KL!

Portlandia: Dream of the 1890s

I was at jury duty all week and it threw off my schedule entirely. (My first time! I was put on a jury! I don’t even know.) It wasn’t my intention to start neglecting this blog so soon. I’m going to make a more substantial post later this evening, but I felt like I had to share this when I saw it.

It’s no secret that if I had money and a thin body I would be the dandiest of dandies, but for now I just spend a lot of time drooling over pictures of young men both new and 120 years old. So as a person interested in the dandy aesthetic and in the genre of steampunk, and also as a hipster who wants to move to Portland, I find this incredibly amusing. I hope you do too.

February 26, 2012 0

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On the list of ridiculous things that make me happy, Looking At Old Shit is wedged in between Any Media That Turns Abraham Lincoln Into A Vampire and Fluffy Bath Mats Right Out Of The Dryer. My parents spent the first sixteen years of my life dragging me and my brothers off on educational trips instead of ‘fun’ ones and for some reason I just never learned how to do anything else. As it is,i f I wasn’t so easily amused by Looking At Old Shit I don’t think I’d find the literary genre of steampunk half as appealing as I do. Not only does steampunk allow me to play with crazy science fiction things, but it also gives me an almost socially acceptable excuse for spending hours at a time researching French Naval sabres of the Second Empire and cooing over Victorians.

I know this is going to come as a shock to absolutely none of you, but man, do I love Victorians. I find both the shiny and the tarnished parts of Victorian society equally fascinating. I wish I could produce a five paragraph essay about why Victorians over say, Ancient Egyptians or 14th Century Persians, but whenever I try I just end up spending a lot of time looking at photographs of people dressed as cats and handbills for electric corsets. When I get stuck in that place I can’t stop giggling long enough to reverse engineer a context or coherent thought. The handbill above put me in that place.

This particular clipping is located in a tiny alcove on the third floor of the Lightner Museum in St. Augustine, Florida. The reason I initially took a picture of it is because of the question mark after the word ‘lady’. (Laaaaadies?) I thought my friends might get a kick out of it, so I snapped it and shared it. It wasn’t until after several of them pointed out that it was the last cake walk of the season–to quote one of them, QUELLE HORREUR!–that I really actually read all of it. Now it’s practically the best thing I’ve read all month. Whoever wrote this was incredibly dedicated to not writing checks the Hotel Alcazar couldn’t cash, specifically that there might be actual females in attendance at the event.

They’re also careful about not getting people’s expectations up re: the inclusion of “stunts” in the show. Those quotation marks make me feel like a ‘stunt’ could be anything from doing front flips like a dolphin to lighting two cigarettes at a time to some of the more interesting pleasures outlined in Anne Rice’s Sleeping Beauty trilogy. I want to say it would depend on the caliber of “girl” involved, but you never can tell with Victorians.

Personally, the whole thing makes me want to lobby my local gay bar for Victorian themed drag nights. It also reminds me of this guy, who I feel was probably a real riot at parties.

February 13, 2012 2

Mike Doughty @ The Social, reading from his new book The Book of Drugs

Sometimes I go to concerts with Lisa just because she likes people. That’s why I went to see Mike Doughty the first time, way back when. I like him, but I don’t listen to him a lot, so she periodically has to remind me that ‘he’s the guy from Soul Coughing’ and then the pieces will click together again. Before tonight it never occurred to me that he might not want to be seen that way.

I cannot wait to read The Book of Drugs. I’m just going to go ahead and rec it to you, even though all I know of it are the passages he read to us this evening and his general unease with the period of time in his life that the book portrays. He talks about his checkered and sometimes painful past honestly and candidly, and more than that, he seems to have learned from it. He doesn’t regret the drugs or the hurtful relationships or the twists and turns in the road that brought him to where he is. He accepts them as parts of a whole life. I try to do this, but sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes I remember a thing that I did in the past and just shudder, because Christ, I used to be so stupid. But, to paraphrase Sirius Black, we’re all idiots at some point.

Standing there tonight I felt a bit like some sort of future deja vu was echoing back at me. I thought, when you’re in your thirties you’re going to think back on your twenties and conclude that they were hard, but when you’re in your forties you’re going to realize that it’s just life that is hard. Not groundbreaking stuff, but stuff that I need to remind myself of from time to time.

It’s comforting somehow, to grow older and reasonably more functional with the musicians of your youth.

February 8, 2012 5

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This week I got two Valentine’s cards in the mail. They were lovely and thoughtful and a great reminder that Singles Awareness Day is just nine short days away! Of course, when I mentioned this elsewhere I got fussed at for calling it Singles Awareness Day, because I’m not single. Single or not though, the older I get the sillier I feel about most gift and Other People Awareness holidays. Not because I dislike people or gifts, but because I like people and gifts so much that I start to resent the added pressure of having to produce gifts and feelings on demand when I already happily do those things year round. It’s kind of like how sometimes you realize that you’re breathing and then it becomes harder to actually regulate your breath. You always end up breathing heavier or longer or shorter than you usually do because you’re suddenly self-conscious about the way your body operates. And that, my friends, is silly.

In general I shy away from writing about love in favor of tackling anger or confusion or fear, but one of the writing groups I’m a part of challenged its members to write a bit about it this month. It’s prompted a lot of thoughts and very few actual plot ideas. It’s been a frustrating experience, but in my most uncharitable moments that’s kind of how I feel about the subject anyway.

My feelings about love aren’t nearly as complicated as my feelings about hope, but they’re still a little to the left of the way that I was taught to feel about love as a child. Love is hard work. It’s easy for me to type those four words, but as I sit here trying to pull together a poem or short bit of prose about how love is hard work I find myself stumbling over all the heavy handedness and obviousness of the initial thought. The closest I’ve come is this paragraph.

Love, Joanie had found, was often rather dull. It was full of the trivial and mundane occurrences of daily life multiplied by the amount of people you felt love for. It lived in an entirely different place than passion and curiosity and all of the things that poets would tell you that love actually was. In reality, Joanie felt that love merely hid within those things, dressing itself up as something desirable in the same way that Sal wore bright jewelry. It was the reason that Joanie wouldn’t tell Sal that she loved her. The term was simply inadequate for the way that she was sometimes caught off guard by just how much affection and devotion she could feel for one person. She didn’t ever share these thoughts, so she couldn’t really blame Sal for the hurt that was harboured over Joanie not returning her affection.

It’s still heavy handed and obvious, but at least it gives me something more concrete to work with.

I have been dreadful at treating writing like a second job for the last month. I really need to work on that.

February 5, 2012 12

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Oh, February, is that you? I didn’t see you standing there. As you’ve probably noted, intelligent scamp that you are, things around here are a bit of a mess at the moment. Please make yourself comfortable on the couch while I tidy up. Have a biscuit?

January
The plan for January was less impossible than the plan for the coming months, since I didn’t even sit down and outline my yearly goals until about the fifteenth or so. In January I wanted merely to complete a draft of the short story I’m working on and then start in earnest on the novel that I’m writing with my compatriot (Coming Soon!).

Words: 9,461

Flubs:
I did not get a rough draft of Volunteer Vampires completed. I got hung up in the science of it, which I think I need to just stop doing for right now. It’s already mad and impossible that there are vampires in space in the 19th century, I’m probably just wasting time worrying over whether they could locate the source of a message being beamed from deep space. I know that my novel co-writer likes to tinker out the science and make sure it’s technically possible, but I also know that scifi doesn’t always need that information. Hell, I just re-watched Ghost in the Shell last night, and while they spend a lot of time hemming and hawing over what a ‘person’ is, they spend absolutely no time talking about how it’s possible for the Major’s camouflage to work the way it does or how androids work. They’re just accepted parts of the world. I think I’m at the stage where I need to accept things and move on with the story. If it’s really important that they pinpoint where a sound is coming from I can work on it in edits.

I also did not get more than a chapter into the Steampunk novel we’re working on. We’ve been talking about it for years now and trying to get all the pieces in the right places and I’ve been itchy to just write things for months. I need to get on that so I can have better, more accomplished news at the beginning of next month.

Follow throughs:
However, we did get a good, solid outline down. And even though there are still a few niggling questions, I at least feel like I know enough about what’s happening between our characters and where they are in the first half of the book that I can just sit down and start to get it out. That’s a good feeling.

I also wrote a silly poem and tinkered about with, not only other bits of the Steampunk, but the Big Damn Existential Science Fiction Novel, which is the third novel length thing in the stall at the moment. So many ideas, so little execution. But well, that’s what I’m out to cure this year.

Words To Date: 9,461

February
The plan for February is to hit the ground running, catch up with January, and then execute the following:
Have a completed draft of Volunteer Vampires done and sent to my betas. Make sure that by the end of the month it’s ready to submit to the anthology I’m assuming is happening. *fingers crossed*

Have a rough draft of half of the Steampunk novel.

Write a poem to submit…somewhere. I’ll need to go through that issue of Poets & Writers I bought and look at different markets. I fully admit that poetry is not a part of the industry I usually keep an eye on. And it’s all just kind of a silly bet with myself, really. We’ll see where that goes.

So, that’s that. Should be easy enough, provided I just sit down and do it. If ChairToBum glue was a thing, I would look into buying stock for it.

February 1, 2012 2

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Writers have ideas. We have lots of ideas. All of the time. About everything. Some of them we want to keep for ourselves, but some of them we want other people to write so we can roll around in them and absorb all of the awesome and loveliness. And sometimes we’re presented with ideas that we didn’t even know we wanted until they jumped up into our laps, as I was the other day while flipping through Sense and NonSensibility: Lampoons of Learning and Literature by Lawrence Douglas and Alexander George. In the chapter this is taken from, they’re detailing ‘Literary Mergers’ that the narrator thinks would be great hits:

Off the Road-

A skillful combination of Kerouac’s Beat novel with Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, in which Dean Moriarty hits the road–and is mysteriously never able to get off. The irrepressible antihero becomes increasingly frustrated as he tries in vain to find an exit ramp that will lead him to the girls, drugs, and jazz he longs for.

I wish I could claim this idea for my own. I wish I could make it intelligent and tongue in cheek and just a little sad around the edges. I wish I could give Dean Moriarty and Inès Serrano new breath that would make their fathers proud. But alas, I am not yet up to tugging on a work of that magnitude. So while I tinker away with my science fiction stories and my frivolous poems I’m going to play the scenes I want most over in my head until the universe makes them happen. The universe does that for me sometimes.

This the part where you come in: Is there a story you’re dying to read that you want someone else to bring into the world just for you? A story that you don’t feel capable of writing yet, or that you might just want to read in someone else’s voice?

I’m thinking about doing questions every Monday, but I make no promises and will therefore tell no lies.

January 30, 2012 2

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Camus said that ‘one must imagine Sisyphus happy.’

Okay, wait. Before I continue here I have to tell you that when I mentioned to my friend that I was thinking of making my first post here about Camus and happiness her response was: “well, that will set the tone of the thing.” I’m inclined to agree with her statement, which is why I’m going to go ahead and do it. So now you know this is the blog of a person who has lots of feelings about French speaking (Camus himself was French Algerian) philosophers and who lacks the common sense to avoid sounding pretentious by not talking about them. Please feel free to back away slowly with your hands up if you’re compelled to. I won’t mind. I’ve actually become curiously used to that reaction to my general state of being. Anyway.

Bernard Picart’s depiction of Sisyphus 1731

Camus said that ‘one must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ It’s a phrase I utter to myself when life gets particularly tedious or absurd. If there are files on my desk at work that have been there for upwards of two years, then one must imagine Sisyphus happy. If I spin out my car on a highway exit and damage two tires, one must imagine Sisyphus happy. If I can’t quite get the glitter out of the living room carpet when I try for the hundredth time, then one must imagine Sisyphus happy and also fabulously prepared for a night on the town. (Sparkle, baby.)

Last week The Boyfriend and I were discussing my old job and how I just couldn’t manage to get away from it, since I’ve been answering emails related to it for a month now. I was frustrated and entirely ignoring the fact that I have a shiny new job that doesn’t make me want to pull all of my hair out and he said to me, “I thought we had to imagine Sisyphus happy.”

“Yes,” I replied, casting myself as Mary Wickes in White Christmas. “We must imagine Sisyphus happy, but I’m free to imagine myself as miserable as I like.” Sometimes I miss the point.

Happiness is a funny thing. It’s hard to recognize sometimes and even harder to quantify. Happiness doesn’t always smile or laugh. It might feel differently to me than it does to you. Maybe your happiness smells of oranges. Maybe my happiness burns and cracks like dry kindling. Sometimes it’s merely satisfied with simply being.

If there’s one thing that tethers all of those separate and unequal results together, it’s that they are all born of the same sense of rising above. You are not your boulder. You are your boulder’s driving passion. You put your cheek to the stone again and again because you know that, even as it rolls back down to the bottom, you were responsible for its momentum.

Which brings me to writing. Writing is also tedious and ridiculous in turns. Most of the time I don’t even know why I do it, I just do. I shout into the void because I know, I just know, that one day the void is going to shout back. It’s the anticipation of that moment that’s going to make me happy.

I have a big scary year of writing lined up before me. I have made impossible goals for myself because I want this year to be the year. I want it to be the year that I’m finally published in something other than the poetry section of my high school’s newspaper. (March 2001 issue. No, you can’t see it.) It’s going to be tiring. It’s going to be trying. Sometimes I’m going to want to give up. I need you to make me a promise. You have to promise not to let me do that, okay? You have to promise that even if I don’t get published this year you’ll hold my hand for a short while and then give me a swift kick in the breeches to get me started on making next year the year.

But one year at a time. The most important promise you can make me is that, in spite of all of that, you’ll imagine me happy. I’ll try and do the same.

January 25, 2012 4