workstyle, writing

let’s get it started

I am revising a scene for my playwriting class this morning. I’ve woken up so early every day this week to help C move that I’m used to not sleeping, and have become more productive. She is staying here tonight, waiting to finally move in. I’ve had or been a houseguest every night this week. It’s been fun.

C was telling me about her brother, the short story writer, who rises super-early each day to write before his 9-5. I like the hour of the day for writing myself. I just never know, when I go to bed, if I will manage to get up. I think having her in the house helps. It’s more exciting to get up and start another day if there’s someone else to start it with.

Speaking of starting, this is my third attempt to write the first scene of the play. I do think each one gets better, but for my sake as well as the play’s, it would be nice to have a second scene some day.

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chicago, dialogue

that’s what I’m talking about

The 52 Kedzie/California bus south at 7 AM on a Friday morning after a Bulls OT victory against the Celtics, in which Ray Allen scored enough 3-pointers to become part of the times table.

MAN ON BUS
Ray Allen. I’m telling you, that Ray Allen – watch out! Ray Allen, Ray Allen, Ray Allen.
Ray Allen, Ray Allen.
Ray Allen!

MAN ON BUS #2
That’s what I’m talking about!

MAN ON BUS
Ray Allen. I mean – come on!

MAN ON BUS #2
Ray Allen!

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chicago, writing

imaginary horses

Yesterday, I met an actress friend on the Green Line. We both traveled from our jobs toward the Loop – her to an acting class, me to the library. My pants were tucked into my (Green) rain boots. She told me I looked like a British horsewoman. I told her that my horse would be waiting for us at the Ashland station, and I meant it.

The thought of this horse was more real and more pleasant to me than the presence of my friend, the clouds outside the train’s windows, or the sense of my own breath moving in the gallon accordions of my lungs. I am still thinking about that damn horse.

I told my friend this. Imagination, she told me, is an escape. I wonder – I know there is – if there is a danger in practicing escaping – just like when I was a kid, how I used to practice unfocusing my eyes.

(I seem to bring a better quality of observation to these posts when I am forced to do them less often. You know what they say about absence. )

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poetry, writing

past compare

Poems are comparisons and if you write too many poems everything starts to seem like something else. The trees, ringed with puddles, have pissed themselves after a night of drinking. The Hershey’s wrapper floating in the gutter, touching one corner to the concrete, is a fish nibbling at the reef of the sidewalk. It is starting to infuriate me. I do not want things to seem like something else. I want things to only be what they are. I want to release the visual world from the curtailment of my comparisons! Nothing is like anything!

To see a tree with a puddle under it and know it only for a tree with a puddle under it: that will be a new level of poetry.

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metablog, writing

something about nothing

Once upon a time, I cared more about the sounds of spoken words than about plot, which is central to drama, and comparison, which is central to poetry. I only cared about sound. But this is no longer true. This is who I was, the writer I was. I am no longer that person. As I get older, I seem to get better at action, metaphor, and simile. My writing today is not something my former self would recognize as mine. I would not want to possess it. I would not know it.

We name things and they change under the names. You can just be grateful – I know I am – that this blog isn’t titled TIME TO RHYME.

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F&F

This one goes out

It’s going to rain soon. An old friend stayed with me over the weekend, and now she has returned to the city to which I always intend to return, but never seem to – San Francisco.

I know she is gone, but I keep seeing her everywhere – once in the revolving rotisserie door of the station staircase, once framed in candlelight negative in the glass window of a train, once talking trackside on a cell phone, once wearing ballet shoes like toy boats. The city is scattered with her stand-ins.

My mother and I discussed the things we forget the other day. We didn’t talk about the things that, in compensation, you remember more than once.

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F&F

doors open on the night

Dear blog, I write you from the laptop of my friend, slowly poisoning my sinuses with cat hair, preparing to assist her in a move from one Ravenswood dwelling to another Ravenswood dwelling. I have arrived early to steal time on her computer.

I have spent so much time on trains today that I expect the door of this apartment to suddenly sway open and chant, “Doors open on the right.” This entire apartment could start moving parallel to the Red and Brown lines. I’ve been sleeping here to help her in the evenings and mornings, which makes the move-prep easier, but the commute longer.

We have, as one always does when one moves, been using the opportunity of putting her whole life in boxes to take stock of it. She has also been giving me all of her (too small) clothing. There is something so natural about it, though – the impulse to just give stuff away as you go. You can’t take it with you, or if you do, you’ll be sorry. Every tiny T-shirt that she assures me really does fit me is one less she has to carry with her. I cannot say no to them.

Outside, the trains continue to move. The trees are starting to flower.

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music

baby, you set my soul on fire

I’ve got two little arms to hold on tight
and I want to take you higher.

No computer, no music. I have missed this song more than anything, SOUL ON FIRE by Spiritualized, which I heard live last summer, sung by a shy lead singer who kept turning her back and raising one shoulder higher than the other. I have its memory but I don’t have its substance. Its sound starts daily in my head, and I can’t make it finish.

I went to a Rita Dove reading yesterday where she read from her new book, and talked about the impossibility of recording music in the 1800s. To hear it, you had to play it.

To hear it, I have to sing. I found myself singing to B yesterday, more, maybe because I haven’t heard music in what feels like forever now. If a Beatles lyric came into my head, I would stop and sing it. A whole verse.

I want to go back to being in a choir. I had a dream about this, where I was lost on some Scotland-green League of Ivy campus in the hills above Chicago (there are no hills above Chicago) and wandered into a practice-room. I found my father there, singing, with a group of other academics.

I have so many more thoughts which belong on this blog, cluttering my head like a box of overturned chess pieces. But I have to write emails now. I hope I get to be back here soon.

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a propos of nothing, F&F, writing

and if I say to you tomorrow

Take my hand, child, come with me.
It’s to a castle I will take you,
Where what’s to be, they say will be.

– WHAT IS AND WHAT SHOULD NEVER BE

My parents recently saw THE SEAFARER @ the Geffen, a play-variation of playing a game with the Devil for your life and soul. I have been thinking of how we know when it is we are going to die, for this and other reasons.

I went out for dinner with a friend two weeks ago, in a Michigan Avenue eighth-floor eyrie hastened from the halls of Harry Potter – a private club overlooking the lake, the lights, and the park. We spent most of the dinner discussing the nature of happiness, which he feels is there for the taking.

I wanted to say, “Friend, some days, my head is a garden for the cultivation of the flower, Despair,” but I didn’t. I think that being a writer, or thinking of yourself as Being a Writer, gives some license to mope around like a Fraggle, license which I have overused. I needed to hear this.

He further told me, Zenlite, that we only know two things:

– you will die
– the hour of your death is uncertain.

I am so in love with the way that last statement is written. This is a formulation similar to but wildly distinct from the Greeks’ “The best thing for mortal man is to never have been born. The next best is to die, and quickly.” It doesn’t hope for death, it only forecasts it. Forecast: Life, with a chance of Death. What does that chance make you chance? What chances would you take if you knew – or what will you not take, knowing you can’t?

If I don’t blog again for awhile, or if I only blog intermitttently from the catch-as-can computers of friends’ couches, I want to at least have left the site standing with some philosophy.

I find, too, that difficult as it may be to remember at moments when, I don’t know, your laptop has perished, that repeating “Happiness is there for the taking” has the inane effect of making you happier. For whatever it’s worth.

The NYT says our friends make us live longer. I don’t know that, but I know mine make me live better.

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