the mess, the shame

I have this issue. Now, my colleague here is not a fan of meta-navel-gazing-self-absorbed wank about writing and process and fuck knows what else. Fair enough, I suppose. Certainly my milling things over in my head for weeks and months and days on end as opposed to, you know, hammering something out and letting it be good enough. It’s a blog, not Das Capital.(1)

(1) You know that bit of Marx where he described primitive communism as the capacity to live life as one wishes, fishing in the morning, writing of an afternoon? If that were really true, I would have quite genuinely starved to death by now. The other day I had to bribe myself to go down the hall for something with the promise of ice cream at the other end. I would try to fish for ten minutes and then collapse weakly on the riverbank and probably allow myself to get rained on. What I mean to say is that I am phenomenally lazy and yet some kind of OCD-perfectionist. This means that Bernard Black would feel right at home in my beyond-messy house.

anaïs nin

“Do you know what I would answer to someone who asked me for a description of myself, in a hurry? This:

?? !!

For indeed my life is a perpetual question mark–my thirst for books, my observations of people, all tend to satisfy a great, overwhelming desire to know, to understand, to find an answer to a million questions. And gradually the answers are revealed, many things are explained, and above all, many things are given names and described, and my restlessness is subdued. Then I become and exclamatory person, clapping my hands to the immense surprises the world holds for me, and falling from one ecstasy into another. I have the habit of peeping and prying and listening and seeking–passionate curiosity and expectation. But I have also the habit of being surprised, the habit of being filled with wonder and satisfaction each time I stumble on some wondrous thing. The first habit could make me a philosopher or a cynic or perhaps a humorist. But the other habit destroys all the delicate foundations, and I find each day that I am still…only a Woman!”

e.b. white

“All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.”

noël coward

“My importance to the world is relatively small. On the other hand, my importance to myself is tremendous. I am all I have to work with, to play with, to suffer and to enjoy. It is not the eyes of others that I am wary of, but of my own. I do not intend to let myself down more than I can possibly help, and I find that the fewer illusions I have about myself or the world around me, the better company I am for myself.”

nabokov's advice to a young writer

1. If possible, be Russian. And live in another country. Play chess. Be an active trader between languages. Carry precious metals from one to the other. Remind us of Stravinsky. Know the names of plants and flying creatures. Hunt gauzy wings with snares of gauze. Make science pay tribute. Have a butterfly known by your name.

2. Do not be awed by giant predecessors. Be ill-tempered with their renown. Point out flaws. Frighten interviewers from Time. Appear in Playboy. Sell to the movies.

3. Use unlikely materials. Who would choose Pnin as hero, but how did we live before Pnin?

4. Delight in perversity. Put a noun into the dictionary. Now we recognize the Lolita at every corner, see her sucking sweetened milk through straws at every soda fountain, dream her through all our fantasies.

5. Burn pedants in pale fire. Accept no fashions. Be your own fashion. Do not rely on earlier triumphs. Be new at each appearance.

6. Age indomitably, in the European manner. Do not finish your labours young. Be a planet, not a meteor. Honor the working day. Sit at your desk.

Vladimir Nabokov (1899 – 1977)

ivan turgenev

“If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin.”

my november

Friends, I am giving myself over to NaNoWriMo for the month of November. It may come to naught, but between that and writing comedy sketches, which, I hasten to add, are like academic-level hard, my frequency of posting will be intermittent at best for the next month or so. If I do it will very likely be whining about process or something like that. It promises to be quite dull.

I have not forgotten you, internet. I will be engaged in a war with some words, of which I am simultaneously the mistress and the bitch. A girl’s gotta be versatile in this day and age.

enthusiasm

My apologies for the long absence, internet. Sketch writing is hard. REALLY HARD. Like, opening a document and staring at it for nine straight hours hard. Kind of like academic paper writing, come to think of it, but without the ability to quote from giant stretches of someone else’s text. A pity, that.

But here I am, with thoughts. And my chief concern is about tonality. I stress all the time about striking the right tone, especially when I get excited. And I don’t see any virtue in adapting some kind of jaded hipster attitude and pretending that I think everything is shit. I certainly don’t feel that way at all. I genuinely like a lot of stuff, and some of it I get downright Dug-enthusiastic over.

I was trying to hammer out some kind of piece on America– why, despite the Tea Party and vasectomy-reversal billboards, it’s kind of an amazing place. That contrary to what Fitzgerald said, there are second acts in American lives. I’m not a nationalist, nor am I a patriot, really, in the modern sense of the word. But I believe you can recognize that modern nation-states are ideological abstractions and still feel affection for them, as this Onion piece would have it.

But the tone. The tone is what’s tricky. So I shelved it.  Because I am not Sarah Vowell. I find sincerity quite hard to transmit without sounding twee, or over-intellectualized, or facetious. It’s why I also have difficulty striking the right balance when I like something.

Right now I am watching The Thick of It, an amazing show about political spin in modern UK politics. I am attaching a clip, but it is sweary beyond compare. So NSFW, unless you happen to work in a mine or a pirate ship.

I fucking love it. The swearing alone rivals The Sopranos. (And we know how I feel about epic baroque cursing. It is one of my greatest joys in life. This stuff could be Slavic in its morphology, I kid you not).  Granted, the camera work, which is done in that jolty docu-cam style, does make me a little sick to my stomach. But if you power through (and you should, you should, you should) you will be rewarded.

I like to think it rivals Mad Men in its nuance, especially with regard to the constructed nature of masculine worlds. It’s like that feminist revelation, that men have a gender, too. That it’s all just one great big pissing contest. And it’s funny. Ridiculous, awkward — bilious and bizarre simultaneously. It bristles with an amazing ensemble energy; it’s spectacularly cast. I cannot enthuse enough. I could write a whole post that consisted solely of CAPSLOCK SCREAM FLAIL OMG WTF !!!!. But I don’t want to sound like a maniacal tween girl chasing R. Pattz down the street any more than I want to sound like these guys.

So that’s that, then. I hope you are all well.

not my poem, not my words

Writ on the Eve of My 32nd Birthday, A Poem by Gregory Corso

Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg in Lee Forest’s room, Hotel de Londres, Paris, December 1957. c. Harold Chapman

Writ on the Eve of My 32nd Birthday, A Poem by Gregory Corso

a slow thoughtful spontaneous poem

I am 32 years old

and finally I look my age, if not more.

Is it a good face what’s no more a boy’s face?

It seems fatter. And my hair,

it’s stopped being curly. Is my nose big?

The lips are the same.

And the eyes, ah the eyes get better all the time.

32 and no wife, no baby; no baby hurts,

but there’s lots of time.

I don’t act silly any more.

And because of it I have to hear from so-called friends:

“You’ve changed. You used to be so crazy so great.”

They are not comfortable with me when I’m serious.

Let them go to the Radio City Music Hall.

32; saw all of Europe, met millions of people;

was great for some, terrible for others.

I remember my 31st year when I cried:

“To think I may have to go another 31 years!”

I don’t feel that way this birthday.

I feel I want to be wise with white hair in a tall library

in a deep chair by a fireplace.

Another year in which I stole nothing.

8 years now and haven’t stole a thing!

I stopped stealing!

But I still lie at times,

and still am shameless yet ashamed when it comes

to asking for money.

32 years old and four hard real funny sad bad wonderful

books of poetry

—the world owes me a million dollars.

I think I had a pretty weird 32 years.

And it weren’t up to me, none of it.

No choice of two roads; if there were,

I don’t doubt I’d have chosen both.

I like to think chance had it I play the bell.

The clue, perhaps, is in my unabashed declaration:

“I’m good example there’s such a thing as called soul.”

I love poetry because it makes me love

and presents me life.

And of all the fires that die in me,

there’s one burns like the sun;

it might not make day my personal life,

my association with people,

or my behavior toward society,

but it does tell me my soul has a shadow.

still not nick hornby

Things I want, right effing now.

1. A cigarette, recessed filter, Parliament for choice.

2. A perfectly pulled double espresso.

3. Tickets to Oaxaca for DoD things.

4. Not to have to go to campus and see people I’ve been avoiding all summer.

5. To have perhaps not eaten 2 loaves of bread in a single weekend (ow)

6. An oxygen facial (to offset smoking)

7. To somehow be paid for writing something. Anything, really.

8. For the property management to turn on the radiators.

9. To not be getting a cavity. More ow.

10. Indian pudding with Ciao Bella vanilla gelato. Or a gingersnap.

11. This dress. And the arms to go with it. (Angela Basset’s would be ideal).

12. To perhaps not think that every comment in every medium is a personal fucking attack.