4 Thursday Tidbits

Short weeks don't always go quickly enough. Happy almost Friday!

• On creating the feeling you want the reader to feel via Maud Newton

Not always so easy or pleasant if it means feeling what you are writing

• Even if the whole world were to fall to pieces, the unity of the psyche would never be shattered. And the wider and more numerous the fissures on the surface, the more the unity is strengthened in the depths via But Does it Float

Really striking, lovely images in RED

• The Great Escape via Economy Custard

Always delightful.

• Me, Myself and Why via FT.com

Cindy Sherman interview

Chardin and Proust, on the Beauty of the Everday

Still Life with Plums, 1730

Rather I should say: Me, on Chardin and Proust, on the beauty of everyday things like jugs, water, and fruit in an article up on Escape Into Life magazine.  Being able to see the beauty in the commonplace is surely a quality to be valued.  Chardin's still life above looks nothing like my messy kitchen table--but then perhaps it does more than I can appreciate.

I'd love to hear what you think about the article.  This train of thought spun off my enjoyment of De Botain's How Proust Can Change Your Life, an enjoyable book I shared earlier this month here and also worth a look.

Distractions: Robot Birthday Invitations

Note that "birthday" is written across the top in binary code

Yep, robot birthday invitations. Not really normal fodder for the blog, but it is what I was up last night writing instead of a blog post: an article on robot-themed birthday invitations. Isn't it amazing somebody would pay me to do that?

The Jig is Up

I've had an amazing five months, been to some beautiful places, and seen some amazing things, but for better or worse the jig is up. I'm moving back to New York city next month.

I am ambivalent about the move. On one hand, it will be great to back in a city I know and love, but on the other I will miss the itinerant lifestyle. Also, while I'm excited by the prospect of finding a new job and working on new projects (somewhere besides my kitchen table), I'm going to miss the luxury of waking up whenever my body tells me to to do some writing.
What all this boils down to is that my last few weeks in Playa del Carmen will be spent job hunting-- never the most fun task. I crawl through the job boards, craft up cover letters, and then send them off with little expectation of hearing back. I'm off to the job boards now in fact. At least hiring seems to be on the upswing and I have had a pretty encouraging response from the past week of applying. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

Why Milton Makes Writers Look Bad

One on my favorite poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay, would sit and create sonnets in her head, not writing them down until each line was perfect. Milton, as we all learned in school, was blind and he said Paradise Lost to an amanuensis as he composed it. He claimed that a divine spirit inspired him at night and in the morning he would recite new verses. Both of these authors knew what they wanted to say before committing to print. I envy them.


I seem to be working out the novel as I go. My story hasn't changed since the first draft, but they way I want to tell it has. I'm in the midst of tedious editing as I change the chronology and presentation of events. The thing that bothers me is that I can't really write in an inspired way for long stretches. It's more like solving, or rather creating, a puzzle at this point. So I write a bit, think a bit, switch a scene or delete something, and read over it. It's a series of stops and starts.

Of course, when I was in the middle of the first draft, you wouldn't have heard me going on about "inspired long stretches." Those tended to only come after a fair amount of hard work, but looking back it seems like halcyon days. Now it also seems best to work everything out in your head first. Think of all the time and typing I could have saved. Maybe if my novel were 14 lines I could do that, but I certainly couldn't come anywhere close to Milton. The bastard.

New Year's Resolution

I'm keeping it simple this year. I've never actually kept good financial records, exercised regularly, or learned a new language anyhow.

Time to roll up my sleeves.

Goodbye New York!

This time tomorrow I will be on a plane to St. Maarten. I have to say, the dismally cold and wet weather makes the parting all the sweeter. When I spoke to the real estate agent about it, she complained about the winter weather down there. You know, 85 degrees. She helped my boyfriend and I find an apartment with a view of the ocean.

At this point, I've been living out of a backpack for over a week, staying with various people, and making some very long commutes. I'm ready to leave! Blogging will resume at a normal schedule once I settle in. I have a backlog of things I want to write about, and just haven't had a chance to focus on (or an Internet connection, depending on where I am staying).

One of the things I've been thinking about is the best way to spend all this newfound free time. I want to finish the novel. I want to do some freelance travel writing. But there are so many other things I hope to do--learn how to speak French and play chess. Build a website (I've wanted to make a new home for this blog for a long time). Read Proust and all of Dickens. Try to revive my dying Italian. Scuba dive. Online classes. So many things. If you can think of a good project, send it my way.

But for now, I'm off.

L

Hello St. Maarten!

Voodoo Work Magic

I love my little voodoo office man. He's been my cubicle mate for a few years now. He's one of the things I was a little sad to pack up, along with my collection of Chinese Buddha figures. This was my last full week in the office. Next Wednesday is my last day and then I'm off. Rushed as everything has been, I've still had the time to get nostalgic over New York. For example, I took a cab through a McDonald's drive thru last night. How amazing is that? And this morning I can see a water tower with an orange roof against the blue sky. I love being in the city.

That said, I've been itching to travel for the past year. I traveled a lot before settling in New York, and I didn't realize when I took my first job that I really would have only two weeks vacation. With holidays and and family, two weeks goes quickly. Not to mention, one job leads to another... Next thing you know, years of your life have passed. Quitting may be the best thing I've ever done for myself. Being in an unknown place awakens me to my surroundings. It's easier to notice the different patterns of life. New York isn't going anywhere, but this is a great chance for me to explore and write. It sounds incredibly indulgent, but I'm proud of myself--even if my novel is utter crap.

And of course, I won't miss these stacks of papers!

Ducks in A Row

Excuse the saccharine image, but I have good reason to be chuffed and post image of baby ducks in rows. In my long hiatus from posting I have

• sublet my apartment
• quit my job
• bought a plane ticket to Saint Maarten
• all the while enduring horrible travel ordeals to spend Thanksgiving with my boyfriend's family, only to rush home yesterday and spend it packing up all our personal possessions, in order to put them in storage before the subletters move in tommorow morning

It's all worked out so well so quickly I've hardly thought anything through. That's not exactly true, of course; I had been trying to move to the Caribbean for the winter ever since my boyfriend's was approved to work remotely. But nothing was working out until last Tuesday morning, and now suddenly I have a whole new adventure ahead of me.

We'll be there until March. I'm going to focus on my writing. I plan to finish my novel and start sending out query letters. I also am going to do some travel blogging, and hopefully scour up some other freelance opportunities. It's a pretty amazing opportunity, even aside from the beaches and sun. That's kind of like the icing on the cake.

I feel very, very lucky.

Dr. Wicked's Write or Die

Continuing the Halloween theme, this writer's application is evil, fun and useful all at the same time. Dr. Wicked's Write or Die lab lets you put in the number of words you want and a time length. Then you choose between Gentle, Normal, or Kamikaze mode. Then you press go...and if you don't start typing and keep typing the white background starts to go red and crazy consequences ensue. Negative reinforcement has never before used the Hanson Brothers MmmBop to such good effect.


And in other scariness, Halloween best in show photo! Unfortunately it was POURING and we never made it into the parade, but at least I got to see this girl with her amazing claws and head. I would also post the man wearing only a bunch of leather straps with a huge feathered headress (because it was pretty scary too!) but I'm afraid my blog would get flagged. So use your imagination.

The Novel

I can't quite get up the gumption to finish this big project of a novel I have going on. I read it through, and made some notes, and even made a Post-it storyboard of scenes. There are definitely some changes I want to make, and some I'm not sure about. But what I'm really doing is putting off the challenge of sitting down to edit/rewrite the last half.

I believed in it enough to write 240+ pages of it. Hell, I believed in it enough to switch careers and am now contemplating an even bigger life change. But the project itself is stymied, and partly because I'm wondering if it is worth all this effort and time.

I know the answer to that one is yes, somehow it is worth it. (Even if all it does is teach me that I'm an inescabably bad writer.) And I was okay with that back in those golden days of yore when I actually enjoyed working on it. Have you ever gotten stuck on a project? How do you get excited about it again?

Ayn Rand's Frank Lloyd Wright Cottage

In 1937, Ayn Rand asks Frank Lloyd Wright for an interview to discuss a novel she is writing. Years later, she gets a house, or at least this design of a "cottage." (The writing studio on the top level sounds incredible.) The whole story is fascinating, and for those of you who have read The Fountainhead, you can guess who she modeled Roark on. If you're really enamored of it, this sketch is up for sale.

This has got me thinking of my ideal home. I would like it to project off the top floor of a apartment building so that it arcs dramatically over the street below. Maybe I would have an apartment spread over two facing buildings with an enclosed glass walkway between, one apartment would be my private apartment and one my public where people could visit. Of course, I've also always thought the water towers could be turned into really neat urban bungalows.

But, in order that any of this may actually happen, I'm going to get back to story boarding the novel. Happy Friday!

Why We Create Art

That question has been running through my head the past day or so. You can google "why we create art" and get responses in varying degrees of inanity and less than helpful lists. Fundamentally though, creating art is not Darwinistic and it does not pay. Yet it feels much more vital than a hobby, which is what the hierarchy of life would reduce it to.

People create for many reasons, and often when discussing it they say they enjoy the process or they want to express themselves. But I think expression implies two parties. We create for other people to read or see or hear. Even while I say I write for myself because I enjoy it, there's more. I write with the purpose of communicating. Even in personal journal entries, I explain situations as if I didn't know what happened in my own life. Maybe that's just me. To some degree, if I can finish my novel satisfactorily and no one ever reads it I will be proud of my efforts. Yet I want people to read it and I wrote with the implicit goal that if a person read it, he/she would understand the story I am telling.

So yes, we create for ourselves. Yet somehow the expression isn't complete if there is no one on the other side to see it or hear it or read it and recognize it's existence. It becomes "like dead letters sent to him who live, alas, away." If a tree falls in a forest with no one there to hear it, it doesn't matter if it makes a sound.

Would you buy Virginia Woolfe's beach?

A Cornish beach thought to have inspired Virginia Woolf's novel To The Lighthouse has been sold for £80,000, says the BBC. It is believed childhood recollections of trips to the seaside in Cornwall influenced her novel, set in the Hebrides.

It's not quite the oddity one might think, as the proceeds have gone to charity for a local theater. Personally, I find it a very exciting development. I have been staring at the same bit of wall this past year writing my novel, and I'm sure its been a very important influence. I would be willing to part with this portion of the wall for a fraction of the sum Woolfe's beach got. Similarly, there are these two orange pillows I've been resting my feet on. I feel the color orange now pervades my work. You could be the proud owner of Linnea West memorabilia before the rest of the world even knows that name. Think about it.

Ah, Ravels in Review

My fingers are relieved to take a bit of a break this week (perhaps you're relieved not to be presented with a long, involved post ; ) . I've gotten into some topics I find super interesting.

We kicked off the week with a proposal against taking photographs of artwork in museums, which got some agreement, certainly some disagreement, and a lot of mixed feelings. It stuck in my mind, and I revised my opinion to allow that instead of being evil and stupid is was perhaps a sign of engagement with an artwork.

We played a game matching the artwork to its auction house estimate. Nobody won, so I'm keeping the $1M prize. In fact, even the auction houses didn't win; they still have their two biggest works by Picasso and Giacometti.

I had the pleasure of seeing the musical South Pacific at Lincoln Center, and then having the song Honey Bun in my head for the whole week.

In fact, that annoying song is probably why I got a little contentious in my post on the Affordable Art Fair, contributing to my backhanded praise of the store Urban Outfitters for so cleverly following the pluralistic trends evident at the fair.



And my personal pick of the week was on the use of writing in painting, especially as it evolved during Modernism. Anyways, thanks for a fun week guys, and have a good weekend!

Obituaries: don't make them a dead end

I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with a lot of pleasure.
-- Clarence Darrow

Obituaries ought to be pleasurable reading, and too often people are literally buried with a perfunctory paragraph. Of the many forms of writing, obituaries hardly get prominence, much less taught in classes, but a lively obit can be as great as any other kind of writing.

People, probably in books more than life, sometimes imagine what will be written about them after they pass away. However, obituaries are rarely written for the dead person they commemorate and as writing they often receive as much attention and care as advertisements for old cars. The typical obit puts together the facts of someone's life, birth location and time, death location and time, vocation in between the two, and a note about whom they leave behind. It serves as a community notice and has a sentimental significance to those noted ones left behind.

Newspaper writers rarely aspire to the obituaries column, and rarely do they seem to devote much significance to it. Some come to love it and look forward to deaths with, forgive them, glee. Prominent individuals receive a longer, more carefully thought out retrospectives in papers across the world. Yet if the website Obituaries.com shows anything, it's that the vast amount of obituaries are hasty factual notices. This is why it is all the more interesting when you come across a great obituary.

A great obituary makes the person known to you as a lifelong friend, and becomes as affecting and interesting as the person was. The New York Times does a good job of suggesting why a person is historically relevant to learn about and mourn. The L.A. Times makes its obituaries a little more compelling with a little more kick, but by far the best obituaries being written today are in the pages of The Economist magazine.

The Economist prints one obituary, or posthumous profile, per monthly edition, and its choice of person is often surprising and always rewarding. It literally makes the dead come alive, with a verve that surprises and delights. The Economist doesn't give bylines, but its obituaries are currently written by the former editor Anne Roe. She is the co-author, with Keith Colquhoun, of The Economist Book of Obituaries. Of course, The Economist doesn't serve as a community notice with funeral details. Instead, it explains why and how the person led a fascinating life. The profiles range from that of H.M., a man without a memory, to Boris Fyodorov, a Russian reformer who is examined through his passion for English churches. This unexpected angle provides an unexpected familiarity and insight into the character of the person.

In this NPR interview, Wroe says she likes to "get to the point" right away, and "the point may not be the one we first think of." Another point in favor of Economist obituaries is that they are more than recitations of facts; they take a decided view of an individual and his achievements, which makes for better reading.

Morbid? Perhaps, yet who knew obituaries could be such great reading? Wroe says in the interview that "it seems to me like an opportunity to get into dozens of very interesting lives and I find it endlessly fascinating, not in the least morbid. In fact, we have a tradition in England of rather irreverent and interesting obituaries ...." Perhaps we Americans are too stiff about stiffs. A great and lively obituary is the best thing you could hope for after your death. As commemoration of the dead, an obit is one of the most noble projects for a writer.

(Originally published December 21, 2008 in Blogcritics Magazine.)

Lazy Books

A great article for anyone who has ever tried to write, well, anything. I am leaving you with this link to it instead of putting up a long/thoughtful/witty post.

Why? Because I too am fed up with my lazy book, which resembles this one.

Little Grey Cells Tackle Agatha's Christies Perennial Popularity

Agatha Christie's murder mysteries is to crime what Romeo and Juliet is to lovers; her thrillers inspires admiration from criminals themselves. My ignorant companion of last night made some distinctly unappreciative sounds when he discovered what my 'big find' at the library yesterday was. Harrumph! was my returning noise, and so we watched The Blue Train, A&E version of the novel starring David Suchet. Soon he was chuckling at the detective Poirot's vanity over his waxed moustache and throwing out (entirely wrong) guesses as to whodunit. The perennial popularity of Agatha Christie, the best-selling author of all time at over 2 billion books, stem from the 'order and method' she uses to construct her thrillers, the same 'order and method of the little grey cells' with which Poirot solves his cases.

Order and Method
Agatha Christie's work is brilliant because its purely driven by plot. A whodunit is a suspenseful process of revealing facts, and with Poirot's 'order and method' arranging them into a solution. The order and method of my little grey cells, as opposed to Poirot's, are perhaps not so strong. In Christie's work, nothing in the plot is superfluous to arriving at this denouement. Characters gradually expose themselves in connection to it, people knew each other through it, and closed situations such as the snowed-in manor house or blue train have the advantage of keeping the suspect pool focused but large.

This is not to say I disparage her characters because they are by-products of plot. She sketches individuality in a few quick strokes. Overall, her books capture post-WWII British society with the wounds of the past and the changing mores of the Jazz Age. But her characters are plausible without the reader being tempted into their interior lives. They are shallow books of circumstance and mere fun, but mere fun is a great thing and Christie writes them to perfection.

Christie quite rightly tends to keep the viewpoint to a limited 3rd person, so that we see what Poirot sees, but not what he thinks. This engages the reader to sleuth out the mystery too. The few novels that she has done from the point of view of a character has its pitfalls, as the reader automatically side with the protagonist. It feels like a gyp when something happens that the narrator leaves out.

Of course she's popular: her whodunits perfect their type, and her detectives are delicious, whether it be the wax-moustached Belgian Hercule Poirot or the old village gossip Miss Marple.

But who is this woman?
The Queen of Crime was in many senses a steadfast, disciplined writer who produced mystery upon mystery rather than illegal activities. She remains something of an enigma herself. While the later part of her life found her happily married to an archaeologist- not Mr. Christie- and going on digs between buying new houses, there was a most curious case (more here) in her youth. The only odd incident in an interesting, but ordinary life.

She disappeared in 1926. Classically enough, without a trace. The police were at their wits end for 11 days. Then one day a reporter is in a hotel lobby in the country. He notices something odd about the woman sitting on the chair. "Mrs. Christie?" he asks. Mrs. Christie blinks, and says "Oh yes. I have no idea how I got here." To the end of her life she claimed amnesia.

Book Review: The Subway

The Subway is an intriguing quasi-fictional appropriation of reality that all New Yorkers can identify with. The Subway contains the full sweep of humanity in its passengers, as they jostle or sit at safe distances or stare into the passing faces. This panorama of society contains the myriad human interactions that make up civilization, from shoving to giving up your seat to flirting.

Minute gestures of the passengers lead one to observations of humanity. For the protagonist is like Everyman of Pilgrim's Progress. He goes about his quest to arrive at his destination, and struggles with the conflicts of finding his metro card, missing a train by a second, being crowded into a smelly homeless person; we see his personality revealed, and as people and especially as New Yorkers, we can identify with his quest.

Within The Subway, all the glories and incongruities of American democracy are present. From the homeless to the elite, at any hour of the day the vast swell of humanity is present in all its odors. All people in the hunt for seats have the equality that makes America great.

Who wrote this fascinating study of the human psyche and deployed his acute and pointed observations on human nature? Who depicted the possible scenarios that could happen among such a group of people? No one. This novel doesn't exist.

How is it possible that no one has written this book yet? I can't be the only New Yorker who on their endless commute sometimes wondered about their fellow passengers, about where they were going and why. Storytelling has its roots in such unparalleled access to people. People who are too immersed in their experiences to put up facades. The subway is humanity raw and uncensored.

Considering people's (and my own behaviors) on the subway, I'm convinced it is a minefield of character and of situation that is integral to a great story.

Musicians...

Mother with child, woman in pink, and Hasidic Jew

Nursing mother

Young lovers

Homeless man

Young pole dancers

These photos from the NYC subway make great character studies. It's seems so much like a book already written to me. But I checked on the Internet, where all things are true, and The Subway hasn't been written. Yet.

Art of War

Balancing work and writing has been difficult lately--Eek! Not a boring article of work and writing? Hardly, gentle Reader: this is a war.

My writing and my job are at odds with each other, and lately my job has been winning. People always speak about a work/life balance, but my problem is a work/work balance. Perhaps someday I'll have an official writing job (perhaps you readers could mail me some checks...) but until then, I work a normal work week and try and squeeze in writing.

Time, in itself, is not the problem. I could work, and then have enough time to write a blog post on a normal workday. But the real difficulty with writing, besides saying things well, is having something to say. When I become consumed with my paying job, I loose the creative bit of my brain. I'm out of the loop on interesting news as well, and can't process it enough to form an opinion of my own. (Opinions being crucial in this blogging business.) Of course, right now I'm talking about working and blogging, not even working and blogging and sleeping and interacting with humans... which are getting squeezed these days.

Today as I was dealing with drudgery of the day job, I stopped what I was doing and brainstormed. Slow at first, but soon I felt all juiced up and full of ideas and happier. It's easy to forget the passions that make you happy sometimes. And then I felt inspired to write about the delicate art of balancing work and writing. I myself am not quite an artíste at this balancing act yet, but maybe someday.

Until then, Reader, I accept personal checks or cash or cookies. I am especially partial to holiday cheer in the form of sugar.