140. Post Secret

Don't tell anyone, but this blog has completely taken over my writing life.  On some level, that was the point.  Writing in public gives me something to be accountable for.  Can't not post for two weeks if you expect folks to come through on a regular basis and read your writing.  But I used to write in other places, and in other voices, and I'm not doing that anymore.

My original goal for the blog was to average a post a day.  Now I think that may be too much.  Not because it's difficult, but because I'm almost too willing to do it.  It's as if, given a place to write, I'll always find something to say.  Who knew?  I thought it would be a chore... something I'd have to discipline myself into.  It's turning out to be something I have to pull myself away from.  Not entirely, but enough to make some mental room for other things.

I'm thinking 10-20 posts a month should do it.  No more than 20.  It should probably be no more than 15.  No more than every other day.  That'd give me a bit of a break to think about and work on other things.  And it would free me to digest things without imagining them in paragraph form with Google Images attached.  I think I need that.

And on that note, I'm off for a week. 

121. Love Letters

It is no secret among those I rant to that I am in love with words on paper (... words not on paper can suck it, except this blog, which I one day plan to put on paper.)  There's something about the tactile element of printed language that awes me.  That I can touch it and even smell it makes a well-written word such a living thing.  When you print an idea you make it real, and extant, and evocative.  Printed words don't evaporate like spoken ones.  They aren't inevitably mangled with each repetition.  They exist.  They can be burned and destroyed, but so can anything.  So can I.  And yet here I am.

Because of all this I have a subtle fetish with the instruments of writing.  The things we use to write real words.  Simple pen and paper. I cannot remember a time when I didn't have a favorite pen.  When I was 12 it was the fine-point purple Pentels my sister used to take notes in grad school.  Now it's black fine-point Sharpies and RSVPs.  I dread writing with anything else.  I cannot write good thoughts with a bad pen.  I imagine that someday I'll have a favorite paper as well.  Probably something expensive.

In the meantime I hang out in stationery stores, eyeing loose-leaf paper and notecards, imagining the things I might write on them and who I might send them to.  My newest crush is on letterpress paper.  It's touch and texture on a whole other level.  Yeah, it's done by a machine, but still.  It's pretty cool.  One of my classmates once wrote that if she could do anything in the world she would move to California and open a letterpress shop.  I wondered at the time why she wasn't doing that. 

Now she has a daughter and a not-yet-written dissertation.  But I like to think that somewhere life may have tucked away a big noisy letterpress printing machine and a drawer of full of ink-stained linen shirts with her name on them.  Maybe one day, a long time from now, we'll be a writer and a letterpress printer, catching up in a little paper shop in California.

113. Quiet Time to Play

We seem to be on converging paths here on the blog.  I can't quite put a name to the change, so I wasn't going to write it out (yet).  But the homie hinted at it so I thought I'd second the emotion.

For two months I've been on a gradual downshift of my consumption of media and a (much more) gradual upshift of running, writing, and other meditative goodness.  Long story short: almost no television, very little music (almost all instrumental), and little to no internet.

Interesting times.

Post-Script: The New York Times thinks I'm onto something.  

105. "Now Usually I Don't Do This..."

... But I cannot hype this Balmorhea album enough.

Maybe it's because it's a genre of music that I don't normally mess with; or maybe it's because I'm in a really thoughtful place; or maybe it's because it's just really frikkin fire.

Whatever it is... I am all over this album.  As much as it saddens me that I haven't found anything I enjoy nearly as much in their other albums, I am so grateful to have found something that feels so natural to me.  It's as comfortable as silence, and yet so much better.

Wow.

83. The Blogger Who Doesn't Blog

It's remarkable, when I think about it, how much of life is not optional. My conception of the good life still consists mainly of a leisurely writing career and exorbitant amounts of free time. A well-structured life is, for me, a fairly slow-paced one. Long, early mornings of writing, afternoons catching up on correspondence and wandering through museums, cooking and eating in the evening, and reading may way into sleep. All at my own pace, never under threat of any kind.

But that's not the way this life works. There are always things that must be done, things that ought to be done, and things that would be nice to do. Until now I have imagined that I would someday collapse these lists into one list of Good Things that I would always and happily do. As it is, my Must Be Done list comes first, my Ought To Be Done list is almost untouched, and my Would Be Nice To Do list is collecting dust on a shelf in the corner of my mind.

Case in point, last fall I bought a membership to the Art Institute of Chicago. I thought that having made a financial investment would motivate me to spend time in a place that, for my creative health, I ought to have been spending time. Last week I got a form in the mail to renew my membership. Nearly a year has passed and I have not been back since I joined 10 months ago. So much for that.

I'm not sure, but I suspect things might be very different if I aspired to be only an academic, or only a writer, or only a teacher. I imagine that being any variety of things requires a fair bit of one's time. While I'm increasingly committed to the laundry list of lives I've decided to live in my short time here, I'm not yet ready to accept that they'll be powered by coffee and quick naps, instead of daydreams and Impressionist paintings. Perhaps I'll be someone who spends her lunch breaks wandering the halls of the Art Institute of Chicago.

73. Ctrl + Alt + Delete

I've done a fair bit of traveling lately. Not a legendary amount, but more than I have been doing. This means that I've been away from my disciplined space (home), eating other people's food, sleeping when and where I could, and most unfortunately, not running.

But... never fear. Unless I'm forgetting something, I'm home for the next two months without interruption. That ought to mean reading, writing, running, eating and sleeping with a much more regular frequency. I have big things planned for school. I'm trying to get off crack ice cream. My running shoes are ready to go. And I'm working my way back toward a decent bedtime.

So... Deep breath. In... Out... Reboot.

61. Writing Workshop: Untitled

i got friends in high places.
look up, familiar faces.
look left, look right, no traces.
i'm the one that fell behind.

i got homies who don't know me,
confidantes who can't console me.
soul brothers and ex-lovers
keep their distance.
i keep mine.

exercise the pen and paper...
exorcise the weight to vapor...
close my eyes and say a prayer.
did it evaporate? or rise?

pour a shot and toast to Death.
throw it back, catch my breath.
this is hell (quiet as kept).
nothing left to do but rise.

54. By Any Means Necessary

In writing a dissertation, there are a number of maxims you come across that are supposed to either motivate or inform your progress. "The best dissertation is a done dissertation." "Give em what they want and get out." Etcetera and so forth. It's all good advice, and it all boils down to one main idea: Get it done.

With that in mind, I've enrolled in a Dissertation Proposal Write-In. It's 5 days, 4-6 hours a day, nothing but writing, and they provide food. To get in, you have to write a check for 50 bucks (a lot of money for a grad student). If you complete the program, you get your check back. If not, they cash it. Interesting concept.

You say you want to write. Cool... Here's your desk... Write. Oh... And if you don't, you owe us 50 bucks.

What if it always worked this way? If instead of someone offering you a job or a fellowship to write something, they charged you $100/month to write nothing. I feel like I'd be a lot more productive. I could have a fellowship, I don't, and I'm not at all bothered, because I don't feel the money I don't have. But if I had to write someone a check for the amount of money I gave up in not getting a fellowship, that would hurt.

So this is what it's come to. I will have my most productive writing week to date, or I will pay the University of Chicago $50 for nothing. If that's what it takes...

49. Penvy

Get your mind out of the gutter. The other penvy:

We all get marked up with the green pen from time to time. There's no crime in that. I am not saying that your are not allowed to criticize other writers or this crazy industry. Yet, there's is a problem when you become overly concerned with(and angry about)the success of others. This is a warning sign that you are headed down a slippery slope into paralysing bitterness.

Her simple advice?

When you are working, you feel better about yourself. After all, writing is what makes you a writer. And when you feel like a writer, you are less worried about the latest celebrity book deal. Your mind is on your characters on your poetry, on your art....

And remember, you started writing because you love to write. When I say get to work, I am not telling you to pick up a hammer and start breaking rocks. When I say get to work, I'm saying get back to you. Get back to where you started from when you said you wanted to be a writer, when you didn't know anything about the business.

I say again: "You started writing because you love to write...Get back to you."

(x-posted at Nunez Daughter)

41. Team Work

I told you my team was nice. One of the homies is reading a slave novel. She trips a lyric fantastic in her spare time:

I am [now reading] Island Beneath the Sea by Isabel Allende. It’s like watching a car accident, a collision of metal, glass and soft, meaty human bodies, in slow motion. Into the blender, hit mix, tear flesh from bone, coat the glass red, hemoglobin run a muck under the relentless pressure of some outside violence, ignore the scream of the gears, the turning blades as bone matter resists, but, no, push through, taking, tearing, plunging forward simply because you have the power to do so. Rip apart, swirl together, then call it pacification, christianization, civilization, natural order of Man.

- Nuñez Daughter

28. Jhumpa Lahiri Hates E-Books

Last night I attended a reading and interview of Jhumpa Lahiri at the University of Chicago. She read from a story in Unaccustomed Earth and then submitted to questions from a faculty member before taking questions from the audience. I learned a few things.

1. There are few things less enjoyable than sitting through a completely inept (and completely unnecessary) introduction. This man sounded like someone walked up to him on the street 5 minutes before and offered him 10 bucks to introduce a woman he had never heard of.

2. There is a tone of voice that, irrespective of what it's saying, grates on my nerves. One of my mother's televangelists has it. The woman interviewing Ms. Lahiri last night had it. She sounded like a hippie kindergarten teacher at pains to use her most delicate inside voice so as not to startle the children.

3. Writers don't necessarily like (talking to) their readers. It makes sense. You can't control what people take from your writing. And being asked to explain and validate someone else's psychic experience of your writing is probably fairly annoying (over and over again).

4. Jhumpa Lahiri hates e-books. She didn't actually say that. She said something like "to each his own." But she also said that even if she were stranded in a cave (or something) and couldn't physically carry her books with her, she still wouldn't take an e-reader. So that's what she meant. A woman after my own heart.

During the Q&A I got up to ask a question, but just as the student in front of me got hers out a woman came and whispered to the rest of the line that that would be the last question. I think I had a pretty good one. At least I wasn't going to ask her about how hard it is to be a brown writer (again).

26. Writing Workshop: "Truth Comes In"

Something I'm working on:

Truth comes in like water through the walls-
Slowly, after the heavy rain.

When the house guests and the uninviteds,
When the healers and best friends have had their say

When the co-dependents and companions
and last lovers have left

When dust settles on the growing quiet
At the kitchen table

The truth comes in
and whispers
What it is.

24. Reading, Writing, (Running) & Arithmetic

I've read that the first step in becoming a novelist is to find a way not to work for a year. Save up enough money so that you can quit your job and have nothing to do but write. Someone actually said that. I thought it was ridiculous at the time and I think it's ridiculous now. Not that it wouldn't be nice. But really... who are they talking to?

More realistically, I think the key to writing is making time. Not freeing up every hour of every day for 365 straight days. But 2 or 3 hours a day before and after work, more on days off, and whole days on the weekends. Subtracting a little time from this or that and adding it to writing helps out a whole lot. It's all about the math.

Here's mine:

If I have 10 productive hours a day, 7 days a week, then I have 70 hours a week to allocate to whatever I need to get done. I currently spend about 27 hours a week working at and commuting to the library, and I am committed to running an hour a day, 5 days a week.

70 - 27 - 5 leaves me with 38 hours a week to write.

Of course, my priority right now isn't a novel, but a dissertation. I figure the same principle holds. By my math, when I'm not bullsh*tting, there are almost 40 hours in a week for me to get it in. Let's see what we can do.

21. Writing Workshop: Untitled

She couldn’t believe it. Any of it. And she believed least of all that he had wanted to be there. He hadn’t been stranded… he had stayed.

Through the night she watched the clock. Time was passing so quickly! Already it was 3am. She felt like she must have missed something. Four hours had passed and she could not recall so much as a heartbeat. As they lay there she felt as though she were watching him with someone else. She stared at the arm curled round her waist. Tried to concentrate on the weight of it. Nothing was real.

Four o’clock! She turned so that she could watch him. Then she might remember what it looked like, if should could not feel anything. She never slept. Not at all that night.

In the morning, they lay tangled, awkward. They did not speak. First she was relieved. It was as if nothing strange had happened. Then disappointed. It was as if nothing at all strange had happened.

18. On the Writing Life

One of my favorite things to read is writers' journals. I've found that a number of great writers kept amazing journals. Henry Thoreau is famous for his. Emerson less so, but still. I recently discovered that Bronson Alcott, who was really a teacher and only ever wrote half-heartedly, kept a remarkable journal.

Today I read a passage from Emerson's:

Cambridge, October 25, 1822

I find myself often idle, vagrant, stupid and hollow. This is somewhat appalling and, if I do not discipline myself with diligent care, I shall suffer severely from remorse and the sense of inferiority hereafter. All around me are industrious and will be great, I am indolent and shall be insignificant. Avert it! ... I need excitement.

That Emerson would write this is not in the least surprising. That he wrote it when he was 17 surprised and shamed the hell outta me. Either I have yet to have my moment of clarity as a writer, or I have had it and made nothing of it. I genuinely hope it's the former.

8. Green-Eyed Writing Monsters

As a writer who doesn't write, I spend a fair bit of time thinking about what I would write if I did. For prose and poetry, this is rarely a problem. I've recently come to the realization that I am not a poet, and I have never had a problem producing prose.

But for narrative, I am at a complete standstill. Some years ago I made up my mind to be a novelist. I've never put down that decision even though I've not nearly carried it out. The problem is that I am not particularly gifted at narration. Nearly every word in literally every sentence has to be wrenched from the deepest creative recesses of my brain. I can come up with some pretty good sentences. But it is a pain. There is no flow.

Then there's Jhumpa Lahiri. I almost never read fiction. I can count the fiction I've read in the last 5 years on one hand. But for some reason, I picked up Ms. Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies." I don't know how much time Ms. Lahiri spends on her sentences but they read like magic. Her writing is true from start to finish, and there is something effortless about it. She makes worlds. And after 2 or 3 lines you are in those worlds. Period. In rooms with characters really too real to be called characters.

And for the life of me I cannot figure out how she does it. Why is her woman standing at a stove so much more real than my woman standing at a stove? I find myself asking while (thinking about) writing, "How would Jhumpa Lahiri tell this story?"

She really is brilliant.

1. Aint Nothin to It...

Welcome to my very random blog. Since I have no idea how to open, and nothing in particular to say, I'm going to use my first post to introduce a few of the personality quirks that will probably drive this blog.

1. I am, for the most part, a writer who doesn't write. Now I have something to be accountable for.

2. I am obsessed with baking the perfect vanilla cupcake. So should this project hold up, there will be many, many cupcake updates.

3. I am in love with the written word, and terrified that we are neglecting it into obscurity. You can expect me to rail consistently about e-books, the death of penmanship, the end of letter writing, and people who type '2' instead of 'to' when it's only one more frikkin character!

4. I'm in an on again-off again relationship with politics. When we're together it's pretty serious. When we're not I can go quite a long time without mentioning his name.

So there you have it. I look forward to the randomness.