i'm freaking out. new house, new job, new romance, new friends, new classes...even a new cellphone. it's all going fantastically, falling in to my lap piece after piece, begging me for attention, praising everything that i do. so, yeah, i'm freaking out.
"dark and twisty" it may be, but now i'm just waiting for the backlash, resisting every impulse to flee and embarking on malignant self-soothing that keeps me awake until 5 in the morning the day before i move, and i'm not even pretending to pack.
and so the id, the me, the clamorous i, refuses to be still, appeased. i sprint from reassurance to reassurance and can't stop thinking about the bubble of fiction on a balmy april afternoon in a haze of frangipani. i'm making it up. god knows which flower it really is.
i avoid deceptively, engaging and embracing, because it's the only thing i really know how to do. what can i say? whatever you need to hear. not want; need. second person is such a comfortable way to live one's life, didn't you know? vicarious is more fun, anyway.
so, yeah, i'm freaking out.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Saturday, April 25, 2009
literary what?
I've been hearing this term bandied about lately: "literary fiction." It rather mystifies me, but I find genres usually do. I suppose writing style or intended audience is just as arbitrary and therefore reasonably unreasonable as content and conventions to categorize something, since the categories are so restrictive and artificial anyway...but it certainly made me pause for thought.
Anyhow, I have been looking for this excerpt for a few days now, and finally found the version that I prefer (there is an oral, as well, and a "primary" source too, I would imagine), so I thought I might share it. Very egocentric, that sentence. Ah, well. From pages 179-80 of Mitch Albom's Tuesdays With Morrie: An Old, A Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson, lauded and degraded by O's book club and I suppose a prime example of "literary fiction":
Anyhow, I have been looking for this excerpt for a few days now, and finally found the version that I prefer (there is an oral, as well, and a "primary" source too, I would imagine), so I thought I might share it. Very egocentric, that sentence. Ah, well. From pages 179-80 of Mitch Albom's Tuesdays With Morrie: An Old, A Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson, lauded and degraded by O's book club and I suppose a prime example of "literary fiction":
"I heard a nice little story the other day," Morrie says. He closes his eyes for a moment and I wait.
"Okay. The story is about a little wave, bobbing along in the ocean, having a grand old time. He's enjoying the wind and the fresh air—until he notices the other waves in front of him, crashing against the shore.
"'My God, this is terrible,' the wave says. 'Look what's going to happen to me!'
"Then along comes another wave. It sees the first wave, looking grim, and it says to him, 'Why do you look so sad?'
"The first wave says, 'You don't understand! We're all going to crash! All of us waves are going to be nothing! Isn't it terrible?'
"The second wave says, 'No, you don't understand. You're not a wave, you're part of the ocean.'"
I smile. Morrie closes his eyes again.
"Part of the ocean," he says, "part of the ocean." I watch him breathe, in and out, in and out.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
TBL is on the air!
The Buried Life, a crew of four guys who are looking to fulfill their dreams and the dreams of others, have touched the deeply buried heartstrings of even MTV, and are bringing their Matthew Arnold-inspired message of possibility to your television. The Buried Life is coming your way, wherever that might be. (And the pilot episode was awesome, by the way; ever walked the red carpet? Inspired an entire classroom of inner-city youth?)
These guys (Duncan, Jonnie, Dave, and Ben) are the energy that the post-failed revolution ironicized society needs to jumpstart itself, particularly in the wave of economic recession and with a thunderous ecological crisis. Based loosely in Victoria, B.C., they have done a variety of crazy, awesome things with their giant purple bus, Penelope. They brought kids with terminal cancer on a Toys-R-Us shopping spree. They opened the six-o'clock news. They lead a parade, destroyed a computer, planted a tree. They were in a protest. They got a song on the radio, sang the national anthem to a crowded stadium, and kissed the Stanley cup. There are a hundred different things on their list; what's on yours?
Here's their newsflash version:
When it’s TBL related, we always want you guys to be the first to know. Sometimes that’s tough.
If you’ve seen the front page of the New York Times today you’ve probably read some exciting news. After three years on the road, “#53: Make a Television Show” is about to be officially crossed off the list! Let us be the first to say: Yeeeeeehaawwwww!!!
We’ve turned down many TV offers in the past. Anything with a script, “mood music” or a lightning round has been - ever so politely - refused. We are exceptionally grateful to even get the offers, but packaging The Buried Life as a conventional “Reality show” would betray our principles. Besides, that shit is whack.
This one - as you can see from the article - has a different fit. The world is changing and we applaud MTV for being brave enough to change with it (for the record, we’re doing this the way we’ve always done it - on our own). We are stoked to be the flagship series of their turnaround and look forward to seeing more like-minded programs in the years to come.
Lastly and most importantly - to our friends, family, everyone out there following on the blog - take this as a sign that you can do anything, no matter how far-fetched or impossible it seems. Write it down, get your friends together and go after it.
It’s Sunday, TBL is in the New York Times, MTV is shifting course. TBL Season One airs (tentatively) July 20th worldwide and we’re going to go to the beach to celebrate!
What do you want to do before you die?
Jonnie, Dave, Ben and Duncan
Check out their website to learn more, and to become a part of the Buried Life network.
My list?
The top ten:
10.) Be involved in a Broadway production of either Cats, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, or Rent.
9.) Shake hands with Spider Robinson and Robert Hass.
8.) Play Mariokart in an IMAX theatre.
7.) Watch the extended Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings trilogy in an OMNIMAX, nonstop. Done it in the living room a few times; now it's time to supersize. After all, I am a cynical North American.
6.) Build another house for a homeless family (went to Tijuana once before, and have to do it again somewhere before I keel).
5.) Have a home that provides rent-free rooms in the form of scholarships for students.
4.) Adopt a child.
3.) Foster animals from the SPCA.
2.) Publish an anthology.
1.) Skydive.
Not an Arnold fan? Try some Tennyson, then, or Herrick. Try some Albom/Schwartz, or even Bedingfield. It's not too late. Dig up your life; the plot isn't sacred, and you will thank yourself later. There is no time like the present, and it's continually slipping away, but it's also continually reborn, an instantaneous shift from past to future, future to past. You're a time-traveler, and you can do the impossible. Prove it possible.
Now, the question again: what do you want to do before you die?
summertime, and the livin' is easy...
Walked the labyrinth at school yesterday, only to discover that in reading the surpringly engaging The Time Traveler's Wife I sunburned my nose. Hallelujah, it's here!
Thursday, April 16, 2009
night moves
No, no Bob Segar, I'm afraid. Just gentle musings of what I am currently pleased to describe as a "backwoods cretin"; seems appropriate given my rather obliquely rural upbringing and insistence on escapist nonconformity with popular culture. That is, I know nothing of anything that everyone knows, and have a mental block that keeps it that way. It's pretty fantastic.
Off topic, massively. I was actually intending to talk about time, and night, and nighttime, and night-time, and how lovely it is to meld, suspended, with the grand arc of time when it's quiet, dark, and still...seems rather ironic to speak of stillness (invoking the Koan posted below), but at the same time it's a sort of overflow of effusive joy that makes its way into everything (since it comprises and is composed of everything, all of the time -- the point, in other words). Time's very meaninglessness becomes soothingly obvious when everything is still and tomorrow is forever away. Surrounded by cats, who I am convinced are anciently imbued with the knowledge of time's triviality, anbd from whose eyes and propensity for napping one can learn the most intimate secrets of the world, I speak in fragments and run-ons, deliriously happy in my quiet night oasis. Facebook flashes, and I ignore it (but not really, since I'm writing about it here, right now, and thinking about it continually as it blinks, blinks, blinks, trying to force me to correspond with a figment of my high school imagination, so rather than ignore perhaps the word I mean is avoid) to drift a moment longer. Its flashes, though, are carefully timed, and remind me over and over that chronology is a persistent little fable...
Now, some links, since I segue like a goddess (read that as you will): Hymns to the Night and Being Time, graciously directed by another N whose preoccupation with transcendence and universality came into my general understanding of life right when I needed it to, of course.
Anyway, general drift (heh): I like the night for its anonymity, its escapist magnitude of silence and slumber, its reminder that at all times there is a pulsing dreaming unconscious hive that hums and carries on the menial tasks of existence, but that is continually in the process of spinning liquid gold...it is the alchemist, in his or her most literal, reductive form, and yet begs reinterpretation as the transcendent.
"If you focus on the local, you can reach the universal" (pleasantly paraphrased by Matt Molloy).
Off topic, massively. I was actually intending to talk about time, and night, and nighttime, and night-time, and how lovely it is to meld, suspended, with the grand arc of time when it's quiet, dark, and still...seems rather ironic to speak of stillness (invoking the Koan posted below), but at the same time it's a sort of overflow of effusive joy that makes its way into everything (since it comprises and is composed of everything, all of the time -- the point, in other words). Time's very meaninglessness becomes soothingly obvious when everything is still and tomorrow is forever away. Surrounded by cats, who I am convinced are anciently imbued with the knowledge of time's triviality, anbd from whose eyes and propensity for napping one can learn the most intimate secrets of the world, I speak in fragments and run-ons, deliriously happy in my quiet night oasis. Facebook flashes, and I ignore it (but not really, since I'm writing about it here, right now, and thinking about it continually as it blinks, blinks, blinks, trying to force me to correspond with a figment of my high school imagination, so rather than ignore perhaps the word I mean is avoid) to drift a moment longer. Its flashes, though, are carefully timed, and remind me over and over that chronology is a persistent little fable...
Now, some links, since I segue like a goddess (read that as you will): Hymns to the Night and Being Time, graciously directed by another N whose preoccupation with transcendence and universality came into my general understanding of life right when I needed it to, of course.
Anyway, general drift (heh): I like the night for its anonymity, its escapist magnitude of silence and slumber, its reminder that at all times there is a pulsing dreaming unconscious hive that hums and carries on the menial tasks of existence, but that is continually in the process of spinning liquid gold...it is the alchemist, in his or her most literal, reductive form, and yet begs reinterpretation as the transcendent.
"If you focus on the local, you can reach the universal" (pleasantly paraphrased by Matt Molloy).
Sunday, April 12, 2009
life is beautiful
a reponse to the following image, found @ PostSecret, and adapted from something else I was pondering:
aside from the fundamental question of good and bad, with a resignation to the distinction for the sake of argument (or, more, contemplation), what is it about submissive persistance that is so preferable? is it not perhaps the ultimate sign of surrender, to persist simply because it is asserted to be "good" to do so? what is the point of comparison? to be, or not to be? and in being, to actually be, or not to be? to accept breathing and eating, reproducing and defecating, working and playing, just for the sake of their asserted goodness? is this not a plebian surrender? is there any sentience at all involved in instinct? (I suspect that there is, but more importantly hadn't thought much about it before the "something else" rolled along.) why is it that we find numb, cheerful acceptance of persistence so appealing? is it to appease our heavily scare-quoted modern sensibilities that we solemnly assure one another that living is the thing? that our very existence is the evidence? what is the essential beauty of life? is it enough to let it become a cliche? should we not be at least occasionally striving to play devil's advocate, to see if perhaps there is something to the well-worn adages?
there probably is. it's probably impermanent, fluctuating, as subjective and constructed as anything else (and thereby no more or less true, except by the standards of the questioner). but just because cacophony was resolved with harmonoius melodies of lulling peace, it doesn't necessarily follow that the dissonance should die, should be permanently erased. why not wonder, once in awhile? why not challenge your instincts? make them stand up for what they have forgotten that they believe in. let them exercise their talents for debate once in awhile, so that when you really need them to be strong for you, the muscles haven't forgotten. instinct needn't be static; let it grow, evolve; shake it from empty resolution once in awhile so that there is something to sustain it. let it rest sometimes, yes; the demands of societal sanity require that you do so, in the self-soothing peaceful meditation that is routine and truths.
yeah, life is beautiful, and good. it is rife with potential and pleasant surprises. there are endless miracles sifting through our willing fingers, forever whispering of potential and breathless joy. there is the sound of children's laughter, the irregular freckles on your iris, the half-moon of a finally unchewed thumbnail. there are snapdragons whose vibrance melts from one to the next and who are laughing, even as you cup the sides of their jaws. there is the taste of fresh gelato and wild strawberries, and the sound of defiant graffiti redefining beauty. sometimes, the sunset is so soulwrenchingly ecstatic that sunrise is only a short blink away, and the diffusion of heavy eyelids cheekily redefines desirable focus. and the stars, oh, the stars, that drift and wheel and wait, occasionally humming secrets to each other in the vast silence. owls, and tigers, and dragonflies. bowls, and soup spoons, and trashy summer novels. it's beautiful.
but remember the option. you may need it one day; if you've got some practice, it will only break you in ways that are exquisitely mysterious.
"It is a profound personal reminder that every single breath is a decision to persist, to strive, to seek, to find, and at the same time a stagnant sort of fear that yields to the organism’s drive for immortality. It is a reminder of the universal unconscious, which cries uncomprehendingly for you to stop while the adrenaline reminds you of why you’d want to continue anything, ever, at all. It is living, in a tender confrontation with the alternative, and it makes you worthy of knowing, just for a second, that you have this same control over that decision every waking minute of your life" (something else).
aside from the fundamental question of good and bad, with a resignation to the distinction for the sake of argument (or, more, contemplation), what is it about submissive persistance that is so preferable? is it not perhaps the ultimate sign of surrender, to persist simply because it is asserted to be "good" to do so? what is the point of comparison? to be, or not to be? and in being, to actually be, or not to be? to accept breathing and eating, reproducing and defecating, working and playing, just for the sake of their asserted goodness? is this not a plebian surrender? is there any sentience at all involved in instinct? (I suspect that there is, but more importantly hadn't thought much about it before the "something else" rolled along.) why is it that we find numb, cheerful acceptance of persistence so appealing? is it to appease our heavily scare-quoted modern sensibilities that we solemnly assure one another that living is the thing? that our very existence is the evidence? what is the essential beauty of life? is it enough to let it become a cliche? should we not be at least occasionally striving to play devil's advocate, to see if perhaps there is something to the well-worn adages?
there probably is. it's probably impermanent, fluctuating, as subjective and constructed as anything else (and thereby no more or less true, except by the standards of the questioner). but just because cacophony was resolved with harmonoius melodies of lulling peace, it doesn't necessarily follow that the dissonance should die, should be permanently erased. why not wonder, once in awhile? why not challenge your instincts? make them stand up for what they have forgotten that they believe in. let them exercise their talents for debate once in awhile, so that when you really need them to be strong for you, the muscles haven't forgotten. instinct needn't be static; let it grow, evolve; shake it from empty resolution once in awhile so that there is something to sustain it. let it rest sometimes, yes; the demands of societal sanity require that you do so, in the self-soothing peaceful meditation that is routine and truths.
yeah, life is beautiful, and good. it is rife with potential and pleasant surprises. there are endless miracles sifting through our willing fingers, forever whispering of potential and breathless joy. there is the sound of children's laughter, the irregular freckles on your iris, the half-moon of a finally unchewed thumbnail. there are snapdragons whose vibrance melts from one to the next and who are laughing, even as you cup the sides of their jaws. there is the taste of fresh gelato and wild strawberries, and the sound of defiant graffiti redefining beauty. sometimes, the sunset is so soulwrenchingly ecstatic that sunrise is only a short blink away, and the diffusion of heavy eyelids cheekily redefines desirable focus. and the stars, oh, the stars, that drift and wheel and wait, occasionally humming secrets to each other in the vast silence. owls, and tigers, and dragonflies. bowls, and soup spoons, and trashy summer novels. it's beautiful.
but remember the option. you may need it one day; if you've got some practice, it will only break you in ways that are exquisitely mysterious.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
green tea enlightenment
"When you know that everything is light, then you are enlightened" (from a tea bag at UVic).
A KOAN:
Subhuti was Buddha's disciple. He was able to understand the potency of emptiness, the viewpoint that nothing exists except in its relationship of subjectivity and objectivity.
One day Subhuti, in a mood of sublime emptiness, was sitting under a tree. Flowers began to fall about him.
"We are praising you for your discourse on emptiness," the gods whispered to him.
"But I have not spoken of emptiness," said Subhuti.
"You have not spoken of emptiness, we have not heard emptiness," responded the gods. "This is the true emptiness." And blossoms showered upon Subhuti as rain. (http://deoxy.org/koan/36)
A KOAN:
Subhuti was Buddha's disciple. He was able to understand the potency of emptiness, the viewpoint that nothing exists except in its relationship of subjectivity and objectivity.
One day Subhuti, in a mood of sublime emptiness, was sitting under a tree. Flowers began to fall about him.
"We are praising you for your discourse on emptiness," the gods whispered to him.
"But I have not spoken of emptiness," said Subhuti.
"You have not spoken of emptiness, we have not heard emptiness," responded the gods. "This is the true emptiness." And blossoms showered upon Subhuti as rain. (http://deoxy.org/koan/36)
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