Category Archives: self-blogerential

poetry, Poland, self-blogerential

I can haz poem

in the current issue of Explosion-Proof. The poem, titled “Ready To Lead Stanford Into The Future?” is one of the more humorous offerings I have, and is about receiving alumni-solicitation junk mail while hung over. The magazine also has a great essay by Marina Weiss on Horace. They have a launch party tomorrow if you’re in NYC.

In other news, I have just written my first Polish composition for class. I think most Polish kindergarteners would laugh at me. (I have a brother. My brother’s name is ____. He is a computer programmer. He likes books. Etc., etc.)

In other other news, I clearly haven’t been posting the long journal-style blog entries I meant to after starting intensive Polish. It must be that I am worn out from intensive Polish. Still, if I don’t start now, it will be hopeless to blog in Poland proper. Color me resolved.

In other other other news, tomorrow is the last day for the ANTHOLOGY I ticket promotion. (Buy by June 15th and receive all kinds of glorious free Parallel Octave merch.) Our screening is July 8th at the Creative Alliance. More info here. Tickets ($10) at http://www.creativealliance.org/tickets.html or (410) 276-1651.

Events relating to Parallel Octave pre-screening planning are probably are another reason blogging has been light.

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self-blogerential, writing

this morning,

before work, I walked to a coffeeshop, and I had Larry Levis’s book Elegy in my bag.

As I put it in there, leaving the bedroom, I immediately thought of a blog post that ran something like “This morning / reading Elegy at ___name of trendy coffeeshop____, (sentence continues.)”

Arrgh. Documenting your own life loses authenticity in both the documentation and the life if you start altering either for the appearance of the other.

And yet it is not wrong to be always thinking of the documentation. It’s just that it (the constant thought) can lead to a certain forcedness.

I did not take Elegy out of my bag. I’ve just gotten to the point that I don’t like to leave the house without a book of poems stashed somewhere. Having bought Howl in SF, this has become easier. (And that last is true, not something I made up because it would sound good in a blog post.)

To work, to work. More editing.

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self-blogerential, writing

Recently on Facebalk,

two of my friends, J and A, each linked to a post, “This is Why I’ll Never be an Adult,” on the Allie Brosh humor blog Hyperbole and a Half. I looked at it, and then I read most of the blog, and then I started writing (by hand, not using a computer drawing program as she does) a journal entry of my own with similar interspersed pictures, trying to use the same format of larger chunks of text interspersed with drawn illustrations.

I really, really like what happened. Really. Really. Alot. I intend to put it up soon.

The results reminded me of other ventures I have made into drawing with text. I’ve experimented with this quite a bit in the past but never found the right balance for myself. I am not a very good artist. I get impatient. I tend to write lots of text and then bore myself having to go back and insert all the pictures. I have several long, long semi-comics that are entirely written and only partially illustrated.

What I like so much about Allie’s format, however, is that she permits herself to use as much text as necessary before inserting the next picture. (In the manner of the This Recording photo essays and other things on the internets, yes, but I hadn’t realized before now that this format would work for memoir/humor/narrative nonfiction sort of things as well as journalism.)

So this means that when writing a picture/story thing, you do not have to use a picture in every panel. The entire idea of “panels” is out. Your images illustrate the text, as in a newspaper article, but you have a much higher percentage of images to text because the format permits you to “print” them without any added cost.

You only need to use as many pictures as you want. For punch lines, or illustrations. It’s like a storyboard with more story than board.

This. Is. Excitement.

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art, self-blogerential, style

A. square

I have taken some time, the past couple of weeks, to rest before a major undertaking. I feel much better. The most reassuring outcome of this rest (grantspeak! stop!) is that when images of dancing people or objects pop into my head, as they do all day long, I no longer feel compelled to suppress them. This makes me and the dancing people less irritable.

I was in a CVS about a month ago, before taking this time which I have now taken, and I imagined some people bobbing up and down the aisles, and it made me so furious with my imagination. “What is the point of having these ideas?” I would ask myself, sometimes out loud.

I am now content to enjoy them again without asking why. There is no point – the point is the process. The point is the style, as we know. No one asks the red square why it is a red square. I know this, but I had forgotten. Or it had been obscured from me.

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self-blogerential

stalling, stalling, over the ocean blue

I just super-speed-reread the entire blog. From now through July 24th, 2007. I have often thought in the last month that I ought to dismantle it, in the sulky spirit of “This blog has not brought me happiness. Why should I continue to work on it?” but now I am certain I must not do that. There were so many things in it I would never have remembered, and was happy to be reminded of. I’m so crazy, all for the love of you, where you = theater.

This ought to be enough stalling to be able to work now.

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a propos of nothing, F&F, self-blogerential

her long story

When Emilia came to the end of her long story – which in spite of its length displeased no one; on the contrary, they considered it to be briefly told with respect to the quantity and variety of events that were recounted in it – the Queen, expressing her wishes with a single nod to Loretta, gave her leave to begin, and she did so as follows:

Dear friends and readers, or enemies and followers, today is my twenty-seventh birthday, and although my life at this time feels like the longest story I have ever known, I hope that you, like the Decameronists, will find it and this blog equally briefly told with respect to the quantity and variety of events recounted in it.

This is the first birthday in years that I have not spent in previews. I am spending it, instead, job-interviewing, housecleaning, filing, and preparing for another meeting of the Jacques Lacan book club this evening. Tomorrow, some friends are coming over for dinner. Last night, I celebrated the April Seconding with a single cupcake, muttering “Happy birthday, cupcake” to myself in quiet agony. But today, I’m going to clean the bathtub.

The most important present I have given myself is the making of a decision which has been suspending me in neutral for months. In its wake, I barely know what to do with myself, but at least it has been made.

Although, unlike Lauretta, I do not know what story I am going to tell you yet, I am comforted and continued by the knowledge that I will keep telling you something. Thank you for being and for reading.

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directing, self-blogerential, theater

talking cats

So, I watched the Budweiser commercial with the dog and horse high-fiving each other, and I think we are at a period in society, for whatever reason (and by “we” I mean my narrow class-subset of young highly educated people who watch too much imagery) where “we” are highly entertained by the idea of talking animals again. A history of this subject would be great, but more than writing the article, I really just want to make a very simple Youtube video with a dog and a cat in “conversation.” No attempt would be made to have them move their mouths or anything. We’d just show the camera on the two of them there, and have actors speak. They could read “Talk To Me Like the Rain And Let Me Listen.” They could have an ordinary conversation. Found text, staged written text, anything. Much like how LIFE IN HELL has the still images. I think, and I don’t quite know why I think this, but I think it would be superbly entertaining and would also tell us something about our selves in this particular moment in time.

Part of the trip I’ve done on myself the past four years is to de-academicize myself. I was brought up in the academy, by which I mean that education is the cardinal virtue of my family. And I’ve had to learn, in order to make theater, to – when I have impulses like this – to resist analyzing them until I have staged them. The staging of them is the analysis. Going in with too much of a theory about how it is supposed to work will make them not work as well as they could.

I have been tempted to veer back towards theory a bit this year. But I know that I won’t really understand why it is things ought to work until I make them work. This blog ought to be called Practice Makes Theory instead of Style Over Substance. Maybe I will rename it.

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