Well, here it is, 2:30 in the morning. Hello, 2:30 a.m. We haven't seen each other since I wrote the paper on Nazi aesthetic policies (it kept me up all night).
I like the middle of the night. There's something sort of... I don't want to use the word peaceful, but it's the only one coming to mind. Tranquil. Calm. Solitary. A very learned person that I know once said that there are no true synonyms, and I like the idea of that and think it's true. There is a difference between tranquil and calm. And the middle of the night is quiet. My asshole neighbours are sleeping, and the only sounds in my flat are the murmured tappings of my fingers on computer keys and the slightest rustling of the liquorice package as I remove another bright red stick... The middle of the night is good for writing.
I am tired now, though. I am still trying to finish the paper that was due on Monday (for a while I thought that I would write the entire thing in caps lock, or maybe wingdings - honestly what is the purpose of the wingding font? there are no letters here, and who has time to work out this ingenious code of symbols? am i missing something?) and while my creative writing portfolio and artist's statement are finished, my story does not yet have a title and that concerns me a little. Something about apples? Something about strings? In my last packet of stories, one of the comments was that one of my titles was too postmodern... I don't really know if that was a bad thing, but the "too" that modified the "postmodern" might indicate so... In which case, I don't really know what that means. I'm not sure why the postmodern is bad. Lately I love the postmodern. Différence.
Oh, look at that. Now it's 3 a.m.
Time for that middle of the night burst of genius.
Wednesday, 7 December 2011
Saturday, 3 December 2011
Last Minute Steps to Pathways That Lead Through Trees
I'm procrastinating. There's a paper I need to write, about the nature of tragedy in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. I have an intense dislike of Willy Loman; I think he's a dummy. I mean, maybe it's not entirely his fault, but he is. He's a dummy. And he's not tragic. I need that to fill 8-10 pages.
Whenever I am faced with writing something that I don't want to write, I end up doing one of two things: I clean (my flat is pretty tidy when there are papers due) or I think about all the other things that I would rather be writing. Sometimes both. When I have to read something that I don't really want to read, I think about all the other things I'd rather be reading. It's like that; I know I'm not alone in this. For example, right now I am dreaming about Christmas vacation, because I want to read comics. I literally can't wait until finals are over, so I can read comics. And write poems! I kind of want to write poems again... (By the way, there's a link on the right side of the page for CV2, which is the journal that just accepted some of Cassidy's poetry. Check it out, because they tell you the themes of the upcoming issues so that you can customize your submissions. The journal is poetry-only, but I think most of us write poems too...)
I've been a little out of touch lately, with what's been going on in the world outside the university. I don't even know if there are awesome new comics coming out! I haven't even clicked on the links on my own blog for weeks and weeks now (and it looks like I missed a few deadlines... ) but now that it's the end of the semester and I still need to talk about those other guys who are also cool, and as I am procrastinating at the moment, I'll talk about Drawn and Quarterly, top comics publisher extraordinaire.
This is my brother's publisher. Have I ever talked about my bro's book on this blog? I don't think so. It's cool, it's historical fiction, called The Klondike. It is naturally about the Klondike gold rush. He did the entire thing with a fountain pen tip and a bottle of ink, which I think is amazing, because it's over 300 pages. It took like, five years. That's pretty much all I'm going to say about it. D&Q is really cool; they publish all the cool comics in Canada, mostly stuff that is considered to be literary, like Seth's stuff, and Chester Brown's. Other artists: Daniel Clowes, Matt Forsythe (notorious for a distinct lack of words in his stories...), Jillian Tamaki, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Shigero Mizuki, Kate Beaton, Lynda Barry, and Guy Delisle. And they are based in Quebec, so they have a really strong base of French comic artists too. I think they recently got my bro a French publisher, like, a publisher in France, which is pretty cool. (Le Klondike?) What else can I say about D&Q? They harness new talent, are preposterously supportive (which I think I am discovering about smaller presses), and publish high quality work, stuff that takes comics so far past fanboy superhero stuff, stuff that elevates comics to a whole new level. I mean, superhero stuff is all right (I have a special soft spot for Hellboy comics, which is a different kind of hero, I think), but comics are so versatile, and D&Q is so good for the industry. I mean, that's what I think, anyway.
By the way, Matt Forsythe and Jillian Tamaki also have blogs and websites that I've linked to in the cool guys list. I've already talked about Jillian, in a previous post, but Matt is an interesting sort of creature. He's got degrees in Journalism and he lived in Korea for a while (in his book Ojingogo, the only words are Korean characters), and he does a whole series of comic strips on one of his pages that are about a comics class he teaches at an elementary school. People who do comics are interesting. I really like his art style a lot. (Click on the link. Do it.)
End procrastination?
Whenever I am faced with writing something that I don't want to write, I end up doing one of two things: I clean (my flat is pretty tidy when there are papers due) or I think about all the other things that I would rather be writing. Sometimes both. When I have to read something that I don't really want to read, I think about all the other things I'd rather be reading. It's like that; I know I'm not alone in this. For example, right now I am dreaming about Christmas vacation, because I want to read comics. I literally can't wait until finals are over, so I can read comics. And write poems! I kind of want to write poems again... (By the way, there's a link on the right side of the page for CV2, which is the journal that just accepted some of Cassidy's poetry. Check it out, because they tell you the themes of the upcoming issues so that you can customize your submissions. The journal is poetry-only, but I think most of us write poems too...)
 |
| I'm so going to read this over the holidays - it's entirely done with watercolours. So cool. |
I've been a little out of touch lately, with what's been going on in the world outside the university. I don't even know if there are awesome new comics coming out! I haven't even clicked on the links on my own blog for weeks and weeks now (and it looks like I missed a few deadlines... ) but now that it's the end of the semester and I still need to talk about those other guys who are also cool, and as I am procrastinating at the moment, I'll talk about Drawn and Quarterly, top comics publisher extraordinaire.
This is my brother's publisher. Have I ever talked about my bro's book on this blog? I don't think so. It's cool, it's historical fiction, called The Klondike. It is naturally about the Klondike gold rush. He did the entire thing with a fountain pen tip and a bottle of ink, which I think is amazing, because it's over 300 pages. It took like, five years. That's pretty much all I'm going to say about it. D&Q is really cool; they publish all the cool comics in Canada, mostly stuff that is considered to be literary, like Seth's stuff, and Chester Brown's. Other artists: Daniel Clowes, Matt Forsythe (notorious for a distinct lack of words in his stories...), Jillian Tamaki, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Shigero Mizuki, Kate Beaton, Lynda Barry, and Guy Delisle. And they are based in Quebec, so they have a really strong base of French comic artists too. I think they recently got my bro a French publisher, like, a publisher in France, which is pretty cool. (Le Klondike?) What else can I say about D&Q? They harness new talent, are preposterously supportive (which I think I am discovering about smaller presses), and publish high quality work, stuff that takes comics so far past fanboy superhero stuff, stuff that elevates comics to a whole new level. I mean, superhero stuff is all right (I have a special soft spot for Hellboy comics, which is a different kind of hero, I think), but comics are so versatile, and D&Q is so good for the industry. I mean, that's what I think, anyway.
 |
| My bro's comic |
By the way, Matt Forsythe and Jillian Tamaki also have blogs and websites that I've linked to in the cool guys list. I've already talked about Jillian, in a previous post, but Matt is an interesting sort of creature. He's got degrees in Journalism and he lived in Korea for a while (in his book Ojingogo, the only words are Korean characters), and he does a whole series of comic strips on one of his pages that are about a comics class he teaches at an elementary school. People who do comics are interesting. I really like his art style a lot. (Click on the link. Do it.)
 |
| Recent illustration Forsythe did for The Walrus magazine, of one of my favourite bands, Arcade Fire. |
End procrastination?
Sunday, 27 November 2011
Sunday at Depot
Today it was red serge everywhere, high brown boots, stetson hats, brown gloves, puffy pants with yellow stripes down the sides. Troop graduation. Families of cadets everywhere. A desperate need for a badge wallet (among other things), because tomorrow, suddenly they'll have badges. My co-worker recommends that one of the cadets buy the flashlight that runs on double A batteries, because where she's going, lithium ions will be hard to come by, and the other flashlight we sell runs on those. We can't sell her the rechargeable flashlight because it's bigger and her waist is too small, and with a flashlight on her belt, she won't have room for her gun. She needs a pocket flashlight. Already she is having trouble finding room for an extra pair of handcuffs. I think to myself, "I could never do this."
It's a busy day. In between customers I pick up the very old and damaged copy of Russian literary theory that I am trying to wade through for my honours proposal, and I get nowhere. I keep having to reread the previous four sentences, and I make little headway. The cadets look at the title of my book, The Dialogic Imagination, and they shake their heads. They tell me that they're so glad they're not in university. I tell them that this is awesome, it's Einstein's theory of relativity applied to the continuum of time and space in a literary text. Their eyes glaze over. I sell them a copy of Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement. They'll need it.
Our worlds are different.
It's a busy day. In between customers I pick up the very old and damaged copy of Russian literary theory that I am trying to wade through for my honours proposal, and I get nowhere. I keep having to reread the previous four sentences, and I make little headway. The cadets look at the title of my book, The Dialogic Imagination, and they shake their heads. They tell me that they're so glad they're not in university. I tell them that this is awesome, it's Einstein's theory of relativity applied to the continuum of time and space in a literary text. Their eyes glaze over. I sell them a copy of Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement. They'll need it.
Our worlds are different.
Thursday, 24 November 2011
Lalala Human Steps
However, in good standard fashion, I think I will post a video about the body as well.
You know how we've been talking about writing the body, and the way the body is used to say particular stuff in a story? Well, here is that made literal - the body telling the story, i.e. Dance, the body as narrative.
I don't really understand dance, nor do I understand how I am meant to interpret it, the things I am supposed to look for in order to find the story in the dance, but one of my bestest fwends is a dancer, and he showed me this video - Wow. Just check it out.
Part of me has always wished that I could dance, but I'm clumsy and chubby; I tell my stories other ways. Still, you have to admire the skill here.
Is writing ever like a dance? I wonder.
You know how we've been talking about writing the body, and the way the body is used to say particular stuff in a story? Well, here is that made literal - the body telling the story, i.e. Dance, the body as narrative.
I don't really understand dance, nor do I understand how I am meant to interpret it, the things I am supposed to look for in order to find the story in the dance, but one of my bestest fwends is a dancer, and he showed me this video - Wow. Just check it out.
Part of me has always wished that I could dance, but I'm clumsy and chubby; I tell my stories other ways. Still, you have to admire the skill here.
Is writing ever like a dance? I wonder.
Bookshop Sessions
Here is a video. It is not a video about the body, as I usually post, but it is a good video, with a literary backdrop.
Song: Little Lion Man
Band: Mumford & Sons
Location: Bookshop! Yay!
Song: Little Lion Man
Band: Mumford & Sons
Location: Bookshop! Yay!
I love this band right now.
Monday, 21 November 2011
Je ne suis pas ici
I come back to the idea of legitimately literary forms of writing. This is because I am doing my honours project in creative non-fiction. Personal narratives. Memoir. Autobiography. Lyric essays. Life writing. Writing a life. It feels as if it is the creation of a self within a text, completely opposite to those theorists who claim that the more distance there is between a writer and his text, the more legitimate this text is.
I do not agree. Of course I don't. When do I ever? Honestly, sometimes I wish I could just do something normal, or think something normal, or be normal. I don't think that's in the cards for me. So I write narratives that require a subjective self.
For the last few weeks I've been thinking that this project is actually about genre, and the ways that things don't often fit into neat little genre boxes, and how I don't want my writing to be one thing but many things, and so I've been looking at texts that use all kinds of genres to tell their stories. Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is one of these texts. At times this is prose, at times poetry, it is a fictional work about a real person so it contains things like news clippings and eyewitness accounts of events, there are falsified documentary-style photographs of Billy the Kid and his wife (the people in these photos are all actors/models), and the whole thing combines together to tell the story of a life. Sometimes, then, it is as far away from being what we normally associate with fiction as it can be. And, I think it might be fictional autobiography, which I sort of thought was an oxymoron.
I don't think this project is actually about genre at all, the more I think about it, even if my attempt is to deconstruct genre. The point is the subjective self. The placement of, the use of, the reality or unreality of the subjective self. Genre only offers a way for me to create that self, to look outside of my text, to look through lenses. It is secondary to where the self is found within the text.
So, where are you, subjective self?
I do not agree. Of course I don't. When do I ever? Honestly, sometimes I wish I could just do something normal, or think something normal, or be normal. I don't think that's in the cards for me. So I write narratives that require a subjective self.
For the last few weeks I've been thinking that this project is actually about genre, and the ways that things don't often fit into neat little genre boxes, and how I don't want my writing to be one thing but many things, and so I've been looking at texts that use all kinds of genres to tell their stories. Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is one of these texts. At times this is prose, at times poetry, it is a fictional work about a real person so it contains things like news clippings and eyewitness accounts of events, there are falsified documentary-style photographs of Billy the Kid and his wife (the people in these photos are all actors/models), and the whole thing combines together to tell the story of a life. Sometimes, then, it is as far away from being what we normally associate with fiction as it can be. And, I think it might be fictional autobiography, which I sort of thought was an oxymoron.
I don't think this project is actually about genre at all, the more I think about it, even if my attempt is to deconstruct genre. The point is the subjective self. The placement of, the use of, the reality or unreality of the subjective self. Genre only offers a way for me to create that self, to look outside of my text, to look through lenses. It is secondary to where the self is found within the text.
So, where are you, subjective self?
Saturday, 19 November 2011
Life's Like This
At work, Avril Lavigne is playing on the radio, and I'm thinking about why exactly I need to make things so complicated.
And at the same time, aside from the story I wrote about the guy who loses all his teeth (Medrie tells me that this boy was a particularly well-realised character, but he should be, because he is largely based on my ex-boyfriend, who I knew very well, and I know exactly why all of his teeth fell out), I haven't had this much fun writing anything in a really long time. I mean, hell yes, making my ex lose all his teeth was amazing, but I mean, as much fun as I am having right now, at work, writing my portfolio story.
Given all the frustration I felt all semester about writing the body, it seems ironic to me that I have chosen to continue to write about the body in my final project, but that is what I am doing. Plus, I've chosen a subject that I know very little about, which is making things ridiculously hard for me. And yet, it's crazy fascinating. I've been asking my friend who is a doctor, and her husband who has a PhD in biochemistry, all kinds of questions about all kinds of cool stuff - the body is crazy! And it's such a fragile shell, this singular thing that connects us to the world and to existence and to consciousness... I can't believe how much I take it for granted every day, the fact that my body works as well as it does. And I can't believe the ways that we can manipulate science, the way we stop ourselves from manipulating too much because of those pesky ethical questions.
More than I have all semester, I desperately want to do this story right. I feel like it's the first time in a while that I might actually have something to say.
I'm not putting pressure on myself though, no, not at all. I'm just doing my thing, writing with my fountain pen. Remembering that life's like this.
And at the same time, aside from the story I wrote about the guy who loses all his teeth (Medrie tells me that this boy was a particularly well-realised character, but he should be, because he is largely based on my ex-boyfriend, who I knew very well, and I know exactly why all of his teeth fell out), I haven't had this much fun writing anything in a really long time. I mean, hell yes, making my ex lose all his teeth was amazing, but I mean, as much fun as I am having right now, at work, writing my portfolio story.
Given all the frustration I felt all semester about writing the body, it seems ironic to me that I have chosen to continue to write about the body in my final project, but that is what I am doing. Plus, I've chosen a subject that I know very little about, which is making things ridiculously hard for me. And yet, it's crazy fascinating. I've been asking my friend who is a doctor, and her husband who has a PhD in biochemistry, all kinds of questions about all kinds of cool stuff - the body is crazy! And it's such a fragile shell, this singular thing that connects us to the world and to existence and to consciousness... I can't believe how much I take it for granted every day, the fact that my body works as well as it does. And I can't believe the ways that we can manipulate science, the way we stop ourselves from manipulating too much because of those pesky ethical questions.
More than I have all semester, I desperately want to do this story right. I feel like it's the first time in a while that I might actually have something to say.
I'm not putting pressure on myself though, no, not at all. I'm just doing my thing, writing with my fountain pen. Remembering that life's like this.
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