Category Archives: blogging

Maybe I Need an Art Buddy. Maybe I Just Need Backup.

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Well, here I am back in the Writer’s Block, which kind of sounds like something you would find in a Communist prison. Yes, they really used to confiscate writers’ typewriters in the USSR and Poland. It was cost-effective. You don’t need to feed typewriters and they don’t bleed when you beat them up.

Here in the more or less democratic US of A, where we have Freedom of Font and also a whole lot more options for putting our ideas down and spreading them around, the problem tends not to be so much Tyranny that is rearing its ugly head as it is Woeful Lack of Imagination.

Part of this, I suspect, is because a blog is not exactly a Project in the same sense that a novel or, for want of a better example, a few hundred pages of poetry about a 1990s TV show are. There isn’t the compulsive pull of a few well-chosen characters whose voices need to be explored. There isn’t the narrative tension of a plot to resolve or of subplots to weave in artfully. On the flipside, there are more opportunities to use pictures of cats to make my points.

Sometimes, when procrastination takes the form of Radically Empty Brain Syndrome (REBS), I stare at the wall, vainly hoping for something to show up. But remember that “radical” comes from the Latin, radix, meaning “root.” If there is nothing at the root of the brain, there won’t be much to grow out of it. So maybe the solution is to find another brain to work with.

If I were an Igor in a Terry Pratchett Discworld novel, I suppose I would mean that literally: find a brain, go up to the top of a tall MIT building and wait for lightning to strike. Then do an evil maniacal laugh, etc. Problem solved.

Tempting…

Failing that, I suppose I need to find another brain the less old-fashioned way, by actually finding a writing buddy, a collaborator, or possibly some badass with a big gun or maybe a Frisbee. Some writing buddies each write their own work separately and then read each other’s work. This is different from collaborators who work on the same project. Personally, I was thinking more along the lines of someone to come to my rescue with a whole lotta firepower, or possibly an Iron Frisbee of Doom.

Then maybe I’ll get writing again.

Where is the Outrage?

Christmas in New Haven, CT was around 58 degrees this year, which is about 30 degrees higher than normal. This past Monday, February 1 was 60 degrees, which is about 40 degrees higher than normal. Can you say anthropogenic climate change?

At the grocery store, I keep hearing people being happy about this “nice” (unseasonable), “beautiful” (unreasonable) weather. Here is the thing people: I know, I really do know, that last winter’s 9 feet of f#$%ing snow was traumatic. I remember taking 2 hours to do a 30-minute commute via the MBTA. I remember climbing mountains of snow to get from the sidewalk to the street and then, on the other side of the street, having to do it all over again.

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I remember this very clearly. Like you, I still have flashbacks.

But tell me, when it is July, which is usually in the mid-80s or August, which is usually in the mid-90s, if we have 110, 120, or 130 degree weather, are you going to call it nice?

Somehow I doubt it.

Grr. Arrgh. More Writer’s Block

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, when the wizard Saruman, wears robes “woven of all colors” because he has fallen from the path of the wise, Gandalf (the Grey) says, “I liked white better.” This is Saruman’s reply:

“White!” he sneered. “It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.”

Now here’s the thing for me a writer. Saruman is clearly evil here, because he is saying the white page can be overwritten like it’s a bad thing.

For me as a writer, constantly trying to produce, this is definitely not a bad thing. So this past week struggling to come up with blog posts, I have tried a variety of things, but today I actually just broke down and turned to Google Images to find pictures to express how I feel: tired, afraid, studious, interrupted. Clearly Person of Interest (and a little bit of Angel) are helping me out here.

 

Then I went and found pictures about how I want to feel: badass.

 

Well, it must have worked, because what we have here, children, is a blog post.

The Donuts of Our Discontent

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So the other day my pal, HeyLookAWriterFellow, wrote about Unfortunate Donuts and even illustrated it amusingly (he is one of my favorite contemporary artists, along with Laura Wilder, Anita Munman and Berkeley Breathed). This got me thinking about Perfect Donuts that I have eaten (all two of them) and set me up for the 7-Eleven’s 50-cent donut deal yesterday morning, which led to the glazed donut I ate half of yesterday and am finishing today, because no one should eat that much sugar in one day if there is absolutely no chocolate in it.

One of the perfect donuts was a coconut-covered jelly stick. I ate it in Cranston, Rhode Island in about 2001 or 2002. The other was an all-too-brief Starbuck’s creation, a rectangular blueberry-raspberry jelly-filled perfect balance of starch, sweet and salty goodness. Naturally, after only about two months, they stopped making them. Probably the gods complained. They just HATE it when humans create something perfect.

How do you write

a poem about a donut

you ate a decade ago,

how do you recall

the texture on your tongue, the zip

of sugary goodness, delicate

balance of salt and sweet, the color of jam

moistly melting

 

And now I have no idea how to end this….

Illustration by Mike Allegra 2016.

Epic (Fantasy) (Fan) Poet: Or What I Did During that Nine Feet of Snow Last Winter

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So every few days or so, I spend time reading other folks’ blogs and getting a kick out of the vastly different kinds of things that people find their passion in, whether it is cooking sous vide, or geeking out about TV shows, or the joys of shoveling snow. And I discovered D. L. Perching’s website for t-shirts for writers of All Kinds of Genres. She had Fantasy Writers and Fan Fiction Writers and so, naturally, I asked if she could make an Epic Fantasy Fan Poetry Writer t-shirt for me, to commemorate the four months I spent back in Spring Semester (read, New England Winter: nine f@#&ing feet of snow, errgh), writing about 250 pages of poetry about Xena: Warrior Princess.

She said yes. Reader, I bought one. In honor of the up-and-coming anniversary of the start of that project, I am going to be posting some of the poems that I wrote, with some of the thoughts I had about the problems of the show I was trying to address. Here is the first, for starters, which is about the events of the pilot episode from the point of view of Gabrielle, when slavers try to take all the women in her village, and Xena, who in dark despair has decided to give up being a warrior (and possibly living–it’s not clear). She then takes up arms again to save them, leading later to Gabrielle following her on her road and then joining her on it.

 

The Slavers Reach Potidaea

 

When you wake on the day that changes

Your life forever, you have no idea, you

Think it’s just another blue, green and

Ordinary day, perhaps a good day

For bringing in sheaves or beating out

The laundry against rocks by the river.

 

On the day that changes your life for

Good, you think your life will never change

From the round of hard work, festival,

Hard work, but that is just because you don’t

Know how to recognize a day like

The one that changes your life forever.

 

Change rarely happens here. When you wake

You know what’s coming: the same old thing.

Then one day, that change. Everything

Changes. Slavers, sweaty and leering,

Sweep through the village like a reaping

Leaving the men bleeding, taking just

 

Young women, the strong or beautiful,

Those who can do the kinds of work that

Such men deem the work of womenfolk.

Terror. Screaming. Chaos and that acrid

Sweat of fear, of the knowledge of what

May be—is—coming. The heart beats too

 

Fast. Even when the unexpectable

Happens: a war cry, sudden salvation—

Your heart still gropes in darkness. And

The next day, when you wake, after that

Night when you relived those horrors, oh,

After that day that has changed your life

 

Forever, you too are changed, like dough

That, when introduced to extreme heat,

Becomes bread, nourishment, food for your

Journey. Sometimes fire destroys, even

Annihilates. But, sometimes, it anneals,

Leaving you stronger even than you were before.

Yelling “Theater!” in a Crowded Fire

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Writer’s block is a thing like when you sit down on the train and realize that you have just stepped (in your brand new shoes) into the sticky residue of someone’s spilled soda. And you think, well, heat melts sugar, right? So if only the curtains of my imagination were on fire, I could pull myself out of this urban transit tarpit and actually create something.

The Weirdness of Precipitation. Also Umbrellas.

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So a friend has pointed out that I have been veering from the straight path of poetry and investigating all kinds of apparently nonpoetic things, and she is not wrong. At first I thought this was simply a result of my writer’s block, again, and to some extent it is. Then I thought about how I started this blog in part to figure out my poetics, that is, what the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics defines as “a systematic theory or doctrine of poetry” (Preminger 636). What do I think counts as poetry and where do we draw the line? Is it enough to “not be prose,” i.e., to have lots of short lines, some of which may happen to rhyme? Is it likely to have more elegant language and imagery than non-literary prose generally uses? Must it be beautiful? And what do we mean by beauty?

And then I realized that some of what I have been unconsciously doing is figuring out my aesthetics, which oddly enough, Preminger does not define, although he does include aesthetic distance and aestheticism, this last of which he seems to define as art for art’s sake, although he takes several pages to do it. I think for me defining one’s aesthetics is about defining what one as an individual, artist and nonartist, find beautiful and not. What draws you, as the bagpipes drew me before my mind had realized that my legs were moving? What repels me, as the sonorous, groaning organ does, even though it has great symmetry and harmony and All The Things, and can move other folks to tears for Very Different Reasons?

And I have been fascinated by our recent popular culture projects, because they have been drawing me in a similar fashion. Some of what I like is the smart juxtaposition between apparent opposites that we often get, the mixing of deadly serious and light wit, or dark, almost Gothic environments mixed with warm companionship. Or just high school students reading 500-year-old texts in an actual library to learn about the demons they are about to face. These tinctures in the story-telling of our time fascinate me, and I hope are teaching me about how to tell a more beautiful story, whether I do it in poetry or prose or some other way.

But for those who came for the poetry, here is a poem from last Monday when I got soaking wet about three different times.

.

Suddenly the air

is awash front to back

with water, which once,

before today, used

to be ocean or cloud.

.

And walksign people

scurry and slosh across

sidewalks become rivers

for a moment or two

too long for dry shoes.

.

Only the dry ones, those

who planned ahead,

stay anywhere near dry

carrying their nylon roof

on a stick.

.

Preminger, Alex, ed. Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1974.

The Block of the Writer, Redux

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So there I am, sitting with my Brilliant Colleague, Rebecca, complaining about how I don’t have ideas for either of my blogs, this one or the one that my cat, Musashi writes, primarily for my parents and my other Brilliant Colleague, Pamela. And Rebecca told me to write about that blog for this blog. So brilliant.

It is an odd thing, writing for such a small audience from the point of view of someone I love very much and will never really know. He’s a cat. He probably doesn’t do a lot of linear thinking, and the idea that he would spend his summer writing (with a purple crayon) a novel about pirates does seem a little silly, especially because, as a tuxedo cat, if he were to enter the Great Philosophical Argument: Pirates vs. Ninjas, he would most likely come down on the side of the ninjas.

And yet, and yet…

It also helps the storytelling process that Musashi, as a writer, has a Somewhat Less Than Puritanical attitude toward spelling. For example, he is still not convinced about silent h’s, such as those in words like “might,” and so he does without. He is okay on the g because of it having a tail, but the h, not so much.

And then it is simply a matter of retraining my point of view downward by about four and a half feet or so, and adding fur and irony.