naylandblake.net

You get out what you put in. Garbage in Garbage out. Read enough junk and you’ll write junk. Truisms, but there you have ‘em. I’ve been scrolling and scanning through pages of articles and websites online and most of the writing is thrown together with one eye on the clock and one eye on Google analytics. So when I called a halt today and picked up an actual book to read, the difference was like being offered clear well water after weeks of drinking soda.

The book I reached for is Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis, a collection of short stories, stories that are oblique and moving all at once. Each one of these pieces is so thoughtfully made, that they make me embarrassed of my own recent flailing both in writing and visual art. I’ve clouded my palate lately, cramming too much junk info. The foundation of every one of Davis’ stories is the act of observation, something that would seem to to be so easy that we possibly for get how to do it. But the acuity of her perception makes it clear that much of what I think of as observation in writing is simply repetition. At every turn I encounter how much I overlook.

It’s funny that I wasn’t twenty pages into the book than I had an idea for a new piece. I think of my self as relatively democratic in terms of taste, liking to take a lot of things in. But there are times when that can be as big an obstruction as having nothing to bounce off of. Even the majority of what I read here on LJ doesn’t help, because so often its interest is social or emotional: I read things here to find out how friends are doing, not for their serious writing, which so often happens elsewhere. There are people here whose writing I admire but I don’t demand of them that they be meticulous craftsmen. Such expectations would be unfair. We are all writing on the fly here.

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I’m going to take a minute to love my screwed up brain. My brain that, once confronted with the notion that it has to get to work, immediately looks around my environment for something to change. My brain that says stuff like “I can’t possibly work until I:

Download a new version of eeebuntu to install on my net book. and a version of virtual box to run on my mac at work so that I can build the usb stick to put the new system on.
Completely clean and wipe my desk down.
Make the phone calls I meant to make days ago but forgot to do so because the numbers got buried in the piles of paper on my desk which I have just dislodged in order to clean said desk.
Drink third cup of coffee of the day.
Back up files on the eepc in anticipation of new system install.
Glimpse at Feedly, then fall down a browsehole tracking down links about productivity and writing.
Think about buying a book on writing tips from the Paris Review, so that I can be inspired by other writers talking about their struggles to write.
Root through my pockets and bookbag to find any flashdrives I have on my person.
Think about buying a new big flashdrive that will contain all the files I have scattered around my many other smaller flashdrives, thus giving me one thing to worry about keeping track of.
Wonder what I did with the last big flashdrive I bought that I now seem to have misplaced, luckily before I had consolidated all my other flashdrives to it.
Forget about all flashdrives and worry about how hard it is to write in google docs, as opposed to a word processing program.
Open gmail to open google docs to start a new doc for a post.
Attempt to brain storm.
Get up and get a pint of filtered water.
Check Gmail, freak out about number of unanswered mail messages, start responding.
log on to Twitter, tweet about being distracted. Curse twitter for eroding my capacity to concentrate.
Pee from all the coffee and water (actually it was my bladder, not my brain that told me to do that)
realize that I need a picture to go along with this post and haul out my camera to get one. Shoot picture and edit in photoshop.
Upload picture and glance again at Gmail, freak out again.
Talk with student about work, and be shown the link to index.org. Stand on edge of biggest browsehole ever, and slowly back away.
Read interview with Harry Matthews on the Paris Review site, because HM is a favorite writer and is also the author of “20 lines a day”, a book that has helped me write in the past.
Resolve to get back to writing twenty lines a day.
Worry about how to determine twenty lines when there is no fixed screen width on my browser.
Look up vintage portable typewriters on ebay – note that the Hermes Rocket I used to have is available.
Remind myself that I don’t have enough money to be buying portable typewriters that I will never use again.
Decide that I’ve probably done twenty lines or so and feel that I can now sit down to really write about what I meant to.

Oh brain, where would I be without you, you crazy lug.

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As of today I’ve been doing this for six years. Happy blogday to me. This forum has allowed me to do something that I’ve tried to do with limited success over the years: reflect on my life in writing. As well it’s allowed me to return to photography and more recently, a kind of daily drawing and publishing.

Usually this time of year I express gratitude for the community I’ve found here on live journal, and that gratitude is still there for me, even though things have changed with the community a great deal. Lots of people on my friends list have jumped ship, and I myself have begun fashioning this into a much more public blog by moving it over to www.naylandblake.net . One nice thing is that the people who have stayed here have been the more committed posters: generally I find far fewer “personality quiz” memes appearing on my friends list. But the decrease of posting overall has diminished my sense of the chatty community newspaper I used to have. A certain portion of that seems to be happening on facebook, and even more casually on twitter. The migration to dreamwidth has also meant that some of the voices I most valued here are occupied elsewhere. On the plus side this year I’ve found a whole group of cartoonists on here who are posting great drawings, and it still remains the source for personal news about friends that I have come to care about deeply.

This next year I want to make this into a source of information about things other than myself: really how many times can we hear about whether or not I’ve done my laundry? The blogs I admire are those that bring me to information or opinion that I hadn’t encountered before. Sometimes that’s because someone is leading a remarkable life and reporting on it, sometimes it’s because they’re a brilliant researcher. I’m neither, but I’d like to find a way to be more of a resource.

So I’m not done yet. But maybe I feel more like a broadcaster than a teen crying in my pillow these days. And all of LJ seems a bit less intimate in the ways that made it exciting a few years ago, more information, but less surprise. I don’t want to simply contribute to that tone. As always, the answer is to work a bit harder, even at this medium that is supposedly recreation for me.

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By which I mean sit down and type, merely type.

Type answers to emails. Type search engine terms. Type evaluations and recommendations and answers to questions and requests for funding and resumes and regrets and tags and summaries and hopefully something in the midst of all that that touches on a feeling or two, that connects one thought with another, or that at the very least makes a dent in the towering inbox.

I despair of finding my continuity in the mass of cotton batting that has taken up residence in my head.

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It’s funny the resistance I have to writing my posts beforehand. Even though the interface isn’t all that friendly, and I don’t have a client loaded on this laptop, I’d rather write on the lj post page than use my word processor. Well this is a little attempt to overcome that resistance.

Yesterday was another sunny day out here. I got into see my friend Kim Anno’s panel on shifting abstraction in the morning. After it ended, I ran into Prof Ray K. who is, I gotta say – so very cute ( sorry about the objectification, Ray) and who made the astute remark that on the whole, the attendees of CAA are not the most prepossessing bunch. It’s sadly true, I’ve seen many more downtown bums on this trip who have turned my head than conference goers. That being said, it has been wonderful to connect with so many pals at CAA. It feels like a part of my life that has fallen by the wayside a bit.

In the afternoon I ditched to meet up with the Dave White, who braved the pain of his surgical recovery to take me first to a great Mexican place in Silverlake for lunch and then a couple of doors down to a little thrift store that reminded me of how terribly picked over all the places in New York are. I managed to get out the door with only a couple of purchases, luckily. And then I gave him a mission: trusting to his impeccable taste I told him to take me to Amoeba and “metal me up” unfortunately, I didn’t get to meet Extreem Aaron, nor Alonzo who had work related stress disorder, but I did get to have the great experience of sitting in the store while Dave said, yeah you should have this , yeah this too. I was ready to splurge on a Plasmatics T-shirt but the cashier couldn’t figure out how to get one and it was getting late. Now when I get home I get to experience the blissful brutality as I ponder the futility of all things not metal.

There’s another weird thing: I’m traveling around without any sort of disc playback device. CDs have become just the thing I carry the music home on, before I rip them to my hard drive: a software delivery system.

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It’s not easy being a one man shop; somehow I thought it was a good idea, and convinced the curator, that we should do the catalog for the current show as a series of 500 word entries, one on each included piece. Basically either she or I am writing the entire thing. And that writing is coming harder to me than I thought it would. Because it always does.

I know what I have to do, but am having a hard time doing it. And that’s why this post is short.

(edit) Oh hey, while I’m at it, have a great time at MAL, all my pals who are going. I’m sorry I won’t be in attendance.

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I have been so lax about answering questions – I’m very sorry to all those that asked, but now I’m going to buckle down and get to work on responding to all of them.

brat_sheba wants to know “What are the top 3 “To Do’s” on your bucket list?”

I don’t really have a bucket list, in terms of thinking about things I want to do before I die, that when confrronted with immanent death I would drop everything else to do. The stuff I want to do I pretty much want to do no matter what. And I feel lucky in that I have few unrealized ambitions. Whether that’s due to actually achieving things or simply setting the bar low I can’t say. But I do have some goals that I’m working towards currently so here’s three I can think of now:

1.Being debt free. For most of my adult life I have accumulated and suffered under debt. There’s a myriad of reasons for it, but I’m now working actively to pay back all of my outstanding debts. It’s a painful process, but the joyful feeling every time I pay one off is so remarkable, that I can’t wait to experience the sense of not owing anyone anything.

2. Travel to Africa. Most specifically Senegal. No one in my family has any records of what part of Africa they were from originally, but I do have a powerful wish to see the Western part, and Senegal seems like the most hospitable these days. Also ever person I’ve ever met from there is astonishingly beautiful.

3. There are two books I’d like write: a novel, and a book on creativity and method for artists. Books are magical for me and I’ve started novels any number of times, but have always run aground at some point. I’ve tried using the NaNoMo method, but haven’t quite been able to get into the rythm enough to see a book through to completion. The “artists practice” book would basicly be a compilation of my teaching methods and lectures, so maybe the way to go about doing that would be to tape some of my classes and start working from transcriptions.

This was a great question, Sheba. Thanks for asking it.

I swear I will answer them all! So if you want to ask, go here and leave one in private.

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From allanh: When you were 12 years old, what did you want to be when you grew up?

It took me a while to remember, once you asked me: a science fiction writer. It seemed to be assumed all through my childhood that I would be a writer of some sort and by that age I was deep into SF/Fantasy, reading it nonstop. And I wrote a bit too, mostly poems and stories. But at twelve that changed when I read William Burroughs (who at that time was being championed as an SF writer). I wanted to write like that and yet had not the slightest clue as to how to do so. So I tried a couple of things and then quit in frustration and didn’t write again for years.

March, month of questions; ask them here

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Past the burnout of the past couple of days. Overslept this morning, but that left me in a much better mood than previously. Obviously I needed it. There are still many things to take care of on the rapidly-approaching horizon, but at least my conciousness doesn’t seem as sporadic as yesterday. One thing I forgot to mention about the trip to the Tang was the presence of one quite beautiful man who was a friend of one of the Tang education coordinators and who stuck around after the whole thing. We were introduced and I made some fumbling joke. He was around my height and seemed to be a pacific islander, with long salt and pepper hair and a pointed goatee. He teaches at the university in Schenectady. I’m remembering an open smile and the dry warmth of his handshake, but off course his name flew out of my head the moment it was told me. My particular curse – I can remember the jingles from every commecial I heard at age 4 but never anyone’s name.
All of this is to say I was a bit smitten. Rare indeed.
This is another of those “I’m at work and I don’t wanna be” LJ posts. There’s lots of other things I need to finish, pieces that need making, rooms that need cleaning, people that need contacting. But the fact is I almost get more of that stuff done here. And now once again I’m frightened by the messages on my phone, so much so that I won’t pick them up. An absurtity, which has gotten me into bad situations with those around me and hurt people I haven’t wanted to hurt. Time after time I’ve tried to talk through these scenarios with my therapist, yet I lapse into the same behavior. Last week for the first time he suggested medication, which left me both shocked (usually not his route at all) and a little thrilled (is my dowdy, garden variety neurosis blooming into a glamourous anxiety disorder?).
I am reading W.G.Seybold’s book “The Rings of Saturn”. It is stunning: the overall structure is a solitary walking tour through the east of England, but each chapter mimicks the sensation of walking; spare insiscive descriptions of the landscape give way to chains of association that become historical and autobigraphical essays. The erudition is never forced, and exists in conjuction with sensitive observations of people and places. This is the kind of book I wish I could write, and indeed it’s given me some ideas for my endlessly projected, endlessly delayed Jack Smith/Ray Johnson/Cockettes/et al book. When I type those words I feel that everything I’m doing right now is wrong, and that there’s a much more important task calling me

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