Interview with Jessa Crispin on The View From Here:
“First of all, congratulations for coming second place in the Weblog awards behind Neil Gaiman! How did you feel about the result?
It’s an unfair match up, me and Neil Gaiman. He’s got legions of fans. If he asks them to do something, politely in that accent of his, it’s just over. I should challenge him to something I have an actual chance of winning. Like a pie eating contest, or thumb wrestling.”
Having finally found the paint job for the site, it’s now time to turn to the substance. (Style first, always, baby.) How, in 2009, can we substantiate the substance of S.O.S? Building a Better Blog? What in the hell is going to make this pile of ASDF more than SDFA?
The blogs I read most often are:
a) Bookslut, which I read for the links (and the gossip)
b) About Last Night, which I read for the quotes (and the criticism)
c) ArtsJournal, which is a news roundup site, which I read for everything that’s important to me.
d) any of the blogs belonging to a really upbeat, successful, usually mainstreamed and outside-my-genre working writer, which I scroll through for process and for an unreasonable amount of unfulfillable hope and expectation.
Since I can’t actually be Jessa or Terry – don’t have the wardrobe – and my attempt at starting a similar news roundup site for the theaterworld has stalled, I might as well try to be a working writer.
I think I have to continue exposing process gears all over the garage floor of this blog. Only in that way will the blog become something I would want to read.
I have to write about what it’s like to write.
…
[any time now, hotshot…]
…
Well, a great way to start doing that is to avoid doing it by writing a post about how I’m going to start doing it.
is it. It wraps itself around a central and hidden axis like the way our lives (by our I mean our) conform to forces over which we have no control. The text follows the shape.
Yes, I’m obsessed.
cheesy as it is, appeals to me more than all the previous versions. I give it 24 hours.
from Jackson to Division, a young woman listening to Van Morrison’s ASTRAL WEEKS, on a cassette tape, on an old-fashioned Walkman. This was magical because Jessica has been working on trying to make a dance show on and around that music, but also because cassettes are always magical.
Just the way she reverently slipped the cassette into the player made me think about junior high school. So much ritual. They’re so delicate, square and dainty, and the ribbon the music’s actually printed on is right there, under your fingers. So fragile. You have to be careful not to hurt them.
I wonder if maybe that’s the way she first bought the album, and refused to upgrade it to a more contemporary format. Maybe she carries around that Walkman just for the purpose of listening to ASTRAL WEEKS.
I love cassettes because they were the first medium I bought music on – my first two albums were (and this dates me both by decade and location) Green Day’s DOOKIE and Alanis’s JAGGED LITTLE PILL. Sometimes, like the other kids at Portola, I would carry the cassettes to school with me just to look at them. I didn’t have a Walkman, but I didn’t want to be parted from the boys who were singing “She” and all the rest of it. I had to have the tape with me.
But my first cassette experience came before that. One day when I was about ten, coming home from a walk, I saw a cassette without a case sitting in one half of our half-moon driveway, by the street. I picked it up.
It was WEST SIDE STORY.
I’ll never know how it got there, but there couldn’t be a more enchanted way to be given that music – a naked cassette in the California sun. And it played perfectly, despite a few scratches on the plastic, the color of tea with milk in it. Beige, gray – there’s no word for that plastic. I wonder if someone threw it out of a car window, or it fell from a garbage truck. Either way, it was a gift. I spent my pre-teenage years choreographing elaborate dance sequences to “Somewhere” and “Something’s Coming.” When I finally saw the production for the first time, it fell so far short of what I had in my head, I had to close my eyes and just listen.
It’d be nice to have a cassette tape player now.
I just realized that maybe that experience, of the music and words without the visuals, is one of my ideal versions of a musical. It kills me that 13 WAYS is dead every way you look at it, but having it as a sound file makes it remarkably similar to that WSS cassette. What if I had found it in the street when I was ten years old? I would ask nothing more of it than what I ask now – just the sounds.
Can I tell this blog a secret that is not such a secret?
I think I should have gone into music instead of theater. Or maybe there’s no “should” about it, but maybe that’s what I’m going to do with the life I have left, in addition to (in support of, in pursuit of, in devotion to, in cahoots with) the words.
The best best best best best producer in the world, the one and only Ash Minnick, without whom there never would have been a MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL, is blogging live from Slamdance. Give her all the props you have.
is that, readable and professional as it is, it looks like the blog of someone who doesn’t know much about the Internet and picked the WordPress template that was the least “bloggie.” It’s not technophile enough.
Ever since I started messing around with HTML, when I was twelve, I have found that it fulfills exactly the same needs as writing. They are both such good ways to waste time.
You can achieve something spectacular pretty quickly, but you can also tinker with something infinitely without ever being completely satisfied – and it expands to fill any amount of time. You’re never done with HTML, any more than you’re done revising a poem.
I wonder if it’s the same way for other programming languages. I don’t know, but I think what makes HTML seem like writing to me is the way that you sit there putting funny little symbols around everything, like a beehive, and then you step back, click a button, and it makes a visual picture. It’s a literal dramatization of the stages of writing – work work work RESULT – work work work RESULT. Something so laborious creating something so useful and cool.
I would like to write a poem that began with something like
A HREF=the first time we met
something like that,
using the HTML code as part of the language,
or something like the word “boyfriend” in close-tags at the end of it.
(WordPress won’t let me show what I mean by close-tags because,
like a good text editor,
it keeps absorbing them into the background of the post.)
Is HTML to web pages as meter is to poetry?
Invisible but essential? (Trying…)
I think this is one of those ideas that’s better in the idea
than in the execution.
The Joy of Writing
Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
For a drink of written water from a spring
whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?
Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?
Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,
she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.
Silence – this word also rustles across the page
and parts the boughs
that have sprouted from the word “woods.”
Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they’ll never let her get away.
Each drop of ink contains a fair supply
of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind their sights,
prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment,
surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns.
They forget that what’s here isn’t life.
Other laws, black on white, obtain.
The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,
and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,
full of bullets stopped in mid-flight.
Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.
Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,
not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof’s full stop.
Is there then a world
where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?
The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.
Her Nobel speech is here: “Poets, if they’re genuine, must keep repeating “I don’t know.” ” She also has some brief notes on How To (And How Not To) Write Poetry at the PF’s site.
Friday poem! Don’t call it a comeback.
Dara Weinberg 