Posts tagged #writing
Coffeehouse. Yes, I’m sitting in a cafe writing all day. Don’t judge me.
Spring Check-in
So, it’s been a little while since I last spoke with all of you. Consider this the quarterly presentation to the board.
I’m dating now, with mixed success. Which is more success than the previous, uh, decade of my life. A couple of dates under my belt, set up through literary speed dating and OK Cupid. Nothing particularly lasting yet, but early days still, and it’s not as big a deal as I thought. You go on dates, some are fun, some aren’t, no one holds it against you. And it’s fodder for writing. Which I haven’t been doing enough of. (Let’s come back to that.)
Related to the dating: why did no one point out to me that I have been wearing clothes that straight-up did not fit me? I mean, christ, I’m just swimming in some of the shirts in my closet, and it’s not like I’ve changed size since my freshman year of college. Why did people let me dress like someone who’d just lost half their body mass in a freak liposuction accident? Combine this with the weird effect that moving to New York has had no me actually sort of discovering what’s fashionable through osmotic processes (or that insane Buzz Bissinger essay) and I end up with an excuse to both buy some new shirts with actual colors and donate the rest to Housing Works.
That discovery — that I actually had no idea how to dress myself in the morning — might be tried to the overall campaign of self-esteem building I’ve been undertaking. That sounds a lot more New-Age-bullshitty than it is. It’s not any mantra or The Secret or anything like that — just a conscious decision to remember that everyone isn’t annoyed by my presence, that I’m good at what I do, and that people enjoy having me as a friend.
That I have plentiful amounts of evidence of these assertions around me is certainly helping in that regard.
Writing is where I’m letting myself down. I promised Nick a thing for his website and let that moment pass without taking advantage of it; I’ve been talking big talk about being a writer without putting in the effort needed to actually, you know, write.
It was easier with the artificiality of school to impose topics, deadlines, a sense of structure and reason to the process. Without that, I’m somewhat lost without an audience or built-in feedback mechanisms. Tied in with that is the drop-off in my already fitful reading habits because I don’t work at a bookstore anymore and I’m feeling my least literary in years.
(I’m not alazyreader on twitter for nothing.)
So, in order to try and force myself to actually write more, I’m launching a fiction email newsletter through TinyLetter. Really simple: you sign up, and I mail you something I wrote on the first of every month.
It’s called A Lazy Writer.
I would appreciate it if you signed up for it and told your friends about it. First issue goes out Wednesday.
“That ‘writers write’ is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.”
—Renata Adler, Speedboat
mmm yes
So I’m conversing with a friend of mine in Colorado about her job travails and wrote this sorta-involved email about what my job is like and thought, hey, why not put some context on this and stick it on my blog, which I never seem to write on anymore. All pictures and reblogs, pictures and reblogs.
Anyway, she’s working for a one-man Oil & Gas leasing company in Colorado, and finds herself getting frustrated. It turned into a office-manager-type role, which she’s not enjoying, and she doesn’t think she’s very good at/trained for the financial tasks she’s being given. She’s talked it over with her boss, who hasn’t shown much of an interest in helping — sink or swim, she’s on her own. My response is below.
I opened the deep drawer of the desk and got the office bottle out and poured myself a drink.
Miss Riordan watched me with disapproval. I was no longer a soild man. She didn’t say anything. I drank the drink and put the bottle away again and sat down.
“You didn’t offer me one,” she said coolly.
“Sorry. It’s only after eleven o’clock or less. I didn’t think you looked the type.”
Her eyes crinkled at the corners. “Is that a compliment?”
“In my circle, yes.”
She thought that over. It didn’t mean anything to her. It didn’t mean anything to me either when I thought it over. But the drink made me feel a lot better.
Raymond Chandler. Farewell, My Lovely.
How Brooklyn Became a Writers’ Mecca, With Background
This Guardian piece is going to start zooming around the internet, no doubt, and as I remember back when a former student of mine approached me about whether she should help out her friends start a magazine called “n+1”…
At the same moment, we both began telling the same story: when we’d initiated a confrontation we knew would end a relationship, which we’d each done in the same spot where we were now getting to know one another. We were just confessing it, like it was the table that raised the question and not our curiosity, our first exposure.
I remember, I said, after the confrontation I started, I was out front here with him waiting for a cab, wishing he would kiss me, and then he did. Passionately, he asked? That’s what I wanted, I said. So maybe it was the last time I’d see him. I thought, we may as well.
He took my leg in his hands under the table, and kept talking like it wasn’t what he was doing. At one, we noticed the downpour. As we left, he was holding my umbrella over us both, and in the same spot, he kissed me for the first time, and kept kissing me until I turned to the street and put my hand up for a cab, and he kissed me again before I closed the door.
The rain was back the next night, threatening the overnight my friends were debating spending at Liberty, and as I took a seat at the bar we called everyone to, I saw B. and he told me this was his bar and for the first time in years, we embraced. He put his cheek on mine. It was warm until I went outside. I hadn’t been that near to him since the morning in a hotel room five years ago, when I told him I loved him and he said nothing. Congratulations, I whispered, in the quick moment I had in the bar when no one else would hear. He just had a daughter.
The next big downpour delayed D., who, for the first time since we were kids, was staying within a 15 minute walk of me. He’d been in Tahrir Square for a few days of the occupation, and now he was going to join us in Liberty. He used to call me his sister. He edited the school paper like the paper of record. He was my first editor. He was the first person I let read my diary. He wrote me a well-wishing note in the back of it, to assure me of our bond after we went to bed for the first and only time, in a 2-star hotel in Paris, when we were 17 and 18. We knew we were ridiculous. He quoted Rilke and called me Victor Laszlo. We stayed up all night again, on the stone benches in Liberty. We didn’t know what we were waiting for, but we waited as long as we could.
When I finally got to bed early Friday morning I had a dream about a tornado, hiding from it in a river. I can still see what the horizon looked like, feel the water under my cheekbones.
It was after midnight on Friday when I was standing on Fifth Avenue with someone else, crying down my neckline. We’d just been to Sophie Calle’s Room. When I’d thought of taking him, I wasn’t sure if it would mean the beginning or the end of something between us. I was delirious. I was drunk and sat on the floor of her room and held her shoe. I asked him to take a photo of the shoe.
On the sidewalk after, I pulled him against a building and I asked him if he was scared to be with me because he’d feel too much. He said it was because he was scared he’d feel nothing at all.
I put my face in the sleeve of his coat because my whole face was wet. I took his hand and squeezed it, because it didn’t matter that this was his fault. After a bit he wanted to walk me to the train. I didn’t want to be in front of strangers. I can’t do this in front of strangers, I said. I turned to the curb and called a cab.
It’s strange now to stand on the street with just one person. I told the story to a friend in Liberty last night, welcoming in the occupiers after the march from Times Square, to Washington Square Park, then back to what the guy who called mic check to ask us to greet them called “home.” We clapped and chanted and smiled as they poured in, watched the stream of strangers’ faces in the dark. Welcoming some of them, there was that wet-eyed moment, where you look a little too long, and you could be cruising them, you could be starting something, and you’re too far and there’s too many bodies between you to embrace them, so you soften your mouth and your brow, you whisper “thank you” even though there’s no time for them to tell you what they’ve been through. You trust because the trust only had about 15 seconds to build. They brush past you, to eat, to plug in their phones, to get warm. You did the right thing and it’s time to go home. You can get on the train and feel everything. You’ll see them again, in five years, in fifteen years. You had this.
Melissa writes.
Fuck yeah, Melissa writes.
No “maybe” about it; I’m coming down with a cold. I had a raspy, dry cough at work today, and as I lie here in bed and type this out I can feel my lymph nodes swelling up in my neck.
I woke up this morning to NPR’s coverage of the launch of Atlantis and the shuttering of the US maned spaceflight for the better part of the next decade. It’s strange. The space shuttle program is older than I am. Sure, it’s rickety and horribly inefficient and it smells bad. But the shuttle program was good for more than producing cool videos of spiders spinning webs in zero-gravity environments.
It stood for the most famous split-infinitive in history, the spirit of going boldly where no man has gone before. The Russian space program doesn’t engender the same sort of symbolic importance, no matter how impressive it is that they keep the Soyuz program running on tin foil and string. (The Soyuz capsules were designed at the same time as the Apollo program, and they’re still in use today, with minor modifications. They leave one on the ISS as an escape pod, no less.) And the Chinese are pushing toward orbital flight, but they’re ages from the sort of consistency that supply runs to the ISS would require.
Germs make me think of space. The most famous example of this intersection is the grounding of Ken Mattingly because of German Measles exposure right before Apollo 13 — a lucky break for him, in the end. And since I’ve been playing a lot of Mass Effect, there’s the fictional Quarians, whose already-weak immune systems have been destroyed by generations of living aboard a vast fleet of spaceships. The Apollo 11 astronauts were greeted by President Nixon through a plate of plastic, as they were quarantined from the rest of the Earth at the time — a reverse spaceship, perhaps.
Germs are the ultimate survivalists; living staph has been taken off the lens of a camera that was exposed to hard vacuum on the outside of a spaceship for weeks. Extremophile bacteria here on Earth give us the best way of understanding what life might look like on other planets.
I imagine there might be a few little bugs hanging out inside the quiet shells of the Voyager spacecraft, hurtling along into the vast unknown. Perhaps those few migrants will be our legacy in the universe, to be found by some unknowable alien race and through extreme effort, our entire long-vanished biosphere deduced from their existence. Reverse-engineering the Earth from our smallest inhabitants.
