How our brains' creativity changes
I used to write poetry all the time. I’m talking high school age here, but I already thought of myself as a writer then. And I wrote poetry. All the time. I’d start composing poems in the shower. While driving. Then I’d forget what I’d thought of and drive myself insane. See, today, I started looking at the National Endowment for the Arts’ Fellowships in Literature, only to be reminded that the fellowships for Prose alternate annually with fellowships for poetry.
What to do about being sick
I am sick. Quite sick. I have a fever. It’s twice as bad because it broke yesterday morning only to come back yesterday afternoon. It’s made me tense and grouchy and nervous. I think it comes of living alone, but illness always sort of freaks me out. Even though I get good and sick at least once per year. This one followed a pretty typical pattern for me. I was in DC last week.
What does this torrent get you?
I think a lot of us have this image of a writer in this life filled with turmoil and emotional upheaval. I think we see them at their emotional worst, shutting out the world with their minds, walking upstairs to their typewriter and pounding away at the keys to make it all go away. I wonder if that’s how it really works for anyone? My life has been highs and lows, highs and lows, again and again, over the last couple months.
How badly do you want it?
Last night I was talking with a friend about my completely lackluster efforts to get my work out there to potential publishers. You know, Jack London had a pile of rejections as tall as his desk by the time he got through. I have the dedication to do creative work, but do I have the dedication to send out letters? I need to get there. What she said to me is this: If you don’t have the dedication to do it, then you don’t want it badly enough.
A DANCING BEAR, by David Free… a podio-book! that whole new media thing is, like, happening
“He tried to kill time. It kept not dying.” That’s a quote from the narrator at the end of David Free’s A Dancing Bear, the first podiobook I ever listened to all the way. Free is a fellow podio-book author over at Podiobooks.com, and I think the quote gives some of the flavor of the books cynically humorous quality. This book helped get me through 24-Hour Comic Day and for that reason alone I’ll never forget it.
The less famous book
I wrote Zadie Smith a letter after I finished reading White Teeth in, maybe, 2001? I don’t remember what it said, but I probably wrote something about how jealous I was that a woman my own age had achieved such success so early while I was just an entry-level organizer with literary dreams. When I moved to D.C. in 1999, everyone was reading White Teeth. It took me a while to follow suit, but once I had, I would have written her, I was glad I did.
Give me certainty
Artist-of-many-voices Lark Pien has written a post over at First Second proclaiming all her longing for the certainty I’ve been suggesting the artist dismiss as mistaken. I guess it must be a metaphor, but she describes a hole in her vision she longs to fill. She says she can’t see things straight on. That she has to bob her head around to see you from the edges of her vision and it leaves her longing for a whole picture.
Radical Boy Manifesto: Stories are finite
[Only a handful of true stories play out in this world. We live these stories again and again, they are the real stories of our real lives. They cannot be changed. They cannot be fought. They cannot be twisted. They begin in the same ways and they end in the same ways. As a thirty year-old adult, I have seen a number of stories repeat themselves again and again. I have seen a number of my peers tell me repeatedly that his or her story is different as a watch a replay in their lives of sad stories I’ve watched before.
A girl can dream can't she?
What higher compliment can be given a thinker than for her most significant intellectual enemy to take the time and energy to say all her writing is nonsense? This weekend I visited the Municipal Arts Society’s Jane Jacobs exhibit. As exhibits go, it was pretty much a long essay printed on some large pieces of paper, but there were some real gems. I encourage you to click the image above and see the larger view.
Hauswerk, an exhibition I am missing
I just learned about this show yesterday from an Inquirer story. I don’t see how I’m going to find a way to get out there with all my weekends burnt from now through the New Year and a day job. It stinks. This sounds very fun. Basically, an art class at Tyler’s School of Art, here in Philadelphia, managed to get hold of a whole house in the suburbs and turn it into one big installation called Hauswerk.