Tag: writing

something new to learn on piano [bravery takes many shapes]


the bird and the bee – polite dance song, directed by Eric Wareheim of Tim & Eric.

[…] Since I’m asking so nice
Would you just entertain
There’s nothing left to hide you away
Just show a little bit of brain

Yes that is what I mean
That’s the nail that I hit
I try to be as coy as I can
But I wanna see your naughty bit […]

-::-

We fall asleep facing our laptops; two beds, eight hours away. I have practice at this, at living far away, at being untouchable, unreachable, lonely yet loved.

The first person I had such a thing with lives here in England. He’s the reason I have the eight hour time difference from Vancouver to London permanently memorized. Our correspondence set the foundation for this place. Years of it, years of talking late at night, of mornings together, of chats and distance. There are hundreds of letters from him in my folders. Hundreds of pictures. He kept me writing, coaxed me into taking pictures. In many ways, he changed me from writing to being a writer, kicked it off, back when this journal was almost new. Back when I believed people who said nice things to me.

I was only a few years older when he hurt me, sliced his way through my center, sliced until I bled, and worse, then put me in a book full of sex that opened yet another crooked little vein. (This starts the part that’s never been public). Perhaps it was meant as a surprise? A surprise like the awful things I found out about him, how he used people; a surprise that sent everything sour.

With the open eyes of an adult, I can see that I was prey, but it took many emotional years, and many, many others to come forward with similar admissions. Women in pain have reached out to me from New York, London, San Francisco, Berlin, Toronto… We’re in so many places! There’s so many of us we might need a name. I collect them, now, his talented discarded. We are a small network, but we’ve started keeping track of the others and making friends. He has excellent taste.

I never asked him why I had a starring role in his first book, our relationship was already critically wounded and we had almost bled out by the time it was published. Was I the first? It seems too unlikely to be true, even though it’s what he said at the time. I’ve also never asked the other woman named in the novel if she had been consulted or what her place in the mess might be. Her name was easier to spot, the public attention must have been massive. (A mutual friend told me that she wasn’t, so I’ve filed her under “One Of Us (potential)” and crossed my fingers that she’s been okay.)

But I have been considering it lately. Now that I’m living just outside London, I’m only an hour’s drive away from his house. Two if I take transit, not even as long as a film. (Closure is such a pretty word. Sound it out! It’s beautiful.) Maybe I should reach out to her, the way the others have reached out to me. Break the silence, try not to fumble, and then, perhaps, ask him for tea.

It has been a long time, but I’ll bet his phone number is the same.

I share this

TODAY’S REQUIRED READING: I Have Seen The Tops Of Clouds, by Quinn Norton

Quinn Norton shows a bit of tooth, a flash of anger, and the resolve we all require to keep making things better.

(Her trick, interestingly enough, is my trick, too. I do not believe I will ever tire of the miracle of flight.)

“I write about depressing things. I try to face the worst things about humanity and our situation. I started with how the oceans are dying, but since then I’ve moved on to genocide, imprisonment, the history of labor exploitation, computer security and mass surveillance, racism, and global ecological collapse. I’m fun at parties.

[…] We are diseased and angry and we kill each other and ourselves and all the world. We are killing off life on Earth like a slow moving asteroid. I try to look at this, and my own part in it. Sometimes it is overwhelming. I feel so powerless trying to comprehend all the terrible things we face, much less get past them into our future, with our humanity and our inconceivably beautiful little blue-green planet preserved.

[…]All these grown-up monsters for my grown-up mind, they are there in the nights I wake up terrified and taunted by death. When I feel so small and broken, when despair and terror take me, I have a secret tool, a talisman against the night. I don’t use it too often so that it doesn’t lose its power. I learned it on airplanes, which are strange and thrilling and full of fear and boredom and discomfort. When I am very frightened, I look out the window on airplanes and say very quietly:

I have seen the tops of clouds

And I have. In all the history of humanity, I am one of the few that has seen the tops of clouds. Many would have died to do so, and some did. I have seen them many times. I have seen the Earth from space, and spun it around like a god to see what’s on the other side. We are the only consciousness we’ve ever found that has looked deep into the infinite dark, and instead of dark, we saw galaxies. Galaxies! Suns and worlds beyond number. We have looked into our world and found atoms, atomic forces, systems that dance to the glorious music of the universe. We have seen actual wonders that verge on the ineffable. We have coined a word for the ineffable. We have coined thousands of words for the ineffable. In our pain we find a kind of magic, in our worst and meanest specimens we find the flesh of a common human story. We are red with it.

the beginnings of failure finished stories (think that you are capable of more than you believe.)

Once upon a time laying awake, laying together, the chance is there, the thought, the idea. She leans over, up on one elbow, any audience would understand this gesture. Next is the kiss, the closed eyes, the heavier heartbeat. Instead, the moment, ready, pared of seconds, is interrupted. “Did I ever tell you about my screenplays?” She falls back down on the bed, body convulsing with laughter. He looks offended. She gasps, catching her voice in tiny snatches, “You have to be kidding!”

Another time, another story. She sits in the bleachers of a damp arena. One of her favourite bands is on stage, “We’re half awake in a fake empire.” Everyone sings along. Earlier she recorded a video of their best love song on her phone. She ended by turning the camera around and blowing a kiss. She would send it to someone but it’s too big for a text and she doesn’t have his e-mail address.

Another man, a different story. “I never got to finish the story about how I lost my virginity! So there I was in those chunky heels and I blew a guy. Didn’t do it for me. That’s when I figured, there’s something missing. This isn’t what I’m into. Definitely need to have a vagina involved. But anyway, that’s how Anne Rice made me think I might be gay.”

The music continues, beautiful, deeply melodic, rushing in bursts if drum roll and guitar solos, the singers voice woven like brocade into the horn section. She admires their lighting, their glitchy graphic video accompaniment, their stagecraft, their everything. The compositions are flawless and they choose excellent designers for everything else. A mental note: to find out who later. Every good artist is worth following up.

None of this is linear. This story only holds together by one thread. They sit in a restaurant in Whistler, exquisite, bracketed by alcohol and discussions about religion. His eyes are strikingly beautiful, huge and blue. “I saved up all year for this dinner,” he confesses. Unsaid, to keep it off the books of his government. In his wallet are a collection of commemorative prayer tracts from the annual pilgrimages his family arranges and attends.

Later, the same week as the concert, she’s upstairs in a velvet and brass lined restaurant in Yaletown at a Women in Communications networking event. Tucked near the back, typing again on the phone, she hasn’t been in a room of this many women since grade school gym class. It feels odd, but sweet. Another mental note: She should have more business cards made.

They hold hands as he walks her home in the rain. “Who are you?” He asks, baffled. She explains about the social event horizon. She explains about similar orbits on opposite sides of the same metaphorical sun. Her free hand traces ideas in the air. Socioeconomics. She is already wearing both his sweater and his coat. Something here feels destined but she hasn’t yet pinned down what. He asks again, ablaze with wonder, “All of that is brilliant, but who are you really?”

The woman on the panel up front is explaining how to use social media. The specific key seems to be making it easy to make people to help you. Know what you want, learn what you can, and remember you don’t know what you don’t know. All of the advice seems sound. The only moment she’s uncomfortable is when she notices a peculiar detail: how the women present unconsciously arranged themselves when they sat. Except for the latecomers, everyone is grouped by the colour of their hair.

Those eyes, those hands, the catch in his body that’s blessedly shaped like her name. Inside the moment, can you know? Can it be identified? Or is your perspective too close? I cannot remember. It might be artifice. Is it unreal, a fiction built into solidity by narrative later? Retconned into the shape of relationship. Perhaps it is only in hindsight we think – that might have been it, in another universe of possibility, if things had gone differently, if he had, if she had, if the, if: that’s when I first fell in love, that’s when I knew.

like a slice of Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemma

Pixar story artist Emma Coats has been tweeting a series of story writing basics she’s been getting from her senior colleagues. Here’s some of my favourites so far:

#5: Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.

#7: Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.

#9: When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.

#10: Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it.

#11: Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.

#12: Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.

#17: No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on – it’ll come back around to be useful later.

#19: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.

Also: Author and artist Terri Windling has written a post about the creative process and artistic inspiration that I suggest you give a look. The comments, too, are quite nice.

fifteen seconds from last saturday

“He shook me awake saying, The most horrible thing has happened. The most horrible thing has happened! Y- just sucked N-‘s dick. I took a video.” The porch was crowded with people sharing cigarettes and thin beer in red disposable plastic cups. The woman telling the story shook her head, laughing a little, her black tank top beginning to slip from one shoulder. “And then he showed it to me, the video, right there on the little screen.” Her audience, a woman with short blue and silver hair and matching make-up, pretty like she just sucked down an electric milkshake, nodded as if she wasn’t quite sure what she’d just gotten into then looked over to Y-. A strong, swarthy man, dark haired and handsome in a rough sort of way, Y- is an incredible creature, a literal tomcat, endlessly affectionate, but with a streak of easy, distractible violence when he’s been drinking, a living testament to Hunter S. Thompson’s writing. When he talks, he sounds just like Tom Waits. “Why would you do that?” the blue woman asked him, incredulous, but wary, tight, as if she didn’t want to admit she was curious or maybe about to laugh. He shrugged, as expressive as a train-wreck at a thousand frames per second, and replied, very matter-of-fact, “Because N- said I could have sex with her if I sucked her boyfriend’s dick and then they gave me a yellow pill that they said was ecstasy and it made me gay.”

file under: research for tomorrow’s wedding speech

The “winners” of this year’s Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest have been posted. The contest challenges entrants to compose bad opening sentences to imaginary novels and takes its name from the Victorian novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who penned the original It was a dark and stormy night.

This year’s grand prize goes to Sue Fondrie, for “Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.”

setting, the scene

An excerpt from the journal of Metrocentric:

Across from the pub, an office building, presenting to us its side elevation. A column of windows, about half a dozen in height.

In many workplaces people making or taking calls on their mobile phones will leave their desks and make their way to a more anonymous part of the building: a corridor, a stairway, a lift lobby. There they stand and shuffle as they speak – if there is a window they will typically look out of it for all or part of the call.

It was that part of the afternoon in which anyone going back to the office would have done so, and the post-work clientele had yet to appear. I was drinking Bombardier, because he got the first round in and he can’t ask for lager, he says.

Every now and then a face and torso would appear at one of the windows opposite. At one point there were four. Four in a row. “Connect Four!”, I remarked. All this was happening behind him.

Once, when all four fully presented themselves at the window, and none were crouched into themselves in their phone calls, and two were gesticulating, the sun came out; the light fell on all four. The squares of window stood out against the dark concrete. It was like looking at a grand opera stage set: they could have flung the glass aside and burst into song.

we are an invention of our very own making

It’s a long time since I wrote to you, Frau Milena, and even today I’m writing only as the result of an incident. Actually, I don’t have to apologize for my not writing, you know after all how I hate letters. All the misfortune of my life — I don’t wish to complain, but to make a generally instructive remark — derives, one could say, from letters or from the possibility of writing letters. People have hardly ever deceived me, but letters always — and as a matter of fact not only those of other people, but my own… The easy possibility of letter-writing must — seen merely theoretically — have brought into the world a terrible disintegration of souls. It is, in fact, an intercourse with ghosts, and not only with the ghost of the recipient but also with one’s own ghost, which develops between the lines of the letter one is writing and even more so in a series of letters where one letter corroborates the other and can refer to it as a witness. How on earth did anyone get the idea that people can communicate with one another by letter! Of a distant person one can think, and of a person who is near one can catch hold — all else goes beyond human strength. Writing letters, however, means to denude oneself before the ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enormously. Humanity senses this and fights against it and in order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element between people and to create a natural communication, the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motor car, the aeroplane. But it’s no longer any good, these are evidently inventions being made at the moment of crashing. The opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal service it has invented the telegraph, the telephone, the radiograph. The ghosts won’t starve, but we will perish.

~ Franz Kafka, from a letter to Milena Jesenska, whom he met in person only twice.

“Possibly mislaid in some provincial station.”

On the middle finger of my right hand is a small lump, a callous right up by the first knuckle that used to be known as a writer’s bump, prominent and round, worn into my flesh by countless pens, yet, oddly, I have discovered that my hand is no longer familiar with writing.

The crux of this discovery lay in a love letter I wrote last night, (bittersweet black ink on treasured boutique paper, short yet hopefully sweet), when I found it curious how naturally I remembered my cursive, (how deplorable my style has become!), and my kerning, even as I marveled at how very long it took to manually scribe all the words. I have become more accustomed to tapping at keyboards, whipping down thoughts at 75 words per minute, and the gentle, profound flexibility of word processors that allow me to shift chunks of text up and down a page, than the slow, steady pace of scribbling with ink, although it used to be the activity I did most in a day. Still, I appreciated the process, even as I railed against the pace. It is comforting to fashion an object, to have made something more tangible than my usual twist of digital light.

I have, myself, a small untidy box of such things, collected from friends, ex-lovers, and one amazing, mysterious stranger, that I can never quite bring myself to throw away, no matter how irrelevant their messages have become. They are charmed things, each page representing a strangely intimate glimpse into a slice of past life, time that I would otherwise forget captured as solid state memory spun from stationery, as telling as the rings of the dead trees that made the paper pulp. Riffling through them exposes layers upon layers of emotional archeology, the rise and fall of small relationship empires, describing arcs of meaning all the way from the brief glory before an emotional disaster to someone’s gleaming desire inexpertly pinned to prose like a shoddy taxidermy specimen mounted on sagging cardboard, all broken clauses and imprisoned nouns trapped in a dirty laundry of terrible poetry and too many verbs.

So even if the practice feels antique, even as my hand cramps at the now unfamiliar act of proper writing, even as it consumes resources probably better left for others, I will defend the act forever. Love letters, even as a mad, sometimes callow contrivance of adulation, hypocorism, and art, are how I shall keep my heart.