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.