Check them out: VIDEOS!

Still, the act of longhand writing has been pleasurable and freeing. I wanted to see if I could find some exercises or themed writing contests, just to give my brainstorming some sort of solid direction. I found a link to Lynda Barry’s most recent book on Aimee Bender’s website.

Friends, I am in love. I do not know how I have gone so long without her. I love love love this brief interview, in which Lynda is very mousy and very cute and she states that most often, as adults, we get stuck when writing because we want to know too much in advance. She suggests we just create as we did as children — unknowing, open, ready to let the story unfold before us.

I found a few sneak peeks of the book’s pages and was instantly inspired to write — and to order the book. (I hope it’ll be here soon!)

I love this blurring of the lines between writing and drawing — to Lynda, the act of creation does not deserve to be placed in a cage.

For some reason, the impulse to sketch for me is mindless and easy — I have never clenched up when feeling the urge to doodle. It’s odd — because I don’t feel the pressure to succeed (and/or to “gain power over my audience,” as Cary Tennis might suggest), drawing/doodling/whatever seems less fraught, less complicated. But I scribbled pages and pages by hand yesterday after reading Lynda’s suggestions! Conflating the various impulses to create seems to be the key to something primal…

What It Is is apparently based on a course Lynda teaches called “Writing the Unthinkable.” Sounds intriguing:

Taking the workshop, which Ms. Barry teaches several times a year, is a bit like witnessing an endurance-performance piece. Aided by her assistant, Betty Bong (in reality, Kelly Hogan, a torch singer who lives in Chicago), Ms. Barry sings, tells jokes, acts out characters and even dances a creditably sensual hula, all while keeping up an apparently extemporaneous patter on subjects like brain science, her early boy-craziness, her admiration for Jimmy Carter and the joys of menopause.

But this is just camouflage for the workshop’s true purpose: to pass on an art-making method that Ms. Barry learned from Marilyn Frasca, her junior- and senior-year art teacher at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.

It involves using a random word, like “cars” or “breasts,” to summon a memory in unexpected, filmic detail; writing about it by hand for a set time period (as she says, “Limitation creates structure!”); and then not reading it or talking about it for at least a week. Within the workshop it also involves positive feedback. As students read aloud, Ms. Barry kneels before them, head bowed, listening intently, and says: “Good! Good!” (“I was a kid who was never read to,” she explains.)

Ugh! I want to take this class so bad! Until then, I’ll leave us all with a wonderful exercise, inspired by Lynda’s book One! Hundred! Demons! – but first, some awesome nerdy gossip.

There’s a section in the book where she releases one of her “demons” — an ex-boyfriend. Who reads Lonely Genius Gazette, apparently. (Read this whole chapter — you can find it in the Google Books link above… I love the part about the daddy long legs…)

Guess who it is! Okay, I’ll just tell you — it’s Ira Glass:

“I went out with him. It was the worst thing I ever did. When we broke up he gave me a watch and said I was boring and shallow, and I wasn’t enough in the moment for him, and it was over. I had to go around for a year saying, ‘Am I boring and shallow and not enough in the moment?’”

Okay. Too cute. Ira, I still love you. And enough with these long gossipy blog posts of mine! Try Lynda Barry’s zen demon exercise! Write/paint/collage/whatever about one hundred of your own demons:

Michael          

Dim light filtered through the sides of the drapes and cut through the floating dust where it lighted on the back of the striped couch and across the mass of empty pop cans, half-eaten TV dinners and the other throw away things of a bachelor’s life that were strewn across the marred coffee table. Michael woke from a light slumber. He hiked the quilted blanket over and tighter to his shoulder as he turned slowly from his back to his side. The coils under the couch cushions squeaked with exertion from the shift in his weight. He coughed and blinked and focused his eyes to the television. Michael groped around his body for the remote. He found it, pointed it, and clicked the green power button. A news broadcast fuzzed into clarity on the thin screen. There were four heads in four separate boxes yelling in unison. Michael didn’t know if they were yelling at him, at each other, or just yelling to yell. Multi-colored text scrolled around the edges of the television screen. Numbers, words and symbols flipped, disappeared and reappeared as something completely new. He tried to read the information to discern its meaning and its relation to the incomprehensible noise that emanated from the talking heads, but found the clip of the content to be too much for him to concentrate. He changed the channel. The next channel was playing a cartoon Michael had caught glimpses of previously. It was a brightly colored affair involving a chimp and a sloth living in the middle canopy in the Amazon. He had seen these characters on the sides of women’s purses at the mall, on the back of t-shirts, as decals on cars, on the billboards that promoted a good diet of literature and vegetables for kids, in magazine ads asking for donations to the relief fund from the latest disaster, on website banner ads asking for him to click here to redeem his latest prize – these characters, as far as Michael knew, were ubiquitous spokesmen for a number of causes and an utter delight to children. Michael found the two dimensional drawings pleasant and the clownish voices to be more accessible than the ranting of the news of the day. Michael watched amenably from the plush comfort of the couch. He laughed at the appropriate times, like when the chimp smashed a banana on the sloths head, and he giggled when the sloth fell perilously from its perch. Then, in Michael’s opinion, the cartoon took a turn for the worse. The chimp turned to the television screen, breaking the fourth wall, and looked at Michael. Slowly, the chimp scowled its brow, raised its furry hand, pointed toward its audience and said, “dance now ye who waiver by the light.” The chimp quickly returned to its comical humped posture and screeched as it jumped from a branch down to where the sloth lay rubbing its banana smeared head and helped the sluggish creature back to the patch of tree where they began. Michael, disconcerted by what he just saw, changed the channel again. But before the next image could come into focus he turned the television off and sat there and stared. Michael’s darkened form in the black plasma screen stared back at him. He blinked, it blinked. His brown matted hair looked greasy and was combed over to the right. Coupled with his four days of stubble and baggy brown eyes it made him think, “this is what a pedophile looks like.” He let out an exasperated sigh as he slowly got up from the deep couch. His body ached from a bad diet and a lack of exercise and sleep. Save for a few stray slivers of light the shades in the apartment were drawn tight. The sepia quality of midday darkness had always made Michael feel comfortable and safe. He also drew comfort from the knowledge that no one could see him. He was free to do what he wanted, or not do anything at all. Michael stood there in his musty sweat pants and baggy, food-stained hooded sweatshirt. The last time he left the apartment was three days ago to go to work. That was also the last time he showered, brushed his teeth and changed his clothes. There was no need for him to do those things because there was no need for him to leave until tomorrow to go back to work. He scratched a dry spot of skin on his lower back and farted. He walked over to the kitchen table where his laptop sat. He slid his sweatpants off, took his flaccid penis from the hole in his boxer shorts, began to stroke it to life and waited for his network card to catch an unsecured signal. It was three in the afternoon and he couldn’t think of anything better to do.  

We sold all of our books, which is great news! If you feel like you missed out on the great opportunity of getting one, or if you’re looking for an extra copy, please e-mail us and we’ll see what we can do!

We hope to see you all again soon!

Earlier in the week, I was struck in particular by this column: I’m rewriting the same paragraph over and over again! It was particularly interesting to me because, well, I too am blocked right now in exactly the same way (call me Ms. Over-editor). I identify with Letter Writer for a lot of reasons. We’re about the same age, we both came to adulthood/responsibility fairly late after fully embracing the freedom of the artist’s life for years. And, like me, Letter Writer struggles with the fact that she works a fun, full-time desk job — and she wants to be great at it. Maybe I am blocked in the same way — for the same reasons?

But I also love Cary’s answer — because Cary, a former drug addict, just had surgery and has to write his columns for the next few days on Vicodin and Percocet. (He often writes powerfully about addiction, too.) Anyway, all week, he has been struggling with fighting his addictions and dealing with his messed up thought process while on drugs… And when writing his answers, he’s been trying an oddly perfect approach for this question: he will only move forward when answering questions, because his brain is so screwed up right now. No revisions! Just writing a sentence at a time! No looking back:

…I simply cannot hold several thoughts in my head at once… I am forced to move in a strictly linear way…

 Well, this whole column was so eloquent to me, especially as I get used to a new fun, awesome full-time job in which I am trying to succeed. Could this be true?:

In spite of what you believe is possible — that it is possible to “have your day job and keep your integrity” — my experience has been that the concrete, day-to-day forces, sociological and economic, that hold corporations together and make them function, will and must work on you; they will force you to choose. You cannot maintain two completely separate lives. What you are experiencing now, it seems to me, is the pain — the terror, perhaps — of realizing that your occupation must take all of you. I believe that this would take many paragraphs to argue in detail, and as I have said, since I am somewhat impaired, I cannot make that argument in full. Yet this is my strong intuitive sense: that you will continue to be in turmoil as long as you try to succeed in your corporate job and also live a full and inspired creative life outside it.

Cary has a lot to offer the upwardly mobile office worker who also aspires to greatness as a writer. A few snippets — but really, read the whole column. You might just feel like I did — as if your blocked writer’s heart is getting a massage. (Sorry, a terrible and weird analogy that, in the spirit of Cary’s writing technique, I will leave as is.) Some especially fabulous snippets:

My speculation is that one motive for being stuck, spinning our wheels and the like, is that we are trying to stop time. Perhaps we fear what we are proceeding toward. In the case of writing and rewriting a paragraph 20 times or 50 times, we may fear the plainness and simplicity of what is in our minds; we may fear that unless we unleash a dazzling fusillade of verbal inventiveness, the reader will turn away in boredom and disgust. So we keep tinkering, trying to perfect the bomb.

And behind this need to have such an effect, we might say, is the need for power — power over the reader rather than with the reader. We are seeking a position of power and dominance; to simply speak in even, measured tones of our own experience will not give us that power and dominance; we have to “slay” the audience. We have to prove ourselves worthy. And this need to show ourselves worthy arises out of an unfortunate belief that we are in some sense not worthy — otherwise, why would we be trying so hard to prove it?

More:

One way is to stop writing on a computer. As we read texts from hundreds of years ago and think about how these texts were created, we must envision how writers worked without being able to move blocks of text around. They started at one end and continued toward the other end. Try this. It entails some fear. I may not appear as brilliant to you as I would like to appear. But I am not hiding. I am doing it one word at a time. There is no hidden process by which I am arranging what you read. I am here with you, in the moment, unspooling this.

Try this. Relax your shoulders. Write in a notebook. Begin with a first sentence. Write as you follow your thoughts.

 I’m not sure where to go next with this information. I certainly am going to try as hard as I can to live two separate lives. Maybe I’ll actually use a notebook. Whatever I do, Cary has my wheels spinning…

Well, here you go.

LCD Soundsystem - All My Friends

This embedding in the WordPress on the server thing is hard to figure out, but another website will do, right? Just hit play and come back here and read!!! (OK so I just found out that you have to log in and stuff, I’m SORRY, I will have to fix it tonight when I get home from my no-dancing-allowed job….)

So….

It’s really cold in my basement. I hang out in the basement now. My roommate and his girlfriend have taken over.

TAKEN OVER!!!!!!

It’s a nice basement. Finished, with a big movie screen. You’d think I would use that part.

They come down here and talk to me sometimes. I think they feel sorry for me.

Alone.

In the basement.

So sometimes, I play a little station on Slacker called “Dancin Partay.”

Never heard of it? Well, let me help you.

Create yourself as a user. Create your own station. Add the following artists: LCD Soundsystem, !!!, Crystal Castles, CSS, Daft Punk, Deastro, Man Man, Of Montreal, Ratatat, Starfucker, The Faint, The Rapture, and maybe Hot Chip, maybe some MSTRKRFT, and there you go - a Dancin Partay for one or many.

This.

Is how you take advantage of your new space in the basement.

Side note: funky punctuation = functuation. I just learned that from my friend Bill. I really hope he just made that up.

Go ahead. You can pause your reading and dance to LCD S for a little bit if you want. I know it’s hard to deny. The blog’ll still be here when you’re ready.

K. Feel better?

Also, in the basement, I have discovered a new way to make these really sweet, trendy boots.

I’ve recently learned how to crochet, and I’m applying my new knowledge to bootmaking.

I found a pattern on McCall’s website for knit socks, right? So I bought that. Also I found a really durable yarn at JoAnn’s. I asked them for advice re: really durable boot-making yarn. I chose purple, because really, I’ve always wanted purple boots.

Okay, so I followed this pattern and made these boot-socks. Then I found an old pair of boots that I didn’t like anymore, with kind of a flexible sole, and I ripped off the bottom. Scissors and a razor helped.

So then I had some baling string, and with a big needle that I found at Hobby Lobby, I sewed the boot socks onto my boot soles. Then I put some special sole-repairing glue around all the little holes so that water wouldn’t leak through the bottom. They’re super cozy!

OH - yeah then I took a Sharpie and wrote “UGG” on the back heels.

So now I dance, alone, in the basement, in my purple boot sock boots.

It’s not so bad really. I think I’ve lost five pounds since Saturday.

Leading up to the event and during it, many people asked me, “Why call it ‘Monster Holiday’?” There’s a simple, if not funny, story behind the appellation. During one of our weekly meetings we were trying to come up with a six month plan of events and themes. When it came to December there was talk having an event where we would combine sections of our stories to create a singular idea that could be read to an audience. I recalled doing something like this at the Omaha Lit Fest a few months back only with drawings. I tried to remember what it was called when you draw the legs of a monster or being on one third of a piece of paper, then someone draws the torso, then someone draws the head - all without seeing what the other person has done. Nobody at the table could remember what it was called. So I blurted out “Pretty Monster!” Everyone looked at me like I was an idiot. Then someone said “I think it’s ‘exquisite monster’.” This was also wrong. It’s actually called an ‘exquisite corpse,’ With the idea of monsters running amok during Christmas playing out in my head, I wasn’t prepared to let the idea die. So, after much insistence we decided to call our first event ‘Monster Holiday.’ When it came time to create our monster we decided to take our 10 favorite sentences from each of our stories and piece them together as the base of our horrific story. Conceptually this sounded like an awesome idea, but when you get five highly imaginative minds working seperatley through email, things can get a little out of hand. By the seventh version we all realized that our little monster was growing into an un-tameable beast and needed to be put to sleep quickly before it began eating small children, setting fires, and birthing winged creatures. Instead of presenting the freshly aborted monster at the event we read excerpts from each of our stories. Below you can read the first version of the monster. This was put together using the original 50 sentences with the only changes being names and tense. For all those people who purchased a copy of our book (thank you!), you’ll notice how well the five stories retained their individual themes but were on their way to its ultimate demise. Enjoy!

Monster_Mash-up_v.1

Sleigh bells jingle on the door and a man shoulders his way inside. With the crack of cold bones being stretched after a deep winter sleep – the growl of a hibernated stomach awoken by the promise of food – he leans over the table-top, too far, like he’s doing stretches and says, “My eggs are getting cold and my voice is quiet as snow.” He reached into the freezer and grabbed a bag of peas. His fingers were thick as hot dogs and hard as stone. And he found solace in knowing that he had not strayed from this path, that he was completing what was expected of him. He felt vaguely ill at ease, like when you realize that your feet have been cold and slightly wet for hours.

The sun was at its zenith; pale like a light bulb under a shade of silver satin. The air was still and the only noise was the light crackling of snow landing on bare branches and frozen ground. He noticed his reflection in the glass window and it did look absurd, a perfect photo op for one of those newspaper contests where readers write in clever captions. No one asked him if they could put an empty, ugly reminder of Christmas right at his eye level. He chews his cheek. The man was beginning to have his doubts about the fat, red face bringer of gifts. Sounds of ripping flesh and breaking bones replaced the silence amongst the trees. Now his brother’s daughter with messy, shoulder-length brown curls and green-green eyes and long, skinny piano-playing basketball-palming fingers, jumped up and down in front of him.

She begged and pleaded with him to, “Please, PLEASE pull the other end of the wishbone!” Hot crimson blood melted the snow and soaked the earth. His lips took the brunt of the cold, and every five minutes he had to stop to lacquer a layer of lip balm over his tight and cracking skin. Dried for weeks, he knew it would be brittle, an easy breaker. “Alright, chickadee. Let’s do this.” Her legs once again bore the weight of her body and as the blood flowed through her veins, she ran quickly from the chute and through the maze of open gates until reaching her final destination.

            No need for smiles, no courteous handshakes, or the pressure to find an easy rapport with the perfect mix of comfortable pauses but no long, awkward silences. The kids are clinking glasses. This meal was to this monster what the ham dinner is to millions of families around the world who revel in Christmas spirit. He sat at the kitchen table, and she stood in front of him, bouncing, bouncing aimlessly in circles, holding this wishbone in her freaky alien hands. The cabin was filled with the grunts from the beast, the guttural screams from the boy and a country rendition of “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.” Had his people to be with, it seems.

            He looked at her, provoked by the Christmas ditty on the radio, and asked, “Do you really think you can win? I’m a much stronger, older, more experienced wishbone-snapper.” A heist like this would entail detailed maps, a timed schedule, and definitely binoculars. Squeezing, tagging, releasing, she says “But you’re taller than me.” She whispered in the only way that 5-year-olds whisper – like an elderly person in a confessional box. He felt like the repressed, bitter housewife to his brother’s gallivanting husband. It was the smell of rotting flesh. He grabbed the ear of the red cow that stood before him squeezed between two walls of the chute. Macaulay continued his conversational style of simply stating facts: “I haven’t left the house in eleven days.” 

            She has a mop and she is swaying to her own music. Then she ran to the kitchen, sliding on the linoleum around the corners of the cabinets in her white socks. Sounds like static. The radio drones from somewhere – says it’s a whiteout, keep warm inside with family. The animal made a low groaning noise that somewhat resembled the moo that the little girl used to make when asked to moo like a cow.

Her body strangely flew backwards diagonally into another dining chair, the back of her head taking the brunt of the fall. Life on the farm can be at times monotonous. If he closed one eye he could completely block out the garland. She didn’t cry but instead tried to shove her little sharp wishbone bit in his eye. He dodged her athletically, like she knew he would. “Cuuuuursed!” he screamed and ran to the living room.

Seeking solace in the nether-regions of the sofa, he avoided the high ground and sank right into the abyss, letting the couch partially swallow his slight 132-pound frame. Or, maybe the indistinct feeling of disappointment came from one very distinct fact: it was Christmas Eve and Macaulay Culkin was home alone.

So, it happened that he did not meet many women outside the small town that dwindled more and more every year. Macaulay tried to focus on something else, the bundled up woman trying unsuccessfully to hail a cab, the pieces of starless sky between the skyline, he even started to count the windows on a different building.

Then they headed to the movie theater and chomped on popcorn as they watched the latest holiday flick, laughing all the while. But standing in the way of attitude and good luck was a six-foot, 250 pound black security guard with a kind smile and a nightstick.

The coworker suggested that I think of something innocuous . . . like peanut butter . . . focus on that object and think about nothing else. I told him that that is impossible because I can’t focus on just one thing. I gave him a chain of causal, eposodic relations to illustrate my point: peanut butter = George Washington Carver = pavement = infrastructure = decay = compost = heat = volcanoes= dinosaurs = Jurrasic Park = Same Neil = Event Horizon = Hell. And as I lay there, closed eyes in a tangle of covers, my mind leaps through a series of endless, ephemeral, desultory thoughts. He then made the point that as we age we accrue more information, which makes life more difficult. When we were younger we had less information to clog our thoughts and, thus, life was more carefree. We weren’t bogged down with a bunch of useless, random junk. I couldn’t agree more.

Recently, I spoke with another friend about my sleep condition. He suggested I read Dr. Wayne Dyer’s “The Power of Intention”.  My friend explained that, at its core, the book teaches the reader to focus all thought on a whitespace. No sound. No thought. No image shall infiltrate this whitespace. He said he would find this little pasture of blankness and he would emerge from a deep sleep fully rejuvenated. I tried to find my whitespace. Its not the serene, vacuous bastion of rest I was hoping for. I get into bed, close my eyes, control my breathing and focus. I see the whiteness. It’s kind of cold and bleak and silent at first. Then conversations I had throughout the day begin to echo through the space. Then I realize that the whitespace is no more then a sterile backdrop on a sound stage. I’m actually in a warehouse. I’m being filmed and it’s creeping me out. I open my eyes, exhale, turn over onto my side and stare at the red LED numbers on the clock radio as they cycle closer and closer to the time when my alarm will sound. My head is too cluttered to sleep. I need this.

While staring at my Google homepage, thinking that my daily horoscope was accurate, that it WAS time to take care of myself, the song “I Want Candy” started repeating in my head. Unfortunately only, like, four measures of it were playing, including the actual words “I want candy…” and then some drums.

Here. Enjoy it for yourself. This guy did.

I didn’t even want candy. I didn’t remember who sang the song. And fuck if I could remember anything beyond those words. With some mental visualization techniques, I started to remember other parts of the melody, but no other words. Maybe I never even knew the words.

Sitting in our living room with the worn olive carpet, I picked up an EP record out of a tall stack that belonged to my dad in high school. My little record player in its self-enclosing, tough yellow case was open and positioned at my side. At age 7, this was one of my favorite records, and therefore it deserved the most play time. I grabbed my microphone, conveniently attached to a cassette player with a blue plastic spiral cord, and then pushed the plastic red button. Record.

I really wanted to Google the song and its lyrics, but some of us don’t have dot-com jobs (anymore) where reading blogs and downloading music is an expected part of your day.

Mostly I wanted to know where the song came from. From what recesses of my memory had it been inspired?

Maybe the song was recalled due to some deep-seated need for mental escape. The youthfulness and joy of this simple declarative sentence had taken over my brain and reversed my age to 7. Age 7, when I didn’t have to change my cell phone plan if I had a boyfriend. Who cared about investment advisors and their government regulations, complicated Form ADVs, U4s, Schedule Fs? Marketing packets were something that, when left over, I could’ve cut up and colored on and glued back together for an art project. When I was 7, the most important part of my day involved making a new hot pad for my mom with fabric loops.

It’s not uncommon to reminisce for the simpler days, but that’s not exactly what had happened. “I Want Candy” had forced itself upon me, as if something in the Universe was saying, Hey you… take a break. Enjoy this little ditty and tell me how you feel afterwards. And for God’s sake, stop taking yourself so seriously.