soundtrack for this blog

street spirit (fade out)

look at this and smile

long days without responsiblity. what a cool place to be. i am writing so that is good. that is always good. it's weird and difficult to get into the head of a young guy who is depressed and scared. it's like method acting - it's method writing - and that makes it stressful because i don't want to be depressed or scared. but i have to go there to write him.

on itunes right now: yikes! it's not radiohead! it's muse, "time is running out."

maybe that's appropriate, since winter break is half over........

15 steps

on itunes right now: 15 steps, performed live at the greek theater.

okay, i have started the gawain/the bends story. began in new york. i have so many pieces to put togehter, but of course this is the fun part, the creative part. my ok:novel is out being read. i can't do anything with it right now. so i am getting inside gawain's head.

boy is that a feat. me, getting inside the head of a 21 year old boy. this should be quite a ride.

listening to lennon

after so much thom yorke, i felt i had to listen to one of his influences. i asked for, and received, Lennon Legend cd for xmas. so right now, on itunes, is "jealous guy."

i also, music-wise, received the following: snow patrol, red jumpsuit apparatus, alkaline trio, muse and taking back sunday. think my 14 year old son had anything to do with those choices?

also got the dvd, Leonard Cohen, I'm Your Man. i saw it in the theater and am thrilled that i can watch it again. highlights - rufus wainwright singing hallelujah, and a duet with cohen and bono.

in a kind of post xmas lull. but i need to write. going to nyc was inspirational for my novel. gotta grab that energy and go with it. so enough blogging.

blame it on the falling sky

gawain - in in new york

my new york diary of gawain, who is clearly not meant to be in nyc:

I don’t think this is the place for me. There are too many people. They are all dressed dark, in black coats. Bulky. And they all move through the streets, sidewalks, with these faces filled with purpose and they look angry. I thought they were angry at me. I tried to stay out of their way but its hard and I bumped into people a lot.

Once I tripped over a stroller, I thought the mother would kill me with her glare.

Johnson wants to meet in times square and I take the subway there. That was enough of an adventure, I wanted to go back to the hotel just to get out from underground. I bought a ticket at the machine and I wasn’t sure what to buy or how much it would cost and people in line behind me were more and more annoyed. I hurried, I did, but I wasn’t fast. Then I had the ticket and didn’t know what to do with it. I had to wait, and watch someone else; oh, I see. You pass it through the slot on the entrance gate.

And then wait for a train and the ones on the other side, going the other way, they are so loud, I reflexively covered my ears. And then felt like an idiot, no one else covered their ears. I felt like I was four years old. I forced my hands back down to my side, but my ears suffered the more for it. Incredibly loud and discordant and painful. Not like loud music. Just loud screeching and metal rubbing against metal and a whine that would shame any monster who thought he had a frightening scream.

-----------------------
on itunes right now, appropriately: my iron lung

new york

a bar, i sat in a bar. i never go to bars. i had a ginger mojito and am not entirely sure what that is. i drank probably 1/10th of it. dinner at a nice italian restaurant. joanne and jim and sam and benett, holly, billy, aaron and carson. we missed richard. walked past the dakota. haven't really left the upper westside yet, but will tomorrow - times square and herald square.

a bar. me in a bar.

how to disappear

playing on itunes right now: how to disappear completely.

thom yorke said in one interview that this song is his favorite of all they've done. it was also used in the movie, "life as a house," and came as a surprise to me when i watched the movie recently. (my husband, on hearing me exclaim about a radiohead song in the movie, threw up his hands and said, "of course!")

i tried to work on gawain, my musician character, but he's not ready or i'm not ready yet. i'm still in the ok:novel story, my head is in that. i have a couple of people reading it for feedback, and i feel poised, waiting to hear what suggestions and comments they have, and what i still need to do for it. so i'm in a holding pattern.

but - going to new york in two days. and what will happen, of course, is that i will have to write a new york scene. either in ok:novel or in the gawain novel. in fact, maybe that will jump start gawain! yeah.....that's what i will do, start out in nyc. cool.

over on the right, that painting, is by my husband, richard sedivy. his show with 15 of these paintings opens on january 13, at hunsaker/scheslinger fine art, in bergamot station, santa monica. exquisite and evocative paintings. you must see them in person, there are details that don't show up in a photo.

silent sunday

sunday afternoon and it is very quiet. nothing on itunes. nothing on tv (that my son would be watching, not me, not on a sunday afternoon). in my head i am singing "winter wonderland" and wish i could stop singing it.

go to my links list, and click on speed of dark and scroll down to find the parody of "bohemian rhapsody" but about xmas. very amusing.

i hate the sunday paper because they print obits of young men and women who died in iraq over the last week and it breaks my heart to see 18 year olds, 22 year olds, and they are gone. stupid, stupid war. i know all the reasons for not pulling out all at once (stability, fairness to the iraqis, etc.) but i don't really care. i think all the troops should just come on home.

i want the bumper sticker that reads, "Stewart/Colbert 2008: or the terrorists win"

android not paranoid?

slowly the clock is watching. watching me? slowly what?
how is that adverb doing any ad-ing to anything? this is not a series of questions.

today the paranormal demanded attention but i didn't give in. live in the real world, i said to it. it declined and dripped away. why can't you write like music, i heard it say. i have no answer to that. so i hold my head in my hands. why can't i? rising up from the bass line, i hear sine waves. i do, i hear them. they oscillate. if i had an oscillator, i would trace their ryhthm and show you. i will trace the sounds of this song and draw it for you.

on itunes right now: paranoid android. of course...

snakey ladders

okay, consider this question. a student asks me for ONE radiohead song that he should listen to, to get a taste of what radiohead is about. Try picking one!

ultimately, i chose "exit music" because i know this student likes show tunes, and i thought this might have enough drama in it to appeal to him. another student suggested "creep" since that was their big hit. i also thought of "just" and "karma police." and of course i can think of many others and make a case why they would be good...

because it is not the weekend, i have not been writing. because the weekend is now so close, i am eagerly looking forward to spending some time writing.

on itunes right now: "sit down, stand up (snakes and ladders)"

just a thought

immerse your soul

on itunes: iluvya, from thom yorke's spitting feathers japanese import ep. phew, that's a lot of words for a short cd.

it's weird and disco-y. back in the 70's i put on fashion shows and would look for music just like this (well, the 70's version of this) as background for the fashion models on the runway. this would have been appropriately weird and interesting for the more avant garde designers, in particular the japanese. remember commes de garcon? like that.

i got my tattoo! the tree, and around the ankle, "immerse your soul in love." the tattoo artist added some flourishes to make everything connect all the way around the ankle. it looks beautiful. i will take a picture of it and post it, when the redness has disappeared a bit more.

my singer/songwriter guy is knocking on the inside of my head. what a weird image. he might be named Gawain. his mother might have had a penchant for naming her children after the knights of the round table. Gawain is a good name, since the knight was idealistic and loyal and also naive. that would fit my character. look, see how he is encroaching on my brain? i have to work on his story over winter break. he'll never forgive me if i don't. here's the thing - his story will be written to The Bends. the last song on The Bends is Street Spirit. The last line in Street Spirit is "immerse your soul in love." see how it all ties together? life is like that. my life is, anyway.

oh, wow, and see, Street Spirit just came on itunes, too!

so in honor of gawain, a poem from, oh, let's say Rilke. what a surprise. here is the first (beautiful) line from the First Elegy:

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in the overwhelming existence.

tattoo you, tattoo me

on itunes right now: "like spinning plates" - the live version on "i might be wrong" ep

thinking about a new tattoo. think i've got it. think i'll go for it this weekend. a simple tree design at my ankle and then around my ankle, like a bracelet, the words "immerse your soul in love" - from "street spirit." in the cool font that's on the street spirit ep. well, first i have to see how much it costs! the tree is definite however.

oh, now "idioteque" is playing. if only i could spell it.

i renamed the titles of my chapters. now they are the ok computer titles in parentheses, and my titles above them. i like it, they resonate off each other and i think it's stronger than just the ok computer titles alone. merges the two.

and i think i am almost done. i am going to go through it a few more times, now and during the winter break, and then i think i have to declare it finished. onward to an agent. shit and wow. but then i can move on to my young singer/songwriter dude in "the bends." he's pushing at me to tell his story. and i also must get back to loralie, whose basic story is finished but needs a great deal of polish, spit and shine. i have things to do! why am i writing my blog??

back to save the universe

The Grammys were announced and The Eraser is nominated for 'Best Alternative Album'

some good competition, too: Arctic Monkeys, Flaming Lips, Gnarls Barkley and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. all good, yet strangely, i want thom to win. will he even attend the awards? will they ask him to play or is he not "exciting enough?" (many years ago, when radiohead was up for a grammy, it was decided by the academy that they weren't a very visually appealing band and wouldn't be good for the ratings.)

in other categories, i found red hot chili peppers up for at least two awards (maybe three, i didn't print out the list). I really hope they win a grammy; stadium arcadium is a totally cool album. "snow (hey oh)" alone is worth the price of the two-disc album!

on itunes right now: exit music from when they played at the greek theater in la, back in june.

thom rocks out

check this out on youtube. red hot chili peppers on the jools holland show. thom rockin' out. about 58 seconds in. but watch the entire thing, cuz rhcp are great, too!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnL6gQRabD0

we alone fly past all things

i am waiting for something. i don't know what. writing is not appearing from my fingers onto the computer screen. i feel like i am taking a deep breath just before i plunge in again. i hope so! i hate writer's block, it pisses me off.

it's a night for rilke, from the duino elegies, the second elegy:

lovers, if they knew how, might utter strange, marvelous
words in the night air. for it seems that everything
hides us. Look: trees do exist; the houses
that we live in still stand. We alone
fly past all things, as fugitive as the wind.
And all things conspire to keep silent about us, half
out of shame perhaps, half as unutterable hope.

wishing and hoping

proof that they are in the studio, working on their 7th album - look at dead air space to see photos (one here) of the lads at work.

on itunes while i look at the photos: you and whose army

oh no, i said too much

i actually didn't play radiohead for a while on sunday afternoon. i played rem instead.

i like rem, i like the songs, the place they take me back to. but i am now officially spoiled by radiohead. rem sounds simple to me, musically. there is not the rich texture and complex guitar parts as there is in radiohead songs.

this is not to say rem has bad songs. just that i must stop comparing anyone to radiohead. i should just have two categories: radiohead and everyone else. then i can rate all the "everyone elses" as good or bad, better or best. but radiohead are outside that rating. i can think of nothing, save some late beatles work, that i can listen to over and over again, and still hear something i hadn't heard before - that's what radiohead music is.

i played ok computer repeatedly for about two months while i wrote to it and i kept (and keep) discovering new elements in each song.

so, sorry rem. i love "stand" and "end of the world as we know it" and others. but it's not the same love i have for radiohead's music. a separate love all its own.

are you such a dreamer?

on itunes right now: 2+2=5

all day long, the line in my head, "are you such a dreamer?"

i spent too much free time poking around the net and finding all kind of miscellaneous radiohead stuff: concert bootlegs, photos, massive amount of personal opinions. i have to say that the message board on greenplastic.com has some of the wittiest writers, who manage to maintain everyone's dignity even as they put each other down. quite clever.

poetry from eileen myles poem, the sadness of leaving:
"1,000,000 women
not me moving through
the street tonight
of this filmy
city & I
crown myself
again & again
and there
can't be
two kings."

fade out again

"All people living well living different from me. all these things I want but there’s no hope. I am not fit for them. And again, I am alone. it makes me shiver, and I can’t communicate. I feel strangled, I feel dead. Feel this in you, feel this nothingness and fade out again. When it is black and there is no hope, fade out again. Redemption comes from where and why does it not come for me. redemption comes for some and it does not come for me. I can’t see this, can’t see these things that are flying around me, they attack me and I can’t see them. Fade out again. Sing and play, and play guitar, and fade out again. And that’s how I will end, fade out. I was told, immerse your soul in love. I did and I cannot. I can no longer feel."

soliloquy from a future new character, my musician-guy, next novel. The Bends. written while listening to Street Spirit.

i hate mistakes

i meant, guitar teacher, not guitar teaching, in the post below. i should be copy-editing better than that.

on itunes at this very moment: thom yorke singing neil young's "after the goldrush"

weezer and radiohead

my son is in his bedroom with his guitar teaching and they are playing every weezer song they know. i am in my office (not far enough away) listening to radiohead, on itunes, on shuffle mode. the two don't really mix. not at the same time.

i am SO thinking about my NEXT novel and this is not good. i need to think about THIS novel. and i am. but i am also thinking about my next one.

so this is dull today. probably because i haven't written anything yet. later, i will. right now, i just want to listen to my weezer-inflected radiohead (or is it inflicted? depends on context).

poetry for the day:

"This is how you change, this is how you tear me open. I live on the edge of your love, and I bleed to see you.”

(The Hyperboreans song, Tear Me Open.)

this is what you get

i don't know why that line is up there

it goes through my brain right now. it will be supplanted by something else, as it supplanted "blame it on the black star."

close reading of the first chapter of the novel. look at every word. does that "that" need to be there? do i need to qualify every emotion? ruthless cutting. the best kind.

the beatles for today's poetry: one line: and all it connotes: "i read the news today, oh boy."

living inside a song

in my novel i explored why fans study their favorite bands' songs so much, why they buy every version, why they discuss them endlessly on the internet.

i wrote: ". . . because you love their songs so much. You want to be in them. You want to get inside them and see them from the center looking out. You want to inhabit them. And that’s what your fans want to do. It’s not enough to listen to your songs. They want to get into the middle of them and walk around inside that landscape and be a part of it.”

on itunes: a live version of "house of cards." i love this song. i can't wait until it's on a record with better sound quality.

because, like with all radiohead songs, i want to walk around inside it.

ee cumming: "for whatever we lose (like a you or a me) its always ourselves we find in the sea"

coyotes in my brain

they are, dancing around and yipping. their little feet are padding through my brain. lots of ideas for the novel. i need a scene in which a discussion takes place - i want the musician to discuss his feelings about being deciphered by everyone: fans, journalists, whomever. and i need a scene of him singing, some kind of performance -- like that acoustic show on mtv or vh1 (can't think of what it's called, the one nirvana did). i need the main character to do some of her own work, she needs to grow.

this is uninteresting.

on itunes right now: fake plastic trees. i can't get the last line out of my head, so i've been playing it over and over . . . "if i could be who you wanted." yes, sung in the high beautiful breaking voice.

hey, that's my way into a scene for the novel.

poetry comes from margaret lopez, a line from her poem "in a quiet house."

"I am a monster /(silence monger)/ stomping along / the house i make quiet."

two wednesdays

radiohead for the day: chatting with students about which album is their favorite and why do the japanese get the discs with extra songs on them. receiving a book in the mail that is all academic essays about radiohead (thanks to joseph tate who edited it). (not that he sent me the book, only that he edited it.) also receiving in the mail two posters: one a photo of the band and one the ok computer poster. they will go up at school to the delight of the five kids who like radiohead, and me.

more wednesday below.

the last chapter is rolling around in my head. or should i say, roiling. it's like a wild sea heaving and falling into troughs then rising again. all while i am trying to teach, or prepare for teaching. richard said the last chapter needs tension, and he is right and so ideas are speeding through my mind. i need time to put them into the computer and yet . . . i am writing my blog.

on itunes: Punchdrunk Lovesick Singalong

today's poem is from william stafford, in its entirety.

by the secret that holds the forest up,
no one will escape. (we have reached this place.)

the sky will come home some day.
(we pay all mistakes our bodies make when they move.)

Is there a way to walk that living has obscured?
(our feet are trying to remember some path we are walking toward.)

postmodern meanderings

i just finished teaching my postmodern literature class. i love it. we talk about recursive structures and mise en abyme, and who the author really is and who the narrator is and, for that matter, who the reader is. the kids get very frustrated and they argue, but that's what is great about it. they are all on topic, trying to sort out their ideas. they like to argue with me about my statements, but i never told them that my statements were correct. they're just my interpretation. so then they get frustrated by that because they want the right answer.

italo calvino's book "if on a winter's night a traveler," is excellent for this. every other chapter is a meditation on the reader, the writer, the story. he writes about the writing of the book being read. and he writes about the reader reading the book. and then he writes about the book he would like to have written, which turns out to be the book we are reading. damn, it's so much fun!

on the itunes at the moment: thom yorke's analyse. how appropriate is that? check out thom performing analyse at the mercury awards in england, accompanying himself on piano. it's on youtube. the best part is his little smile at the end, and the fact that he points out that he IS smiling!

i sit here surrounded by books and i have no poetry for today. maybe later.

oh, so short

bummer. too tired to write tonight.

go to this website and read this article that connects my favorite band with one of my favorite authors.


http://www.pulk-pull.org/essay/where-murakami-ends-and-radiohead-begins-a-comparative-study-by-samuel-jp-shaw/

new music, new words

sunday night again. they come too fast. i'm listening to radiohead live recordings of their newest songs, the ones that will be (may be) on their next album. i like them, better, i think, than the hail to the chief songs. but i like those too. and i like all the others. i have no discrimination, just a pushover for all radiohead.

so that was new music. now new words. i added so much to the OK novel this weekend. more sense of place. i named the band members who had been "the guys" for much of the novel. a band with Niall, Leith, Brendan, Henry and Michael. now they become real to me and this adds another, fuller dimension and gives me more places to go.

so a line of poetry for a sunday evening, when work looms . . . .

"we watch a sunlight dust dance and we try to be that lively, but nobody knows what music those paricles hear."

rumi, again.

baby's got the bends

hmmm.... except the bends (the song) is not on iTunes at this moment. at this moment, it is "you and whose army?" from amnesiac.

now i want to get into writing another novel. bad girl. stay focused. shit. this new character is forming in my head, i hear his voice, i feel his stress and i want to get him on paper. but my "ok:novel" story is filling me up too. gee, maybe if i quit my job and just wrote i could get it all done as fast as it comes in to my head. or almost as fast.

my husband paints and he doesn't paint one painting at a time, he has (right now) 8 on the wall of his studio and he goes back and forth to different ones, depending on what he's thinking and what he wants to be doing at that moment. i wish i could do that with novels, have several going at once. i have my loralie novel in first draft - i want to get back to it and bring it up to a better state, but see, i got sidetracked with OK and now i want to get sidetracked with the bends.

focus. i wish i just wrote songs. not that it's easier, i don't believe that. but it's a shorter form. i should write poetry. i've tried. every time i start a poem it turns into a story. that's just what i do.

so, baby's got the bends.

poetic thought for the day: Rumi: "this is how i would die into the love i have for you - as pieces of clouds dissolve in sunlight."

thanksgiving and ee cummings

hmmm....a day away from the computer. no writing at all, except for this post. but i did excellent writing last night, so good i wanted to cry. i watched radiohead videos for about an hour, and got an idea for a scene in my novel, and came in to write. it went well, it flowed. i think watching someone else be creative - express their creativity - helped me be more creative. i wrote some damn good phrases last night. not entire sentences (that is too much to ask!) but some good phrases.

on the drive north for dinner, ry played weezer's "island in the sun." made me remember costa rica, the beach, the water, the coolness factor of the jamaican/costa rican people.

poetry for the day: ee cummings:

"here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)"

thinking about you

okay now i'm stuck on another radiohead song. i just played "thinking about you" about 50 times. it gets better and better.

i liked writing to ok computer so much, now i want to write to another album. i'm thinking of the bends. just thinking . . . . for now. gotta finish this one first, and i'm still trying to get to 50,000 words for the nano project and i'm up to 43,000 and something. i should be able to reach the goal by the time this long weekend is over.

this is what fascinates me the most - how to write emotion in fiction. what i most want to do is impossible. what i most want to do is to write fiction that moves a person in the same way music does. this is completely impossible. nothing can move the soul like music can. it's ethereal, it's here and gone, there is nothing to grasp onto, but it moves through the body and fills you up and takes over. and then it's gone. there's no way fiction can do that, but still - i like to try to write moving emotional scenes that aren't just crap. don't know if i'm successful.

can't forget this

radiohead for the day, forgot it in my last post.

fake plastic trees, really i keep listening to it and i love it more and more. and also thinking about you - great guitar chord changes, my son picked it up and began playing it, very cool.

thinking at work

except not thinking about work.

thinking about my story. i keep adding to it. i wrote it all and now i'm going back and putting in more scenes, more dialogue, more thoughts. i hope it's not too much more, but i can't seem to let go of my characters. i've become so fond of them, like they are my friends and i don't want the novel to be over because then they are gone from me. i've also never written a novel with such a definite love story in it, and i quite like the love story aspect. it's fun to write and fun to daydream myself into it....

last day of work. five days off before i'm back here again.

sunday writing

there is a pressure about sunday that makes the writing come at full speed, as if the iminence of monday forces the ideas out of me. but there is also the deadly annoyance that monday IS going to come and then i will not be able to live inside my ideas and my novel, but have to be out there in the world thinking the thoughts that other people want me to think.

and tomorrow is jury duty, so that means either i can sit and daydream all day while i wait to be excused or i will be too uncomfortable in a room filled with other uncomfortable people and so i won't think any useful thoughts at all.

radiohead for the day: high and dry, just, black star and fake plastic trees.

more radiohead

http://superblive.blogspot.com/2006/11/radiohead-nobody-does-it-better-live.html

go here and listen. thom yorke singing his heart out on nobody does it better!

it doesn't get any better than this. heh heh....

rilke

in all the duino elegies, the line that stays with me is "what birds fly through is not infinite space."

however, i may have remembered it incorrectly, it is, i think, a little different. but it doesn't matter, because this is the line i like and it is beautiful.

the elegies are filled with references to space, birds, air, sky, angels, and love. when i am writing a story, and when i am stuck, i pick up the rilke book and just wander through it until enough beauty has saturated back into my writing brain, and i can go back to work with something that i really like.

today i tried to explain this to a student of mine, an exceptional writer who also gets hung up. i want to show her how following language can pull you out of stiff, uncreative writing.

follow the language, not the idea.

and today, the sky was so blue, the mountains had that crisp clarity as if you could trace every peak and valley and crevasse and tree from far away, and the sun was warm and it's hard to believe it's mid-november.

radioheadmania

all one word. spent the day looking through google images at radiohead photos, to find the perfect one to use as a back drop or desk top or whatever you call it on my computer.

i finished a first draft of OK computer stories. but i have lots to go back in and change. finish. add.

tattoos - why do i write about tattoos so much? i now have the Tattoo Chronicles, three short novels about women with tattoos. and i only have one. i want another but i sure as hell don't want as many as the women in my stories have. so what's with the obsession.

can't type tonight. broke a glass in the sink. cut a finger.

stories fill me but they don't spill out. or they do, but too fast and i don't get the whole thing. like taking a photo, i'm aiming off to the side and all i get is the arm of the person whose picture i tried to take, swinging, like she or he is walking away, right out of the picture frame.