Getting ready for the SB. I’ve got a laser-rocket arm, you know. Shockingly, the NFL has failed to draft me just yet.
Quin and Brooks
My neighbor Molly and I recently had a conversation about isolation and the various forms in which a person can escape the world. Some escape into booze & mind-altering drugs; some escape into their jobs. Writers and artists? They retreat into their own minds.
Not that retreating into your mind isn’t scary as hell, but it beats facing the reality of human life most days. Molly pointed out that using drugs or alcohol to escape was a socially acceptable form, whereas isolating yourself and becoming hermit-like is not. Isolating yourself from the world is seen as deviant behavior, where anesthetizing yourself is not? Sure, we drink and do drugs in groups. But it’s still a form of escape.
This idea of isolation led me to the Internet. The Internet allows us to connect to people that we previously would not have had access to. Internet has allowed us to connect to people who are far away; however, we are connecting through a machine. And we interact less with those people who are in proximity, people living within feet of us. Does this make us more or less isolated? Does this improve or hinder our social skills? Isn’t how we interact now fundamentally different than how we have interacted in the past?
Mechanical interaction is FAR different from interaction in person. No human touch, no smell, no chemical interaction. No facial expressions. No body language. Even with web-cam, these things are ALL strikingly different. Web cams have delays, freeze up, aren’t clear. Sound and sight are distorted.
Here’s a post that illustrates what the net has done to us perfectly (via House of Bedlam) from Jennifer Daniel:
you never knew this, but for years after he died, when I couldn’t sleep, I drove to the cemetery on Gallatin road, to visit his grave. I visited him there because it was all I could do. I had nothing else left of him. Few memories, and no keepsakes, save a few photographs from when I was too young to remember. Him standing next to a Christmas tree, in his dress fatigues, smiling. Dark-haired. The window behind him and the tree has fake snow around the edges. It is dark outside. He has slicked back, black hair, and eyes like mine. He looks like he belongs in the sixties. The photos are dated 1969, the year I was born.
I wait until the sun rises, and the cemetery is open. It opens early. I drive around until the black iron gates are open, then I take the familiar route to his place. He has a nice spot, I think, because it is close to the drive, but far from the main road. I don’t know why this is important to me. I park the car on the drive nearest to his post.
It is a veterans graveyard. Just white posts covering green or brown grass, depending on the season.
I talk to you, though I have no idea what to say. Or if it matters. Or if you even care.
Some others in my family tell me things about you, sometimes. It’s all I have. This grave, and other people’s memories. It is sometimes not enough and too much. My wishes to know you fall silently to the ground.
I don’t eat pork (nor would I cook it), but I may watch this video a few more times. Hot director + a ten minute lesson on cooking? Fuck yes.
And as filmmaker Roberto Rodriguez says, “Not knowing how to cook is like not knowing how to fuck.”
Just finished the ‘novel in fragments’ and found this post of the work:
http://www.slate.com/id/2235023/
Not really much else to say, though it is too bad the novel wasn’t completed.
It was my muse. What she brought me? Something about the holes in the ceiling above my bed and how two different boys have commented on the holes in my ceiling above my bed.
I don’t really know what to do with that at the moment. Maybe something will come to me. In the meantime, I’m gonna go fume over the SNL’s piss-poor writing from last night’s show some more.
I mentioned in an earlier post that there were several books from the past decade that changed me as a writer. Books that turned my head to a new direction. Books that showed me I could write the book I wanted to write.
The memoir fits into the category of literary or creative nonfiction. Prior to 2000, I hated biographies/autobiographies due to the flat chronological narratives, the factual and cold writing, the lifelessness of the genre. Prior to 2000, I’d read a few holocaust memoirs, diaries, but did not dare venture further. Thankfully, that changed ten years ago.
I’ll begin with Dave Eggers. Now I know from personal conversations and from reading reviews of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius that not everyone loves this book. Some have said the writing is self aggrandizing and self serving, and that Eggers does a lot of annoying name dropping. True, there are parts of the book that I could have done without– namely, the interview for the Real World. I skipped it entirely. Yes the book has it’s flaws, as many books do. HOWEVER: during the entirety of my reading of this book, I had NO idea whether it was a true story or if it was fiction. When I found, after finishing the book, that it was a memoir, I was incredulous. A non-fiction narrative that reads like fiction? I ate it up. I wanted more.
AHWOSG was the book that really showed me I could write the book I wanted to write: a narrative that was non-linear, creative, and went where I wanted it to go, without concern for convention or chronology or any other constrictions. No, my memoir is not anything like his, nor does it read in the same way. But this was the spark, the catalyst. This book was a platform of sorts for me. Shortly after reading Eggers’ book, the film Girl, Interrupted was released. I didn’t read the book until years later, in grad school. Another heavy influence on my own memoir, due to Kaysen’s matter-of-fact style, and her ability to talk about very labile, tense situations with seeming calmness. I also loved the kind of shock value held by the publishing of her own medical records: not so much bragging as documenting. This book reminds me of how truly new modern psychology is, and how treatment of mental illness changed drastically in just 100 years. This book did not have the emotional impact as, say One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest does, but it is stark and bare and revealing.
Then came an onslaught of non-fiction that just bowled me over. Maus changed me as well– not as a writer, but as a person. I love how Spiegelman took his parents’ Holocaust experience and put it in such a non-conventional form, and how doing so made the narrative even stronger than could be imagined. Powerful. Had I any artistic talent, I would next have drawn out my own memoir as well.
On the heels of this, I was introduced to another cartoonist, Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis. This woman is UNbelievable. I saw her speak early in 2009: she was smart, witty, exuberant. And yes, I DID stand in line to get her autograph. She was just lovely. And her story, amazing. A fantastic book (and animated film as well).
On the recommendation of a friend (thanks again, Marjorie!), I also read Susan Orlean’s much touted and talked of book The Orchid Thief. I really did not think I would be interested in this book; it sat on my shelf for some time before I actually read it. I’m not sure if it’s because it was a non-fiction book about orchids, or the fact that it was about (or, at least, I assumed it was about) orchids. A non-fiction book about plants. (As opposed to fictionalized books about plants??) I had read some of Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire and found it appealing, but… still. A book on plants. I really did not think I would be engaged.
Ha. Now is the time that all of you who have read The Orchid Thief can laugh at me. I really had no idea what I was in for. I was really stunned by all the information and history of the orchid; I was amazed at all the varieties and names and the lengths that collectors will go to. The smuggling. The thieving. The money involved. Not to mention the characters involved. And the history of Florida and the swampland. I’ve had many obsessions and while orchids have never been one, I felt I had been immersed into a world in which it could have been a possibility.
This was a decade full of books that changed me as a writer. What were yours?
A knock on the door on New Year’s Eve revealed my neighbor Molly and a friend: come sojourn with us to Springwater, she invited.
We traipsed down to the nearest liquor store on West End for petite bottles of bubbly. We took the side streets over to the Springwater, proudly deemed the biggest dive bar in N/V.
Springwater was packed and hazy; the inhabitants were sparkly and tattooed. A five-dollar cover and a Sharpie S gained us admittance. We passed the last hour of 2009 sitting on a bench near the one pool table, dodging shots and witnessing the motley crowd drink their way into the new decade.
The walk home was brutally cold; we consoled ourselves with warm champagne and laughter. Fireworks exploded as we got closer to home.
I came home smoky, thirsty. Alive.
[please see yelp reviews of Springwater for the hilarious attempts to characterize this beloved bar: http://www.yelp.com/biz/springwater-nashville]
Seems folks have a nasty habit of using synecdoche when talking about OCD. Why? Because they clearly do not understand what, exactly, OCD is. Case in point: earlier this week, while in line at the store, I overheard the cashier and bag-boy discussing their pseudo- OCD symptoms. Cashier: I have the check the cash drawer every night, I have to. Bag-boy: What, is that like an OCD thing? Yeah, I’ve got one of those too: every time I wash my hands, I have to do it twice. Every time, gotta wash them twice.
Checking and hand-washing are just 2 symptoms of hundreds for those with OCD; not only that, these symptoms penetrate one’s life to the point of interference in daily life. In other words, one checking behavior and some extra careful handwashing does not a disorder make.
Excessive handwashing and checking are just two outward manifestations of the disorder; behind these, there lie thousands of obsessive thoughts, internal rituals, magical thinking. Thousands of other rituals that no one else sees, like counting steps, or only turning to the right (never the left), only opening doors with your left hand, never your right. Looking at things only at a certain angle. There are countless invasive rituals that no one ever knows.
Point being this: please be well-informed of what you are rambling on about. There are those in the world who just might call you out on it.
