I sent the link to the collage piece I wrote in June to a friend tonight, with the disclaimer that keep-this-chuck-that works out better in metaphor than in real life. Few know that better than he.
Thing is, there are plenty of things I'd love to throw away and can't. And when I write, I'm sometimes paralyzed by a desire to tell the truth, the whole truth. A good finished piece emerges when I sit around with the scraps of my life long enough to know what that is, and how to arrange it, what truths are not relevant to the matter at hand. Sometimes the truth is so big and so hard that I don't know how to begin to assemble it, and it takes up space and I don't know what to do with it.
These are the pieces I'm going to share right now:
My mom died in July.
She was 54.
I moved into a new house when she was in the hospital, and sedated, for the last time. I had mono while I was moving. I never got to show her pictures of the house. I'm taking care of her cats. One of them is 11 years old; he was born when I was in high school, and I remember when he fit in the palm of my hand. All his life he was nearly feral, keeping a safe distance, rarely in the house and hiding when he was, watching you with his half-wild nearly-gray green eyes. Now he's deaf and arthritic and otherwise falling apart and for a long time terrified to leave my room. Every breakthrough he makes breaks my heart -- not just because she's the person who would care the most and because I can't tell her, but mostly.
Mom shared my ridiculous memory, and in particular, she fetishized dates. On long car trips she would ask my brother and me to tell her a date -- we couldn't specify a year, just a day, but she'd tell us something that happened that day and on what year it happened. On October 1, 1980, she told my older brother we'd put up the Halloween decorations when the baby came. I was the baby. I was born on Halloween.
And once, we nearly got thrown out of the grocery store for punching the Brawny man -- as in the fella on the Brawny paper towel package. It's a surprisingly satisfying thing -- the paper towel rolls offer just the right amount of give and cushion. And she started it.
Guys?
I'm confused.
So very confused.
Paris Hilton has made so many attempts to redeem herself through self-parody that I get dizzy trying to count them. Thing is that, until this morning, every single one of them fell absolutely flat. It's one thing to be famous for, you know, nothing at all, and quite another to increase one's fame by repeatedly calling attention to the fact that it is entirely un-earned. And even if the joke had been that funny to start with, isn't it, like, five years old by now?
So this morning, when the Tubes called my attention to its latest variation, I expected that I would once again be underwhelmed, and then homicidally irritated:
But um, no, I actually think this works. I even think it's funny.
Terrifying. Terrifying. Terrifying. I need a hug.
It's pretty great, when your body is acting just slightly mysterious, to go to the doctor's office and get an answer within an hour. The fatigue and confusion? The oh-damn-I-forgot-to-eat business?
Apparently, not merely attributable to stress.
Apparently, there's this virus called Infectious Mononucleosis that I dodged no fewer than three times in college that just hit me like a damn bat.
That is not pretty great at all.
Universe, you probably think you're funny but you're so, so, so not.
This spring I created a ritual of setting aside every Tuesday night for a Solo Happy Hour Writing Date. I'd find a quiet spot (preferably one not frequented by any of my friends), take the laptop or a notebook, buy an appetizer or two (enough that I would not be hungry anymore, but not enough that I'd feel sleepy), buy a drink or two (enough to loosen the tongue, hopefully not so much as to compromise my typing or handwriting irreparably) and write, write, write. Generally the project is the fabled Novel in Progress; there are a million smaller projects I've been kicking around that I'd love to get to, but I gotta keep my eyes on the prize.
But I haven't done it for at least a month. Now, I've been spending Tuesday nights in a class for the last few weeks, but when that started I rolled the night over to Wednesdays and kept that appointment somewhat faithfully. Then, yours truly -- who spent her last post belaboring her exceptional memory -- spaced it. Just completely forgot about it. And it was in my damn Google calendar.
There are Reasons, of course. I'm in the middle of moving, and the logistics and anxiety involved in finding a new place, and a roommate, and timing the move -- these have crowded out just about everything in my brain. In mid-June I took a short business trip that sent my sense of Weekly Routine straight to hell. Another reason has to do with some family matters which I'm going to be a big girl about and not discuss out here in public.
Suffice it to say my head is so full of Other Stuff that I barely even think about non-work-related writing these days, not even to tell myself It's OK to Take a Break To Deal With Real Life. Then again, for several mornings last week I woke up with atrocious headaches which took hours to shake. I considered all the awful stuff I do to my spinal column (the reclining position from which I write this is gonna put my LMT's kids through Harvard), the ongoing stressors, etc. but realized that all of that is relatively old news, but this feeling that I was walking around inside a giant vise -- that was new. And then I remembered that back in my old life, when I wasn't preoccupied with the contents of liquor store recycling bins, I was the kind of person who had to eat every three hours lest she become stupid or insufferable and on a good day, both. (I've never been checked for hypoglycemia, but I describe myself that way because it's a reasonable hypothesis and most people understand what that means -- unless they're idiots, or assholes, or otherwise dated me in college.) And I inventoried how well I was eating in the evenings and, uh, hey, I'd been having light, early-evening meals with no pre-bedtime chaser. So if my typically-diligent body just failed to send me Time to Eat reminders, can I believe my brain when it tells me it doesn't even miss writing, or the characters from the novel, not even a little bit?
Probably not. So I suppose I should do what I was doing the last time Real Life threatened to lock me out of my precious, fictional world (I realize most writers of fiction sound creepy and delusional when they talk about their work, and I sort of wish I were podcasting this so you could get the full benefit of my sarcasm speech impediment, so you know I'm META and not just creepy, delusional and self-absorbed), and start taking a few minutes here and there to make notes until I finally feel I have time to take back my Tuesdays.
I know that's what you all came here for. A discussion of my PROCESS. I suspect that not as many readers are as fascinated by discussions of PROCESS as many writers imagine them to be, and I assure you, I am quite deeply ashamed of myself. I promise to post something much less disgusting next time. Like pictures of my cellulite.
A few weeks ago I was dorking out to prepare for my boyfriend's birthday and, since one of his presents was a gift certificate (to American Science and Surplus) I decided to tuck it into a nice card, and then decided I should make that card. I bought pretty, heavy papers, scallop-edged scissors, some stencils, an X-Acto knife and a cutting mat.
I used to love collage. It might have been my first craft love, somewhere in the same mix as beadwork. I never got very good at the latter (though I made some cool, funky necklaces) but I think I had a reasonable eye and hand for the former. In high school, and well into college, I spent many a Sunday knee-deep in cardboard (cut-up cereal boxes or the covers of last term's notebook) and old magazines, making postcards to send to my friends elsewhere.
So once I had a final product I liked enough to tuck into the envelope and call it good, I started thinking: What happened? When did I do this last and why did I stop?
Now, that middle question -- I didn't need to ask. My brain's a Collyer mansion. I remember everything. Every mean thing anybody said to me at any age (six, nine, twelve years ago or last week -- it doesn't matter), every kind deed or gesture or word. Like a lot of hoarders I spend time sifting and sorting these memories, weighing their significance, but so rarely discard one that when I discover I've forgotten something, I'm exhilarated.
I hoard tangibles too. Collage was a great excuse.
So when was the last time I sat down with a stack of magazines and a pot of rubber cement? It would have been 2002. Seven moves ago. The postcard I sent accelerated a correspondence and friendship that became a delightful, doomed relationship that's now a startlingly durable friendship. We've all muttered "there's dust on my guitar, you fuck" one time or another. Have I discovered another symptom of Just How Badly That Whole Thing Fucked Me Up -- or is that a vindictive reading of circumstance?
Five -- no, six -- of the seven moves took place in the year immediately after I made that postcard. Wasn't that why I stopped hanging onto magazines, to particularly interesting papers, to foil candy wrappers or what the hell ever? Wasn't I tired of the haul? Wasn't the financial and emotional chaos that catalyzed and accompanied those moves the real reason I dried up creatively? And after stabilizing quite a bit, after breaking the anxiety-laden hoarding habit, why take it up again?
But when I sat on my bedroom floor a couple of weeks ago contemplating stencils and layouts, collage wasn't about this nauseous fear of forgetting, or of discarding, not anymore. Once, I thought throwing things away was both wasteful and dishonest. It isn't. It's about revising. Keep what you need or love. Chuck the rest.
I take 2002, 2003. I keep the bleach-white Idaho sun, the walks from Sun Valley to Ketchum and the big, unleashed, well-behaved dogs wandering the sidewalks unattended. I cut away the cold entitlement of the children I worked with, but I keep its funnier manifestations. I cut away the nastiness of nearly every young employee on the resort, but I keep the boy I had two long, substantative talks with and never saw again. I keep some of the fall -- the rain-soaked bike rides to campus, the watery Portland sunshine and the old-friends-who've-just met euphoria. I discard my (now former) best friend's heightened silences and the way she eventually, unceremoniously dropped me altogether. I keep the spring.
I think: Why didn't I play this years ago, this game of keep this, chuck that? I'm not pretending none of it happened. I'm admitting I no longer need it.
The other day my boss walked out of his office and said, "Christen, what's the German word for wishing ill will on people?"
I don't know if he asks me these things because I'm just conveniently located, or because it's so obvious that my head is full of goofy trivia, or that my head is full of a particular kind of goofy trivia, like German words for habits I happen to possess: schadenfreude was my gleeful, correct response. It's also a hobby of mine.
But that word, as I understand its definition, may be too small. I'm interested in the whole process of failure: where bad ideas come from and why they persist despite all evidence. It's a fun exercise, and it's not just about being a jerk.
But being a jerk is a big part of it. And there are some kinds of stupid that aren't all that interesting -- but that I can't get over, until I realize I'm guilty of them myself.
File the following in that category: Recently I stumbled (quite accidentally) upon two social networking site profiles (with attendant blogs), in quite close succession, by people who advertised themselves as writers, with books to sell, but told us nothing about the works themselves. No excerpts, no summaries, nothing to tease or bully us into buying it other than a brief admonition to do so.
The hell, people, this is Web 2.0. You've got so many free self-marketing tools at your disposal -- with pretty much unlimited bandwidth -- and you can't even bother to give me a glib 20-word summary about the product you're hawking? Selling Yourself Properly (hell, at all) is kind of a passion of mine. Others' failure to do so in the context of grandiose claims about their achievements or achievements-in-progress -- oh, these things keep me up late at night.
What keeps me up all night is my realization that the content on this website -- which I intended to be a much more professional, bloggy-style blog than the one I keep over at that teenage girl website with all the goats -- is scant and hasn't been updated for more than a year. And the protagonist of my novel in progress hasn't updated her blog in more than a year either, partly due to hosting issues I've been too lazy to address. So I'm just as half-assed as those folks I lost all those hours snarking at and disparaging.
Somewhere, I presume my doppelganger is rolling her eyes and shaking her fist at me.
That's right. I know two German words. So buy my book.
Baby attended her very first Lebowskifest this weekend, in the beautiful city of Seattle, Washington. For those of you just tuning in, Lebowskifest is a frequent, traveling celebration of the 1998 Coen brothers cult classic The Big Lebowski. For those of you who've really been living under a rock for the last 10 years or so, The Big Lebowski tanked at the box office but its popularity has grown by orders of magnitude since its video release. It doesn't hurt that the explosion of DVD technologies, and this little set of truck-like tubes we call the Internets, followed shortly thereafter. A YouTube search for "Lebowski" reveals a startling number of tribute films, from the brilliant (The F*cking Short Version, Requiem for a Lebowski) to the bewildering (clips from foreign films that sort of remind you of certain scenes from The Big Lebowski) to the banal (how many people need to upload the Jesus' dance from the actual film? Plenty, if YouTube numbers are any occasion). My favorite are the clips that succeed in fulfilling all three of these categories: for some reason, I can't get enough of the varied re-enactments of the Jesus' dance. Wii Jesus? Bocce Jesus? Foozball Jesus? Pathetic underachieving Jesus rolling a basketball down his hallway to knock down two pop bottles? Wrap 'em up, I'll take the whole set.
You're safe in assuming at this point that I did not attend Lebowskifest as an impartial journalist (though that was my ostensible excuse -- to cover the story) but as a hardcore fan. Of the movie itself, of course. Like most people, I'm fairly certain I didn't like or get Lebowski the first time I saw it. My mind being as, you know, limber as it is, I don't have a clear memory of this experience, however, though I do recall seeing the film as a sophomore in college, when I was either drunk, or had the flu, or was perhaps experiencing the mild narcolepsy that non-interactive backlit screens induced in me at that time. Whatever the cause, the effect was that I drifted in and out of sleep, taking in a few minutes of nap, then screwing up my eyebrows for a few minutes of film, then drifting quietly back into sleep again. In retrospect, this set of circumstances was ideal, or at least prescient: the plot of this ostensibly plot-driven flick is never, ever going to add up for me. And I've wasted countless horus of my life on it. I've hunted down its sources of inspiration (Chandler's The Big Sleep, for instance). And storywise, it just doesn't work. Yet the movie works anyway. It really is one of the miracles of cinema, like a house of cards that stays intact after 40 whacks with a cricket bat.
So why does it hold up? Personally, I'm satisfied with "magic." You have to understand that after four years and change of a liberal arts education, I'm pretty relieved to find any film or book that still manages to thrill me despite intense crutiny. But looking around at the costumes this weekend -- these were easily the main event -- it occurred to me that the film has an unbelievably rich visual landscape. Amid the anticipated Dudes, Walters, Maudes and Jesuses (and even one Lebowski, in a latex mask and wheelchair), there were numerous outside-the-box costumes. One woman (who I ran into in, of all places, the bathroom) dressed up as the ill-fated rug. Rumor had it another dressed as the line "Certain new shit has come to light," though I didn't find her. I saw no fewer than two men dressed as monks, referencing the exchange, "I'm a brother shamus, like you!" "What is that, like, an Irish monk?" (For the uninitiated, no, a shamus is a private snoop, a dick.) Several people dressed as pigs in blankets, a menu item ordered by nihilists at the pancake house in one scene. Even people who were actually dressed as characters from the movie were tough to recognize: two dressed as the Dude's landlord during his interpretive dance debut. I've seen the movie God knows how many times, and it took a good couple of hours (and a pitcher of oat soda) to place him. For all the outside-the-box characters, all the people dressed as single lines, there is a hell of a lot going on inside the box, in the visual landscape of the film itself.
But a lot of films have a multitude of weird-looking characters and a rich visual landscape. One of the reasons I came to Lebowskifest was that I'm obsessed with pop culture cults in general, but don't qualify for membership in most of them. I grew up in the sticks, then went to college in another isolated outpost, so Rocky Horror passed me by, and anyway, I'm pretty young for that. And science fiction? Just not my thing. Lots of films are funny. Lots of films address the heady themes Lebowski addresses (ever notice that all three of the main characters are poignantly irrelevant, each in their own way?). Lots of films have their own universe -- just ask any pointy-eared sci-fi con geek. And even then, lots of films have their own vocabulary, their own clever lines and catch phrases. So why is Lebowski different? How does it manage to turn non-geeky, non-con-attending types like myself into total drooling fan types? Copious meandering discussions with fellow Achievers (as Lebowski cultists are called -- and proud we are of all of them), and my last several viewings of the movie, have yielded this theory:
What makes The Big Lebowski different from anything else, ever, is not just that it has its own language. It's about language -- and specifically, the language of the movie. It's been noted by YouTube posters of varying degrees of astuteness (see the aforementioned f*ckin' short version, as well as the inferior but mildly amusing "dude" version) that certain words and phrases are repeated over and over throughout the film. But the characters also spend a great deal of time talking about those phrases -- special attention is called to a particular word or phrase at several points throughout the movie. And the word or phrase in question is almost invariably repeated by another character a few scenes later -- sometimes this person was party to its earlier discussion, sometimes not. The Dude soaks up language like a sponge ("This aggression will not stand, man" and more significantly, the addendum, "In the parliance of our times"). But more curious, and funnier, are scenarios like this one: at the bowling alley, Walter chides the Dude for referring to the guy who, uh, soiled his rug as a Chinaman. "'Chinaman' is not the preferred nomenclature. Asian-American, please." Two scenes later, the big Lebowski rants that "some Chinaman took (my legs) from me in Korea!" Maude Lebowski, addressing the ever-bewildered Dude, laments that the word "vagina" frightens some men, "whereas, without batting an eye, a man will refer to his dick, or his rod, or his johnson." Dude blinks: "Johnson?" Two scenes later, guess what the nihilists (again, not present at the earlier exchange) are threatening to cut off? The Dude's johnson. In the parliance of our times, that's fucking brilliant.
That out of the way, here's my wishlist for future Lebowskifests:
- I've read that some Lebowskifests have included an academic component, as in panel discussions and people reading papers. Given the wankery above, it should not surprise y'all that I'm totally jealous and totally want to go to one of these someday.
- The screening should be held in a sit-down theatre, not in a stand-up concert venue that used to be a movie theatre.
- The screening should employ a 35mm print of the movie, not a DVD. (Maybe I'm wrong, but this really looked and sounded like DVD quality.)
- People who hate the opening bands should be asked to go out and have a smoke. Oh, also, the opening bands should not suck. Might I suggest that the Fucking Eagles, who opened at this year's event, lend their name to an awesome Creedence cover band?
- Jeff Dowd's appearances should also be a little more formal, sit-down and panel-discussion-y. And this year's event should have discussed the Seattle Liberation Front in more detail.
One of my favorite getting-to-know-you questions (or even I-already-know-you-but-I-hadn't-thought-to-ask-you-this questions) is: What were your formative reading experiences? I mean, sure, lots of adults don't read, but almost every kid had something that really turned them on. As a young child and preteen, uninterestingly enough, I favored straightforward children's and young adult fiction – Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume. I also liked talking animals (the first book I read with chapters was Charlotte's Web), and spunky, misunderstood chicks (Pippi Longstocking comes to mind, though she wasn't really misunderstood). I tried to read A Wrinkle in Time, but decided science fiction was too weird for me. (My friend Laurel, on the other hand, reports that she read nothing but Bradbury when she was a kid.) And, proving that kids are utter morons, I was deeply upset by Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, though I almost considered it worth it for its descriptions of food.
As for formative experiences, though, I can't say many things have impacted me as deeply as did Sassy magazine. It's still a kind of dogwhistle: you mention Sassy magazine, and either you get blank stares, or you get chicks in a certain demographic (namely, mine) barking at the goddamn moon. I think Sassy created that demographic, actually. While BUST actually began around the time Sassy ended – reportedly because the editors were jealous that teenagers had a hip, pro-feminist magazine to read and all they had was crappy Cosmo – now the situation is the reverse. And it's never surprising – though it always inspires a strange, not-quite-deja-vu feeling to read about something in BUST that I first heard about in Sassy 12 years ago. After all, former Sassy readers are undoubtedly that magazine's bread and butter. Completely unsurprising, then, when BUST ran a history of the fabled teen-girl rag, about a year ago, and equally unsurprising that that article turned into a book. It's been demonstrated that the junior alterna-chicks of yesteryear are all grown up, making our own money (or trying), and buying magazines and books with that money.
That said, as one of those chicks, I have a problem. A very specific problem. Of the sort that can only be solved by whining to the Internet. A lot.
I used to read Sassy cover
to cover when it came in the mail. I investigated every Cute Band
Alert, sent away for every Zine of the Month, coveted the clothes, and
adored the authors (who never used surnames in their bylines) as
imaginary older sisters. I studied the design, reread sentences over
and over to figure out exactly what the writers had done to pull the
punches they pulled. The writing was so tight, and so jokey; you knew
the staffers loved their jobs.
So why the obsession? Well, as my man James Ellroy once wrote, writers in training snort up the craft by enjoyment. It was the beginning of picking things apart to figure out why they worked for me. That was part of it, but this went deeper than that. No one had told me before that it was OK to be weird, nor acknowledged what I sensed innately at 12, 13, 14 (my age when the magazine folded): that trying to fit in usually just made matters worse. When the writers at Sassy said it was OK to quit trying, I took everything they said from then on as gospel.
Including the fiction. Perhaps especially the fiction.
Lately I've had the weird experience of discovering that people whose zines I used to read when I was in middle school – Al Hoff, Lisa Carver, Brandon Stosuy – all have pro gigs writing for hip publications or websites (like Nerve and Pitchfork). Which not only makes me wish I hadn't quit doing zines at 15, it leads me to wonder about some of the other names I used to see in print a lot. Marjorie Ingall has popped up on Salon a couple of times. Jane Pratt had Jane. Christina Kelly was writing for YM (ouch – but everyone's gotta eat). Then I began to wonder about the authors whose fiction ran in Sassy. Blake Nelson's Girl was excerpted in Sassy and then made into an embarrassingly bad movie with Dominique Swain (appropriate, I guess, considering she made her name making embarrassingly bad movies from awesome books). The real conundrum for me, though, is Rebecca Moore, whose byline ran quite a bit in the old fiction section.
I cannot tell you how many times I have reread “Smokin' Joe,” which ran shortly before Sassy was bought by a rival publisher and run into the ground. I can tell you that my copy of it is at my parents' house 400 miles away, and I can type chunks of it from memory: “I could see Joe out in Hollywood. You want to make a deal? You ready to talk?” It's a disturbing little number about a middle schooler falling in love (and being seduced by) a twenty-something film teacher. There's a passage, wherein the protagonist's mother's boyfriend explains Mercury retrograde, that I think about every time I ride a train.
There was also a series of shorts about middle schoolers in late-70s Greenwich Village which contained lines I still quote to myself to this day: “Boys: One thing wrong about them and you die for ever having liked them. One bad shirt, one off day, one show-offy social studies class with even the teacher thinking this kid is really a loser, pitying him.” Better yet was, “Harry: He is like a chute I could suddenly fall down.” I understood that these were excerpts from a forthcoming novel, Lunch in Brooklyn, and I anticipated it eagerly.
Here's the problem, dear readers: I am still anticipating the goddamn novel. My Internet research reveals that Lunch in Brooklyn was Moore's MFA thesis at Columbia, and went no further. Now, what the hell is that about? Dear dimwits in the publishing world, 1) admit that the above quoted sentences (and the stories that contain them, which I assume you will immediately track down and read) are compelling and brilliant, 2) note that there is a frigging demographic that will buy this book, and an accompanying collection of short stories if you publish it.
That's right. I'm 26 years old, I loathe teenagers and yet I badly want to read about middle schoolers falling in love with each other! I want to read more stories about creepy dudes seducing middle schoolers! I want to read more stories about middle schoolers who refuse to speak to their divorcing parents!
You people have no excuse but to track Ms. Moore down, shake her down for the manuscript, and publish it. I promise I will reserve a copy as soon as I hear that this has happened. (Even though, as my boyfriend informed me when I started screaming at him about this, I can just wander down to the PSU library and request the thesis on Interlibrary Loan from Columbia's library, that is not the point. I'm talking about the greater good here.)
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