I’ll always think of you watching the world go by from the top of Buena Vista Park while the fog rolls in.
I’ve been doing some heavy, painful rewriting of a project that has me full of doubts, so I’m using music a lot as I work on it. But I can’t have just anything on, and even my favorite music will have me going off in the wrong direction. So when I’m stuck and need magic help to get instantly in the mood to write, I turn to one track and one track only. Arvo Part, Tabula Rasa – Silentium. I put it on auto repeat and play this into the ground.
Here, it only took me three hours of crawling around the back end of the wordpress plug-in directory to see if I could put up an audio sample of it on this blog.
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I think it’s still easily buyable. And now, since I’m a media-uploading fiend, here’s what the cover looks like.
Tags: arvo part, spooky writing music
I went to a conference this past weekend at Asilomar, which is on the Monterey Peninsula, moody and rainswept in February. Somewhere south of San Jose, hitting the radio again, I caught the second half of “Add It Up” by the Violent Femmes, and it sounded so exciting and stripped down and full of awkward rage and lust, it catapulted me immediately back to high school when, one day (skipping classes), some friends and I wandered over to the UofA student union and down, I think on the second level where the mailroom was, found the Femmes playing an acoustic set to a crowd of, like, three, looking all misfit, because instead of drums they had what looked like a plastic bucket or a metal pail, and Gano skinny, sweaty, eyes closed, was singing that shocking ohmymymymymyohmymotherrrr.
It was great to hear that song again after years, especially on 101 South, after driving by the exits of my working past – Fashion Island, San Antonio Road, Oregon Expressway – remembering long-gone commutes and carpools and speeding by them.
Later on, going for a run along the ocean view road, past a sandy golf course and exotic flowering succulents, I got the song stuck in my head again, (ohmymymymymyohmymotherrrr, I would love to love you lover). And it was great, running in the rain, skipping out on a part of the conference, being someplace new, and actually, staying up late and hanging out being a little bit high school. Though nothing’s ever like that again.
I’d gotten the idea stuck in my head that some tragedy had befallen the Femmes, something befitting that utter vulnerable rawness of the set I’d seen as a teenager skulking in the university student union. And when I got home and thought about writing this blog post I looked them up, thinking that maybe the guy had committed suicide or something. But no, what I found on Wikipedia was that the singer had sold rights to “Blister in the Sun” to Wendy’s for something to do with hamburgers!
How perfect is that? Somebody’s hallowed past is another person’s hamburger jingle. It reminded me to enjoy my memories but not get too choked up over them. And if I had to be honest, I’ll admit that the other song I had stuck in my head while I went running in Pacific Grove was the cheesy Flo Rida remix of Spin Me Round (You spin my head right round right round, when you go down). Nothing hallowed there – just radio randomness and a long drive in the rain.
Tags: asilomar, highway 101, violent femmes
A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Wow. I almost never like high-fantasy epics of m’lady courtliness, plus (ho hum) spooky old darkness, plus swords forged someplace awesomely dread of some kind of dreadly steel, plus, oh, dragons and prophecy and kitchen-sink Tolkien. Now I know why I’m so dismissive of that stuff – it always falls short. This book does not. The copy I have looks like any other pulpy doorstopper you might buy in a pinch at a drugstore before heading to jury duty, and yet I stayed up quite late reading and against my will and good sense went down the “Song of Ice and Fire” rabbit hole, even unto behavior like checking out George RR Martin’s livejournal and reading of his football preferences, yea for several entries even. F*** it’s now onto “A Clash of Kings” and more Westerossian madness for me and a futile attempt to shake free of books that slice like fine Valyrian steel through all my reading prejudices and plans. Bring on the dragons.
Tags: books
Oh boy, it’s been a while. I think I was up to something this past year, and here’s my best guess as to what it was.
- I bought my first smartphone. After dithering, I went for the iPhone (as my friend Juana said, anything the Blackberry can do, the iPhone can do cuter.) Now I’ve got tangled ear buds and twitchy fingers like everyone else in the Bay Area. But I do like … hell, love it.
- I picked up some freelance work as the project editor of a YA nonfiction series with the mission of bringing essential information to America’s youth. The first title is How to Be a Vampire, and I’ve since how-to’d my way through How to Be a Zombie (lurching soon toward a bookstore near you). Naturally, How to Be a Werewolf is in progress.
- I liked Breaking Bad.
- I got a Google Voice number.
- I started editing for NVIDIA and learned a whole lot about parallel computing and other things that just blow my mind.
- I bought my first midriff-exposing yoga top (although I don’t always wear it).
- I did a lot of rewriting and revising (including a bank-robbery scene that I still don’t know if anyone likes) and for the most part I did it without chocolate.
- I vaguely remember being bored to death by Wolf Hall when it came in the New York Review of Books, and now I fully intend to read it while awake since it’s won the Booker.
- I really liked Humpday.
- I started thinking, if Grant can blog three times a week, I can blog three times a year, dammit.
I’ve taken up Bikram yoga again after a long hiatus. This is the kind of yoga that is as much spiritual enterprise as physical practice, because most of the time you’re doing it you wish you were dead. You’re in a room heated to just a few degrees below sauna, the instructors are merciless, the poses kick your butt, and – given the “Look good naked” slogan that some of the studios use – most of the time you’re surrounded by limber waifs in yoga cute shorts. Even though it seems like I see more older people doing Bikram these days, it’s still the sort of thing where when I see someone with varicose veins and a poochy belly I feel like saying “thank you!”
Anyway, the Bikram near-death experience is very instructive. I lie in savasana and think, “I am dead.” My whole life, I should just be getting ready to be dead: for instance, finally clearing out my folder of junk mail and important financial statements so that when I’m dead my loved ones won’t have to go through all that crap.
Most of the poses I am happy just to survive. But occasionally I get some additional nuance beyond just life and death. Standing Bow Pulling pose is the one I usually fall while trying to do, but now I like it because I think it’s the best one for writing.
The reason is, in order to achieve balance in the pose you have to charge your body forward (the instructors always say that: “charge” – like we’re the yoga cavalry) and kick back at the same time. If you don’t kick back as hard as you go forward, you fall. The importance of kicking back while you’re going forward made me think about my novel and how I really needed to think more about the forces of opposition within it (well, also, my editor may have mentioned something about that). For the story to work, my antagonist needs to be going just as strongly in his direction as my dear little protagonist goes in hers.
So I’ve been focusing on my antagonist and trying to get to the heart of a villainy that makes sense.
Listening to “Fresh Air” recently on NPR, I was surprised to find out that I actually had a lot in common with the celebrity guest, Bruce Springsteen.
Bruce Springsteen has been in the news a lot lately. He performed at one of the Obama inauguration events, then he was off to the Super Bowl half-time show (which I happened to miss because at the time I was weeping uncontrollably during “Revolutionary Road” – another story). And I’d been thinking about him more than I usually do because he was in the Sunday New York Times, and – as should be apparent from my previous post – the Sunday New York Times is way more important to me than is healthy.
So he was on my mind in a way that he isn’t usually. I like his songs. I especially like some of the ones on “Nebraska.” For instance, the one that goes “Mr. State Trooper…” I last heard it in a new way because it ended one of the episodes of “The Sopranos” perfectly with its eerie, spine-tingling whoop. But, really, I don’t know Bruce Springsteen – man or oeuvre – well. I brushed up against his songs on the radio the way you might nod your head to someone in your high school – only years later, when you reconnect with some person you used to know and you’re talking about old times and his name comes up, only then do you realize, my God, that guy was solid. Like, I would have thought Talking Heads, whatever I listened to back then – X, Suicidal Tendencies – those bands would have been enough to get me through, which just goes to show you.
Anyway, why I’m so thrilled about Bruce Springsteen now totally has to do with creative process. When Terri Gross asked him how he went about songwriting, he said he just fit it into his life. Whenever he had a spare half hour, hour or so.
I was stunned. The Bruce Springsteen. And he’s writing these songs a half hour here, a half hour there.
The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Bruce Springsteen is probably really busy. He might be busier than I am – I mean, I have young kids and that just naturally makes a person think she’s busier than anybody else, but the truth is, I’m not doing any half-time shows.
Even before I heard Bruce Springsteen say that he got his songwriting in during his spare time I’ve been trying to see what writing I can get done in little blocks of time. Crumbs of time. I used to think I needed vast stretches – days, even. And that is why, before I had kids, when my weekends were nothing but lollygagging, Sunday New York Times, and movies stretching out before me on an endless horizon of free time, I was not that productive a writer.
What I’ve realized now is that it’s a mental game. I’m not doing my corporate job any more, I should have more time. Somehow, it feels like less time. It’s an illusion. There’s more or less time, but how much there is doesn’t matter that much and, actually, it doesn’t vary that much. If I can believe I can get some writing done in a small amount of time, I do. But if I don’t, I surf, I look helplessly at the pieces of mail asexually reproducing on our kitchen counter, I do something futzy and wasteful and throw up my hands. Really, it’s all about believing in half hours.
I finally figured out what I miss from the Sunday New York Times.
They used to do this thing in the magazine next to the comics (which, I’m sorry, I try to read each one but have always given up on) called True-Life Tales. It was kind of like Modern Love, in the Sunday Styles section, in that it had a similar brilliance-to-cringe ratio, say, 1:9. But I lived for that 1 in 9 chance. I guess, back in the day, when I read True-Life Tales and Modern Love I had a 2 in 9 chance of satisfaction, which is pretty significant. Every Sunday morning, I’m there with a big mug of coffee, a groggy head, and a couple of kids making a racket in the background – believe me, 2 in 9 looks great.
What I liked about True-Life tales was that it was pretty much as advertised. Normal people suffered the indignities of life and they wrote funny about the experience. I find this genre of writing incredibly comforting, I think because not only do I feel like I go through a lot of indignities but also because now I’m in my 40s I realize I could die any moment. And since death is the ultimate indignity, having a funny story about indignity represents some kind of triumph over mortality. Or at least that’s my explanation for why I like to read about petty humiliations.
The problem is, it’s not so easy to find funny writing. The New Yorker sometimes has funny Shouts and Murmurs. For instance, about five years ago they ran one that was a corporate-style memo announcing family layoffs. Since my husband has a joke he likes to repeat about how he’s doing my year-end performance review, I found this to be hilarious.
After an especially humorless stretch of Sundays, I decided to go back through the New York Times’s archives and see if the pieces I remembered as being so funny were actually any good. And my scientific conclusion? They were. So now I’m wondering, could someone please bring back True-Life Tales? To this day, I laugh whenever I think about the woman and the angry Mailboxes, Etc. guy and I repeat to myself the awesome last line (“Have some damn respect”). Or the one about the guy in France having to wear the Speedo, his principled refusal, his surprising reconciliation with sexy swimwear, and the sweet way he faces the real issue – which is, the memory of going on a beach vacation with his divorced father in the 1970s. Or the one that begins, “I think I may have accidentally ended up in a pornographic film.”
I realize if I’m that obsessed with funny I could be reading The Onion more often, or watching “Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo” over and over again. But those are not funny Sunday morning experiences. Sunday morning – when I am thinking ahead to the beginning of the week and to the stuff not done from the previous week, when the house is trashed, when our dog has woken us up to go pee several times during the night, when we are all tired from having stayed up long past good sense the night before – Sunday morning is when I need my good news, my triumph over death, that insane Mailboxes guy and the Speedo and the adult film. So I’m just saying, New York Times, please. I’ve got the humiliation, you bring the funny. Because that stuff is keeping me alive.
Tags: my travails
Yes, I’m afraid things are bad. It is on all levels: malaise about life, an inability to drink enough water, sleeplessness, too much sleep, moping about the past, hatred of the past, fear of literature, fear of laundry, excess carbon, and not being able to duck a curse. I have even seen the new James Bond movie and experienced not so much lift as muddle.
This badness comes at a time when I’d thought I’d outwitted most of these things (well, maybe not my laundry) through the help of an excellent book called “The Now Habit” about overcoming procrastination. So it is also hubris that has tripped me up. Alas, today I am procrastinating again. I would write more except I think it would be just grumbling. I am going to push back from the computer and take a walk.
For the longest time my mom kept telling me to watch the HBO series “The Wire”, and I would say, “sure.” I intended to get to it someday. “It blows ‘The Sopranos’ out of the water,” she would say, and I would say, “yeah, okay.” But “The Wire” seemed – from glimpses I’d caught of it in hotel rooms or wherever – impenetrable and a bit dreary. I’m quite sure it is obvious where this is going.
So now I’ve had my conversion, and I’m a slobbering, frothing, born-again “Wire” fan. And there is no pleasure to be had anywhere, any more, ever again. Because “The Wire” was so good it kept me up late at night thinking about public schools, drug policies, and foster kids. Because no book comes close. Because by some cosmic misfortune the next movie in our Netflix queue was the unspeakably bad “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” it has made all other movies seem laughably inept and lightweight. It almost felt sacrilegious the day after the final episode, to smile or to express suburban joy at my Berkeley Volvo and the way I may drive it to excellent farmers’ markets. O, Wire, you have ruined my life!
In some ways, though, it is no joke when something grabs you so strongly and makes you story-sick with that peculiar malaise – the real world fades away, the characters feel more vivid than the people you see every day, the tragedy (well, in “The Wire” it was countless tragedies) of a character worms its way inside and coils like a parasite into your thoughts.
After it was over, I wondered also where all my worked-up emotion would go. Didn’t “The Wire” show again and again how one individual could make a difference? So what would I do after watching it? Sadly I haven’t yet figured that out.
