I’d been thinking about ways to get myself off the rss bandwagon and back to actually reading blogs. Lately I sit down at the computer, click onto google reader, quickly go through my friend’s feeds, whiskey river, Maud Newton, the Sartorialist, and my friends shared items (watch this one, she’s a ninja). Then its back to checking twitter, tumblr and wandering why the web isn’t as fun as it used to be. The news items build up too fast and the blurbs are to short to merit any actual reading. The music blogs usually link the song or the videos in the actual website, so I end up with a bunch of tabs that I never get around to working all the way through.
I agree with Mr. DesignNotes guy, blog reading feels like a chore. Its sitting down with the NY Times sunday edition and trying to read every single headline in the paper, skimming through every single article. When reader usually has 1000+ unread items it feels like wading through an insurmountable task. I’m not 100% sure that his crazy elaborate system would work for me, but there has to be a better way for me to ingest information on the web.
How, on the other hand, can I remember the blogs I’d like to read and make it back on a regular basis? I’m open to new solutions or ideas.
Until then I’ll keep adding blogs like DesignNotes to the reader and marking half the new items as read.
I’ve been thinking lately that I’d somehow like to change the content of teenybooks.
When I started writing teenybooks in 2005, it was a simple pleasure. I found things off the web, I occasionally wrote personal anecdotes, I posted about artist (of the music and writing variety) that I enjoyed and mostly just clowned around. After restarting my blog and slowly got into tumblr, well tumblr got all the fun posts and teenybooks mostly got everything else.
It feels too serious all the time. While I’d like to maintain the integrity of the site, sometimes I find things on the web that I really just want to talk about as well and I find myself just slapping it on m.i.n.e. with a link and waiting till I can integrate it into conversation with my circle of friends that follow the site through tumblr. Hopefully in the next few months that’ll change a bit.
Keep following.
teenybooks ain’t dead yet.
(Its also been a little over three years that teenybooks has been an active site.)
I’ve recently met a new and interesting character, living quite literally on the other side of the world, over discussions about youth and city living. She directed me to Joan Didion’s essay “Goodbye to All That” which I’ve excerpted here, not the best or most striking portion but the part I related to the most. Slouching Towards Bethlehem has been on my reading list for months and months now.
In fact it was difficult in the extreme for me to understand those young women for whom New York was not simply an ephemeral Estoril but a real place, girls who bought toasters and installed new cabinets in their apartments and committed themselves to some reasonable furniture. I never bought any furniture in New York. For a year or so I lived in other people’s apartments; after that I lived in the Nineties in an apartment furnished entirely with things taken from storage by a friend whose wife had moved away. And when I left the apartment in the Nineties (that was when I was leaving everything, when it was all breaking up) I left everything in it, even my winter clothes and the map of Sacramento County I had hung on the bedroom wall to remind me who I was, and I moved into a monastic four-room floor-through on Seventy-fifth Street. “Monastic” is perhaps misleading here, implying some chic severity; until after I was married and my husband moved some furniture in, there was nothing at all in those four rooms except a cheap double mattress and box springs, ordered by telephone the day I decided to move, and two French garden chairs lent me by a friend who imported them. (It strikes me now that the people I knew in New York all had curious and self-defeating sidelines. They imported garden chairs which did not sell very well at Hammacher Schlemmer or they tried to market hair staighteners in Harlem or they ghosted exposés of Murder Incorporated for Sunday supplements. I think that perhaps none of us was very serious, engaged only about our most private lives.)
All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better, but I did not bother to weight the curtains correctly and all that summer the long panels of transparent golden silk would blow out the windows and get tangled and drenched in afternoon thunderstorms. That was the year, my twenty-eight, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and ever procrastination, every word, all of it.
Found in a small asprin tin from 50’s. A set of tiny child’s teeth. Perfectly perserved. Such an odd thing to find and share, but it got my imagination to working.
Maybe it is better to get off the beaten path for a while.
The kind of booming voice that New York teaches you to avoid, looking for a willing audience. Out of the corner of my eye I could see him scanning the faces of passengers. I knew even before he sat down that it would be me, the easy target. Something in my face has always attracted strangers that no amount of staring-straight-ahead has ever been able to curb.
I made an autumn mix. *
And now I’m sleepy and it’ll be sunny tomorrow, but these songs feel like being bundled up on a crisp NYC day to me.
Listen Thursday.
Soul Coughing-True Dreams of Wichita
Radiohead-High and Dry
Sufjan Stevens-To Be Alone With You
Modest Mouse-Lives
Interpol-NYC
Elliot Smith-Needle in the Hay
Franz Ferdinand-Eleanor Put Your Boots On
Cat Power-Say
The Album Leaf-September Song
Elbow-Weather to Fly
Department of Eagles-In Ear Park
Gorillaz-Demon Days
TV on the Radio-Ambulance
(Well two mixes actually, but this one came together much more easily and I don’t think my computer liked the process at all)
(ps I know. I need to get my errant blogging together)
Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.
Lay your shadow on the sundials
and let loose the wind in the fields.
Bid the last fruits to be full;
give them another two more southerly days,
press them to ripeness, and chase
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.
Whoever has no house now will not build one
anymore.
Whoever is alone now will remain so for a long
time,
will stay up, read, write long letters,
and wander the avenues, up and down,
restlessly, while the leaves are blowing
I’ve been daydreaming a lot more like I used to when I was a child.
My mother once described me as she saw in her minds eye. She said, it was like I was walking through a field of tall grass in a summer dress with a wide brimmed straw hat. And to my right was a lionness crouched and waiting, to my left a tangle of venomous snakes, their rattles shaking. In front loomed a cliff, obscured from view by the grass. But I was walking and dreaming, always unaware of the danger that surrounded me.
This to me was just a good description as any. She tried and tried (mostly succeeding) to make me more cognizant of my surroundings. But lately it seems like I’ve taken a step backwards into dreamland.
Someone recently walked by me on the street and just as he passed by me he said “marcia, pay attention.” I’d noticed him, his bulky figure ambling by, but it was enough to really pierce the veil of my conciousness, to pull me out of myself into recognition until he called my name. His words even startled me, icet water in the warm fog of my mind. I’ve tried to describe this sensation to others. I miss train stops, riding with my eyes open to a few stops beyond my destination or running onto uptown trains when I’ve road down a million times before. I’ve walks past my own street, past the same block I turn on everyday, only to find myself on bewildered on a slightly unfamiliar block. In a crowd my friends talk and their voices swirl around my head, a pleasant background to the noise of my thoughts. I have to remind myself always to be present, to look around to observe.
I’d hate to say I’m displeased with reality, but it can at times and in the nature of life be difficult, disappointing, confusing. Where sometimes my thoughts can grant me a certain control over a situation. The good can be better, even as sometimes the bad can be much worse. I wouldn’t recommend it as a way of life, it’s just hard to extract myself from the part of my thought process that engages in situations that can be very removed from reality. I work on it. I really have to try.
When I was younger I read fiction, usually that dealt in the realm of the fantastic. The heroes were usually strong but deeply flawed, at times villanous and sometime the monster, they usually never fail to disapoint at some crucial moment. But when the time came to be valliant, they stepped up to the plate. The heroines were often confused young women. They were the slight outcasts that you’d never expect to be as strong as thy could be, but of course always were. They never failed to grow, to gain a sense of themselves as the story progressed. And usually when it came time to make the hardest decision, to decide between what was desireable and what was necessary, they could always be counted on.
This of course was my favorite fantasy to live with, that people could do fail but ultimately they would rise to the challenge and face their mistakes head on. I daydreamed there so much that I began to write stories of my own. Mimickng the books I loved, I wasn’t only not present in life, I was busy creating an entirely different one, where every disappointment was merely a hurdle that everyone crossed to grow into something better.
