Yesterday morning I went outside with La Medusa and I sat on the porch and read. It was sunny and seventy degrees. I am in Tucson. The bit I read contained a paragraph that nearly made me cry with its simplicity. Vanessa Place is so cool. She writes for sound extremely well but I’m most attracted to the simple aching stuff. I knew I was going to like this book when I read the first page and a scene featuring a man eating a gas station cherry pie stuck itself in my head for a week.
Another thing is stuck but I can’t remember who said it. Something about how if you don’t read a novel in x amount of days you’re not truly experiencing it. Maybe DeLillo or Saul Bellow said it. Maybe it was my dad. Can’t remember.
Today was a good day for predators (hawks, bobcats) in my parents’ front yard. A dove flew into the glass door in front of the dining room table and a bobcat cold ate it off the welcome mat. My dad keeps saying “they’re getting their Christmas shopping done early.”
A couple weeks ago I said that writing is just the studious avoidance of cliché. I was talking words to see what they sounded like at the time but the more I think about it the truer it gets. Trouble is there’s cliché in words, phrases, sounds of words, ideas, plot maps, melodies, harmonies. Plus we’ve got our own individual clichés in the ideas we keep returning to over and over again because we can’t figure them. The best writing finds the unfamiliar in the familiar and the rest is some insidious cliché.
I thought you knew
There’s a clock in this house that has chimed every fifteen minutes for my entire life and I don’t hear it anymore. It is the extrinsic intrinsic, the cliché. When I was explaining this idea to my students a few months ago, I said that I was just as vulnerable to the commonplace as they were. They looked at me as if they gave absolutely no fuck.
Now I’m watching Star Trek: The Next Generation with my dad. It’s the episode where Riker is eating a lot of food and Picard is getting all judgy.
I’m writing a story about a house that was in my dream last night
I don’t like writing best-of-year lists but I do like reading lists written by other people. It does give me a little worry, like maybe we’ll forget about the things on these lists now that we’ve listed them.
AM/PM made a couple too. I am pleased. People remember the book even though it came out in February, which is akin to the dawn of time as far as these year-end lists go.
I watched The Road today. It’s not that I didn’t like it, or that I wasn’t ready to be depressed. That book scooped me out like a fresh grapefruit and sent me empty into the world, so I knew the movie would have some devastating feelings. It delivered! Still, I wanted the images on the screen to be like the ones in my head and I was disappointed when they weren’t. (This post is going to spoil exactly eight movies; skip the whole ball of yarn if that would annoy you)
Anyway, for some reason I didn’t feel disappointed in the same way about No Country For Old Men, which I will say for the purpose of argument is equally well-written, though of course differently written. Maybe the movie added to it because there were more characters, quirks and details, more to pick among to represent visually. Comparatively, those long patches low on character interaction in The Road force the reader to visualize much more detail. I’m less likely to visualize a person than a house. Maybe Baxter was right when he said novelists don’t describe their characters’ faces anymore. I want to read that essay.
Oh, also, I couldn’t figure why they left the cellar in the book or the movie. All these post-apocalyptic movies have this thing. The good guys find an oasis, they enjoy the oasis, and then for unconvincing reasons they leave the oasis. It is a tradition in zombie movies:
Dawn of the Dead (remake): The mall. The original had the same mall but handled it better
Land of the Dead: Trick question! You’d think it was Fiddler’s Green but it is when Cholo leaves the Dead Reckoning
Diary of the Dead: There is literally a safe room. I mean honestly
28 Days Later: At the end when they’re going to trust the military even though they have a perfectly nice hillside covered in sheets
28 Weeks Later: District 1. Alternate answer: Spain
Zombieland: Bill Murray’s house
Why yes, I have seen some zombie movies
I’d hate to lose the oasis scenes, though. There has to be an oasis and they have to leave it. A really good zombie/apocolypse plot will have an excellent oasis, and then take away every other choice for the characters and force them to leave. I wonder if Robert Rodriguez was making fun of the phenomenon in Planet Terror when he has that “missing reel” cut to their oasis on fire? Here I am at one in the morning, blogging about zombies so I can go to bed and have nightmares about zombies.
(Confidential to a Wise Man: Did you know that I Am Legend is a zombie apocalypse style movie, but with vampires? And Will Smith? Let’s look into this if you’re still talking to me after that list.)
On the French Onion soup’s first day it was reduced with wine and on the second day I put a little dark beer in there. I took a picture of the onions in the pot because there was an impressive amount of onions.
not to brag but it was a lot of onions
It turned out okay but I should have cut the onions a lot thinner. In a good potato soup you get a nice hearty potato soup, but you don’t want to chew on a hearty onion in an onion soup. Like chewing on an earlobe.
I’m thinking of making Christmas cookies but buying the icing Central Market makes for their gingerbread houses and mixing that with food coloring for cookie frosting. Let me know if you have experience making Christmas cookies and what you recommend to save your sanity. Sorry I’m prattling on about food.
A friend of mine is doing a clothing swap party wherein everyone brings clothing and household things, drinks wine, and takes turns picking among the goods. It was a recession party idea but it is surviving the times. I’m bringing some shoes I love that pinch the pudding out of my toes, some jewelry I put on and take off about once a month, maybe some dresses.
I was listening to Wesley Willis earlier. He is inspiring me to make my sentences stark. I was also listening to Philip Glass (free sampler, worth the hassle for a track from The Hours). I can’t write and listen to music unless I’m familiar with the music. I wrote some of my thesis to Beck’s Sea Change album in my earbuds because the coffee shop was too loud. Now I work from home and listen to the sound of typing and the heater switching on and off. Maybe a noise machine would be nice. I like the silence too.
I also took a picture of strawberries last night. I was trying a trick I learned from the awesome Parind Vora at Restaurant Jezebel in his equally awesome strawberry shortcake: when sugaring the berries, add a dash of cracked pepper.
he said "it makes them sparkle"
Tasty with cream, even on the biscuits that I messed up. Even on an off cooking night, there are some bright spots. A silver lining to every cloud, friends. Well anyway later.
Aaron Burch and I have stories up at Knee-Jerk. There is some language in my story! If you are my mother, you might be interested in reading this article I wrote for work instead. Today’s a day to put on Pandora and bustle around. I believe I’ll make some French Onion soup tonight.
Everything in my house is in a pile and cleaning only serves to shuffle the pile around and hide it. The pile remains in some subversive form.
You know, between blogs and the Twitbook and the Facespace we have to internalize this brand-conscious do-it-yourself public relations or else we either ruin relationships or go nuts. Everything we say has the power to further alienate us from one another.
The people who are agreeable to most are the ones with the strongest consciousness of their own brand. Person-as-brand has been around since the printing press at least but social media turns the concept into an obsessive stranglehold. If you’re important enough, you hire a brand manager to take care of the far reaches of your brand; corners of childhood you’ve forgotten about, loose ends overseas. The rest of us do the work ourselves. I’m not sure that pretending this isn’t happening is a great idea.
“Agreeable to most,” I know I know.
The best response to my all my worries comes from two old men holding signs on a front porch in Temple, Texas: one sign reads DUH, and the other, CHILL OUT ALREADY. Thanks guys.
“When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty; I think only about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” — Buckminster Fuller
I’ve been sitting three feet away from a total stranger in a silent office for the past hour and a half. I just realized that and the realization has kind of freaked me out. Now I’m trying to silently eat salad.
Laura Owen’s got me feeling all manner of sentimental for old times. She’s a spitfire with stories in the latest issues of American Short Fiction and Annalemma but back in the day we used to sneak Hornsby’s from her parents’ fridge. I had a weird set of high school years, spending the first half playing the violin four hours a day in a performing arts magnet in Charlotte and the second half failing math and being the new kid at an academically rigorous and lily-white public school in Tucson. Laura was one who helped me make the transition to new school/life. I feel a kinship even though we only run into each other once every couple of years.
Hi Laura! I’ve always thought you are funny too, and much sharper than I am. You should come to Austin sometime. It is usually not very cold!
It feels like I am covered in tiny hairs from different animals and plants. Keyhole nominated me for a Pushcart along with Matthew Simmons and Kim Chinquee and some other guys. I saw fifteen snowflakes yesterday afternoon and got real excited. I am a desert girl so snow is a thing. I need to rent a steam cleaner and attach it to my ear. Coati run with their tails up when they are pleased.
