(But, Enough of my waxing poetics about… well the same things I usually wax poetics about and lets talk about something… I usually talk about. )

I was reading back and came across this tidbit from my brilliant friend, Daniel, and was amazed as though I had never read it before at his perception of the art making proces in general and specifically about my constant anxiety about creating. I read it again today and thought it was much too insightful not to share:

Do trees have an easy time making leaves? I always imagined that they have as much trouble, angst, anxiety, and doubt about that each spring as we have about love, art, and breathing.

Anyway, who is qualified to judge whether you’ve struggled with your overworked words like an unpolished amateur or spilt onto the page the finest prose like a painter thoughtlessly putting brushstrokes onto canvas, as amazed as any observer that a beautiful form emerges?

I was writing tonight, and not just writing, writing without effort, writing without thought. Writing from some place in me that just needed to sit down and put it down on paper. Its been a while since I wasn’t “trying to write” and was actually writing. The same way you breathe, because its whats necessary to survive.

We’ll see where these next few weeks takes me.

Maybe it is better to get off the beaten path for a while.

Each morning I reach
my fingers, tentacles of light and sound.
There are daydreams with more scope,
Where the pale flowers still stretch
un-wilted by heat.

Each night I whisper;
your ears are willing accomplices.
Silent as the beating of butterfly wings,
(silent as butterfly wings beat)
that cause tsunamis in the Philippines.
There are much bigger pools to drown in,
none so much as our response ability.

(And this is how i draft)

Consider me the Kanye of writing.

Today I wandered over to Union Square after work. While I was sitting there amidst the hustle and bustle it struck me, everything was moving in time with the rhythm of this symphony of light. The words bore a certain cinematic quality. Sitting solitary and decelerating, while all of life seems to quicken around you, the people become blurs, the cars simply streaks of light, the lights in the buildings seemed to all come one and flicker as people sleep or leave or whatever else they might be doing in the darkness…That all flashed into my head in the instant they crossed my mind but I realized that exactly it…

It was all the people. Everyone around me seemed to be involved in some type of city dance.  They were the light, the energy the driving force. They were flickering and flashing objects. Some were bulbs nearly burnt out on life, shining like a nova before it becomes a black hole. Some were dim and weak and barely aglow, their eyes sad and safe.  Some sparkled like the christmas lights that shimmer all colorful and changing with their own rhythm. It was all there, all inside all of us. All in everyone prepared for fighting or fucking or loving or dancing or singing or stuffing our faces till we couldn’t breathe. All in everyone who had come to New York wanting more and lived in New York taking more, reaching for more, grasping for more.  All in everyone who’d been driven mad by the city and seemed to go on and off with their own accord, like haunted lights. Lights of ghost. Some unforeseen force compelling and driving them forward with unimaginable energy. (Oh, the stamina of insanity.) It was all there in the loudness and the rudeness and the loveliness and the loneliness and the beauty. All reaching out, those symphonies of light. Drawing outsiders to us with our radiance. Sirens against the angry storm that is our City. Calling as loud as we could.

When I wander about my place in the city, when I find myself at Union Square just before dusk, in those moments when the air finally cools and the sun is no longer hot against my skin. Just before the lights on all the buildings start to become lit, sitting arm to arm with strangers while the frantic energy of the city in heat swells around me…I feel alive.

The movie and the book are both amazing. Its one of the few instances I’d recommend both in whatever order. While the movie embellishes the stories told in his book, adding and subtracting characters for whatever reason and deals much more in the hopeless portion of his struggle than the book for cinematic purposes, it makes up for it by being visually stunning. Everything was enriched by the so-beautiful-it-breaks-your-heart cinematography, the perfect handling of the flash backs, the way the movie seemed to be paced perfectly ebbing and flowing like the ocean.

The book on the other hand is just simply amazing. Bauby uses his words to inspire hope, despair, the power of imagination. So much so that twenty pages in I was blinking back tears. You can see the lavish meals and the wonderful trips. You dream each dream and live each memory with him. You can feel the pain at not being able to ruffle his son’s hair. All of this told with wit, humor and aplomb. All never ceasing to be amazing, not simply because of the means with which the story was told but because of it’s sheer power and magnitude. I didn’t want to stop reading it and once I finished I wanted to pick it up and read it again and again. I found myself pouring over passages lest I missed the subtle meaning of each line.

I receive remarkable letters. They are opened for me, unfolded, and spread out before my eyes in a daily ritual that gives the arrival of mail the character of a hushed and holy ceremony. I carefully read each letter myself. Some of them are serious in tone, discussing the meaning of life invoking the supremacy of the soul, the mystery of every existence. And by curious reversal, the people who focus most closely on these fundamental questions tend to be people I had known only superficially. Their small talk had masked hidden depths. Had I been blind and deaf, or does it take the harsh light of disaster to show a person’s true nature?

Other letters simply relate the small events that punctuate the passages of time: rose picked at dusk, the laziness of a rainy Sunday, a child crying himself to sleep. Capturing the moment, these small slices of life, these small gusts of happiness, move me more deeply than all the rest. A couple of lines or eight pages, a Middle Eastern stamp or a suburban postmark…I hoard all these letters like treasure. One day I hope to fasten them end to end in a half mile streamer, to float in the wind like a banner raised to the glory of friendship.

It will keep the vultures at bay.

*     *     *

From the Chapter: Twenty to One

(my favorite passage I chose because in the movie the imagery of the iceberg breaking away with the narration behind brought tears to my eyes)

The memory of that event has only just come back to me, now doubly painful: regret for a vanished past and, above all, remorse for lost opportunities. Mirthra-Grandchamp is the women were unable to love, the chances we failed to seize, the moments of happiness we allowed to drift away. Today it seems to me that my whole life was nothing but a string of those small near misses: a race whose result we know beforehand but fail to bet on the winner.

**heading to the at&t store in the morning to replace what I believe is simply a defective sim card.

I couldn’t help but wonder whether that line had in some way influenced Smith’s passage.

Smith’s second book, On Beauty borrowed elements and themes from E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End though the stories are strikingly different; there are scenes that directly parallel Forester’s work. It got me thinking.

Some time ago, over dinner, I got into a discussion with a friend about his disdain for hip hop. Which turned into a discussion about originality, which he felt hip hop lacked and I vehemently argued. But tonight it came to me, i wondered how much of culture is reused and recycled, how many generations have heard the same song, seen same movie, read same book over and over again, tweaked by someone else. Hip Hop is of course the easiest target, but you don’t hear people say (well you do, but not as many you’d hear calling it “the problem” with rap music) I don’t want to see the remake, it lacks originality. Couldn’t possibly watch the new Batman film because the jokers already been done amazingly by Jack Nicholson and Cesar Romero.

Three movies that I loved while in my younger years have the exact same plot, The Shop Around the Corner (1940) , In the Good Old Summer Time (1949), and You’ve Got Mail (1998).

It reminds me of the lesson we learned early in writing school, there are only three stories: man against man, man against nature, man against himself. I wonder if the same will eventually be said about music (there are only 10 basic beats, the rest is all repetition), and if, in knowing this, people will loosen their judgment on mediums that borrow from the work thats come before it.

I wonder how much this is understood and more likely accepted by people who are in the art’s, by nature of understanding the real possibility that they will break ground (though they try with a blunt ice pick nonetheless).

(This was mostly written at 2am last night, so I’m not sure if it’s coherent. It was sparked by my rumination on Smith’s genuis and trying to figure out who had sampled Thom Yorke’s The Erasure [mr. west of course])

For her it was the lack of permanence.  Leaving something undefined…Never really committing to a statement…the idea that it was still open…maybe…

For me…it’s the idea that things might be carried on…that nothing was ever really ended…that ideas could be completely thought out…that things can always be come back to later on. I write generally, at least in my head, in ellipsis.  My thoughts one continual stream. If you’ve met me, i generally start sentences that there is not an end to, but I pick them up, usually by the way side, later on.

If I could write an entire novel with less periods, and more…I might…

feel more fulfilled.

ah, language is beautiful.

A L Kennedy

Read the rest.

“A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens–second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day’s events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths.”

–Reynolds Price