to evoke this feeling, I think. That "instant soul mate," I must have been separated from this person at birth thing, that oh my god HE IZ ME AND I IZ HIM! kind of cultishness. This thing is meant to pull my strings, to make me feel smart and superior and special enough to fork out my $7.00 and spend a couple of hours piecing together the nonlinear puzzle pieces. The marketing begs readers to help this thing become cult. It comes pre-loaded with all the earmarks of "instant cult classic." It's as if the author of the flyer did ten years of market research by passing out "list your top 10 favorite..." questionnaires at open mic nights and poetry slams all over New England, and wire-tapping the chat transcripts of several thousand art school drop-outs. Pull our heartstrings--we elite, wise, intellectual, fragile, ephemeral, transcendent, existential, misunderstood waifs who get addicted to drugs or develop other dysfunctional defenses to soothe our collective yet lonely anguish at how beautiful, wasted, and ironic everything is. Really, now. This book and its marketing is a parody of people like me. People who like Sigur Ros and Bon Iver, who cry while watching script-less foreign films about sheep farming.

Can you tell that I hate how much I love that flyer? It mirrors me, and it mocks me and I don't care. The implication of the listed works on the flyer is more than the book can handle: it's not the sum of its influences, but it borrows the glamour well enough to flip the switch on my self-absorption. I love all of those works listed, in the way that the child loves the velveteen rabbit, with that desperate focused love that smells like old dried thumb-sucking spit, so yes, I must necessarily also love this book, because it says I should, right here on this flyer. And the writing has merit; I'll show you. I guess I'm writing this blog post this way because I feel manipulated, and because I know I'm so easy to manipulate, yet hard to fool, I feel I must confess all of this. I confess that I love a sushi meal, and that I love that I share a taste for sushi with a lot of people I admire. Somehow, knowing that those people like what I like makes that thing I like taste better. I like the writing in this book, but the mind-games on that flyer are like the crack sprinkles on a Voodoo doughnut (joking: if Voodoo ever made a crack doughnut, it was after hours, and they did not sell it-they did sell Nyquil doughnuts though, and were ordered to stop).

Here are three passages from the book about reading:

Page 127. In the pages of books, surrounded by words that were true, the world as it was, people and places as they were, I felt more real, more myself, and happy. Even if the authors didn't understand the craziness, good ones at least recognized it. A good book made me feel like I existed, made me feel safe, that nothing could hurt me, that even under closed covers, cold and drab-looking, never read, all the greyness of my life life became pleasant and colored.

Page 144. I wanted to rip the flesh from my bones, vomit out the poisons, sit stark and removed, drinking water on a mountaintop.

I needed rest, silence, coolness--taking nothing into my body, only refreshing water, cool moist air, deep breaths. I wished I were ancient, calm, and free. I hated destinations, everything between and on the road to destinations. I hated being anything that wasn't myself. I was quiet and nice. I didn't want to hurt anything, not even myself.

I wanted to do nothing but quiet work and never talk and live till I was old, sad and calm, to find an enormous perfect book and read forever.

Page 160. A stupid fat man drank all day and had nothing to say to people who told him to change his ways. He listened to the radio. He flipped through the TV. He did the crossword puzzle. He swatted flies. In his mind he'd written a thousand books. In his mind he'd been so many princely men.

These passages won't mean much if you didn't read those other reviews--if you don't know that the whole book is about this guy who drops out of college and proceeds to drift from state to state, to drift overseas and back, sinking deeper and deeper into drug abuse, alcoholism and despair. It's not clear how the snippets of hope are like diamonds winking from piles of manure, that it's that movement that's important, not the destination--the movement is the lyric:

I wanted a true love and a house in impenetrable mountains, to live in a bright meadow with wildflowers. I wanted animals on a farm, not animals to slaughter or to milk or to make money off of. All the bodies living in a meadow would make me smile. I wanted to look over everything, like a wizard working a spell.

I worried about it falling to pieces. I didn't want children to think I was crazy. I didn't want strangers dropping bombs, invading and raping the valley. I could see my dream like a flower.

It was a devastating progression.