Blogorrhea Junior

Resolved:

So, no big retrospective this year. It's been kind of a blah year, without any real earth-shaking changes and a lot of work. I did reconnect with some folks, which was excellent, and got to see some new places I hadn't seen before, which is always good, but didn't get any of my projects done that I'd wanted to. Well, not entirely true: I'm almost done with one poetry collection and have been writing more poems, some successful, some not, and I owe Helen and Gwen a huge debt for flogging me through that. I blogged hardly at all, as you may (or may not) have noticed, nor did I get my novel revised, hence the following:

I don't usually do this because everybody knows that resolutions are just made to be broken, but these seem like a realistic ones, I hope:

1. Write more
2. Make books
3. Submit to publications and shows
4. Look into writing grants
5. Apply to more teaching jobs

I want to start taking the science blogging more seriously, and I want to start taking this blog and my personal blog more seriously too. I'm starting to get a good little collection of Cocktail Party Physics columns, but I need a lot more, and a lot more practice before I've got anything that might be worth editing into a collection. I'd also like to rethink my focus in that area, and find a niche to settle into. I don't think I'll ever be anything but a dilettante in the science writing arena, but it's something to add to the pub list. And who knows?

Ultimately, what I'd like this next year to be about is writing and making art. That means seeing less of my friends, but I feel like my writing and art are friends that I've neglected and who need some attention. Wish it were easier to find that balance. But that's life, isn't it?

Sweat and Inspiration

It's been months since I've written much besides Facebook comments. Usually, I've at least got a couple of fan stories on the boil, or some poetry, but right now—nada. I've been so busy working with others on their creative projects or absorbing new material in the form of travel that my head has been empty of ideas. Not inspiration, just ideas. It's not inspiration that moves a writer; it's perspiration and ideas. What's the difference between inspiration and ideas? Lots of people are inspired to write. I know loads of people who want to write novels or poems or short stories. But they don't know what to write about. They have no questions they want to ask, no hypothetical situations they want to explore, no important thoughts they're trying to communicate, no point they want to make, no insights to share. Without that, what you're writing is just . . . blather. My dad used to say about writers and books that they should leave the messages to Western Union and there's something to be said for that. Nothing kills a good story more than lugubrious didacticism. But every story worth telling has a point and it's the author's job to make that clear without getting in the way of the story.

Anyway, I'm making myself get back in the saddle again. I've finally gotten the urge—and the necessary distance—to go back to my decades-in-the-making novel and do that last revision. I started the other day in Starbucks when I couldn't get my wifi going and discovered the synch program hadn't given me the latest version of something else I wanted to write. But the itch has been there in my head for a while, thanks, oddly enough, to Facebook. I've got enough writer "friends" there (Charlie Jane Anders, C.E. Murphy, Charles de Lint—people I don't know personally but admire; and Jennifer Ouellette, Christine Hamm, and Allyson Beatrice, whom I do know) who post regularly about progress on their own work that it's been, well, inspirational. Because, you know, you can talk about being a writer, but if you ain't writin', you ain't no writer.

The first four chapters were relatively easy, though I think they could probably still use some trimming down. But now the hard part comes: the reorganization, the slash and burn, the killing of my darlings. I'm not the same person who wrote the last draft of this book and it's been a significant change. The person I am not could have written this story ten years ago, and the person I was then could not rewrite it as it should be. Which is why it sat for ten years. It's a story that needs to be told but I needed to change to tell it. When I wrote it, I was struggling with depression, with family health issues, with becoming a whole, individuated person and that shows in this book. Now, it's not as if I think I'm done with that process—no one sane ever is—but I've gotten over the first big humps, the ones that needed to be done before I could write this story (or perhaps any other stories of my own worth telling).

The point of this story today is that distractions are not always a bad thing. Writers grow at different paces, and just because you're not churning a new book out every year doesn't mean that you can't ever churn one out. And just because you're not a wunderkind publishing your first book at 17 or 22, doesn't mean you never will.

Now it's my turn.

Hello again! Back from China!

Hi everybody! *waves* It's been ages since I posted here, especially at anything like regular intervals. Please accept my apologies. Life has been, well, interesting, to say the least. I've been teaching, working, involved with a spoken word performance group, and in late May, I discovered I was going to China for four weeks spanning July and August to teach ESL.I just got back August 13th and have been out with back problems since then, but I wanted to get back in the saddle here at Blogorrhea, at least briefly.

The China trip was amazing, to say the least. The beautiful thing about travel, even if you're going abroad to teach, is that you always learn at least as much as you teach, especially on a trip like this. I may not have learned a lot of Chinese language (just hello, thank-you, and the word for beer so far), but I made some wonderful friends and had the chance to observe China from the inside, less as a tourist than as a resident. That's my favorite way to travel, and it's generally impossible in a place where you're both illiterate and unable to speak the language, but I was privileged to have some gracious and kind interpreters from Harbin Institute of Technology (China's MIT) and experienced some marvelous moments as a result. If you're interested, you can read more about my trip starting here on my (other) blog, Dowsing, and see the pictures at my Flickr account.

One of the things I did was visit the Harbin Art and Culture center, which was a kind of mini-mall for artists, and met a couple of painters and calligraphers. From Teacher Tang, I bought 100 sheets of beautiful handmade paper; she then took me over to another store to buy ink sticks and an ink stone. Several days later, I went back to buy some calligraphy too (which is now out for framing; I'll post pictures of that when it comes back). The large ink stick was about $10 and smells heavenly of pine, which is what it's made of (pine soot). The smaller ones were about $1.50, but they'll all last a long time. I've finally gotten  hold of a Chinese calligraphy book by Yat-Ming Cathy Ho, called The Chinese Calligraphy Bible: The essential illustrated guide to over 200 beautiful characters. Teacher Tang very kindly offered to tutor me via the Chinese IM program qq.com, but I don't have a camera on my computer set up yet and the time differential is pretty formidable (12 hours). She did show me how to hold the brush and how to grind the ink. Most of my instruction so far has been courtesy of a wonderful teacher on YouTube, Yang Haiying, from whom I learned about ink sticks and ink stones too.

She has many, many more useful videos, so if you're interested in Chinese calligraphy, silk painting, , definitely take a look. When I get going, I'll share my efforts with you. But I have a bunch of books to make before then, and some blogs to keep up with. So I hope I'll be posting more often now. Stay tuned!

Countdown to China

Hi book peeps! Long time no post. 2009 has been an insanely busy year so far. I hope it slows down a bit. But it won't for a while. I'm going to China for a month to teach English at the Harbin Institute of Technology. Since I'm also going to the country where paper was first made and movable type was first set, I'm pretty excited about that, too. Though my main focus will be on English language through the lens of science communication, I definitely plant to do some exploring of paper, books, ink and type while Im there too, if at all possible. I'll be posting at my other blog, Dowsing and once a week at Cocktail Party Physics, I hope, as well as posting pictures at my Flickr account too. But if I find book arts related goodies, they'll be going up here, too.

So stay tuned! I hope I'll get back to regular postings here too, when I return. That's the game plan, anyway.

Bronx Voices!

If you've been wondering where I am, this is what I've been up to. I've got two poems in this show, and have been doing the producing and stage managing for it. If you're in the neighborhood, please come! It's FREE!

Take the 1,2,3 Train to 116 or 125th and walk a block west of Broadway to Claremont Avenue. Come right in the revolving doors to see some really riveting material, hear some blues, and be uplifted. Hope to see you there! And have I mentioned it's FREE?

Planning vs. Process: Roberta Lavadour

Great interview with Roberta Lavadour over on Oregon's PBS site. I love her books, but the most heartening thing about the interview for me, when she talked about not being able to plan things first. She says that for her, working with the materials and going through the process is what produces the book. It's nice to hear someone of Roberta's expertise say this, because it's how I always feel about the books (few as they are) that I've done. Like her, I can't draw or paint (not very well, anyway) and the materials suggest the book themselves through trial and error. What I plan often seems to work out differently from what I intended. One of my problem with coming to art bass-ackwards (i.e., not through art school) is that I'm always worried about doing it "wrong." Intellectually, I know there's no "wrong" way to do it. It either works or it doesn't. But the organized little rule follower in me freaks out all the time when I do this. I suppose part of it is that "credentialed" vs. apprenticeship model, where going to school for a degree is pitted against learning by doing. I've done my writing the same way, via apprenticeship mostly (my degrees are in English, not writing), but I'm a lot more confident about my writing, even though I've been making some kind of art almost as long as I've been writing. So it's good to see someone I consider a real pro working the same way I do, and having come to it the same way.

Anyway, go watch this video. H/T to Sweet Madness over at Live Journal's Handmade Books community.

Recycling the War

Some of the best paper is made from cloth rags. Some of the best art comes out of pain. Here's a project that takes both of those facts and uses them to help veterans makes sense of, and make beauty out of what they went through as soldiers. The Combat Paper Project, started by Green Door Studio in Burlington, Vermont, teaches veterans to make paper from the scraps of their uniforms, some of which have been ceremonially cut from their bodies. And in the mix, as one veteran says, is "sand, blood, tears, depleted uranium, Haiti, Canada, Hungary, Germany, Ireland, Kuwait, Iraq." The paper and the objects, prints, and books made from it, are all astonishing and powerful, as well as truly transformative and cathartic. Have a look at the video-in-progress, "Iraq Paper Scissors" by Sara Nesson, chronicling the project. Keep the Kleenex handy.

H/T to Alison Bechdel.

Happy Birthday Joni Mitchell

Joni Mitchell, songwriter extraordinaire, turns 65 today. I first discovered her on the Detroit AM radio station CKLW with "Free Man in Paris" from Court and Spark in 1974 when I was 14. It's been true love ever since. Her musical experiments helped introduce me to jazz and to a far more eclectic range of music than I might have known until far later. She did everything: folk, rock, jazz, country, all of it loaded with off-kilter rhythm and quirky instrumental arrangements. She didn't have Judy Collins' pure, ethereal voice, but she had something just as interesting: a kind of smoky warble that inclined to minor keys.

If there were one song that sums up my fascination with art, with New York, with my motives for moving here and the way I've structured my life, it would be Joni Mitchell's "The Boho Dance." Although it's an ironic look at the hip crowd and their contempt for the squares, it had its own strange sort of mocking appeal that made both the grit and the glamor of New York romantically attractive. Of course, real life is never like our dreams imagine it to be, but I'm happy to say that I've found a bit of my own Boho Dance here without the absolute squalor that often accompanies it. I guess the cleaner's press was in my jeans, too. Happy birthday, Joni. Thanks for the inspiration.

Demolition Day

Flux Factory, the excellent art collective in Queens, is not going gently into that good night when the MTA comes to call. Slated for demolition to make way for the East Side Access project, they're holding one last blow out, The End of the End of the End of the End, before they move on to a more peripatetic lifestyle. Join the fun on October 30th & 31st for a mad windup to Halloween, with a potluck and performances:

$10
october 30-31st
potluck 6:00pm
party 8:00pm-4:00am
cleanup 4:00am-6:00am

"Journaling"

I've been watching the "journaliing"* movement for a while now, from its early days as a strictly literary pursuit to its recent developments in visual or artist's journaling, and doing so with both amusement and bewilderment (would that be bemusement?). I'm a lifelong keeper of journals in their written form, and I enjoy reading other people's published journals. Journals often present us at our most unguarded, the most true to ourselves (although professional writers are almost always conscious of writing for an audience, even in their diaries). Reading Virginia Woolf's published diaries was one of the most fascinating and enjoyable reading experiences I've had in years. They offer, to my mind, just the right mixture of snark, gossip, history, personal observation, and craft.

I've kept my own paper journals since about 7th grade, with a long dry stretch when I first moved to New York, and eventually turned to blogging as a natural extension of that. I've taught my students to keep journals in classes, and finally, last summer, taught a class in "journaling." (If you want to see my syllabus, you can download it here.)  Mine was a literary pursuit, though I encouraged my students to do whatever they wanted in their journals, without restriction or fear of penalty. For many of them, it was the first time they'd tried writing in a journal; many of them were really loathe to part with them by the end of the semester, not because they didn't want me to read them, but because they didn't want to stop.

I've always seen journals as a path to the interior life, a tool for self-reflection and self-examination, though people keep written journals for many different reasons. I'm a verbal person, comfortable with words as tools and as "art supplies," so visual journaliing does not come naturally to me, but I think it's vastly intriguing. I also think it can serve the same purposes written journals do, as well as serve as an outlet for creativity. On top of that, it appeals to the book artist in me.

But journals, those that survive, are also historical documents. Journals like these are useful not just for historical research but for scientific research as well, as evidence of climate change, for instance. I've read a number of historical journals, including one of the most famous, Samuel Pepys diary, and I'm always fascinated by the window on that particular world they provide. There is a common humanity in them, the same concerns we all share (food, clothing, shelter, love, security, peace, our children, our marriages) but the underlying assumptions of life are often quite different from contemporary ones. We worry about our 401(k)s for retirement; our historical counterparts were often far more worried about their immortal souls after death. Journals can tell you a great deal not just about the individual who kept it, but about the society of which they were a part.

It's this last aspect I was thinking about when I looked at Teesha Moore's visual journal pages. These are beautiful, strange, wondrous pages, full of pop culture references and images as well as vintage and original work. Say some historian digs one of these up in a musty attic 300 years from now. what is this, for instance, going to say about 21st Century Post-Modern American life?

I'm a little afraid to guess. But I think Teesha Moore will be having a good giggle somewhere, watching that historian try to figure it out.

[h/t to Paper Studio]

*As a side note, can I just say how much I hate the verb form of this noun? I understand the need for it, because "keeping a journal" or "writing a journal" is way too many syllables. It's just an ugly word. Blech.