1. Led a freewriting circle on ways into prose poems yesterday. It was fun to come up with prompts that allow people freedom to be wild. Or maybe they force wildness. There’s no use in writing if it isn’t fun, if it doesn’t make you feel a little crazy and uncomfortable if just for a few minutes. I mean, if you’re not striving toward some original expression/way of expression, what are you doing?
2. I’ll probably post the workshop as craft notes on HTMLGiant once I write them up in some coherent fashion.
3. This bed is so cool:
image source
image source
Good article from BBC News about one of my favorite subjects.
This weekend I:
1. went to a two-service funeral for cousin Phyllis
2. drove 22 hours
3. got sick
4. saw family members I love
5. watched my dad forget things
6. watched people cry
7. didn’t cry
8. played with animals
9. went outside a lot
10. witnessed my brother and Lawrence sing the entirety of “Part of Your World”
Capable of being in Mysteries, uncertainties, and doubts?
image source: Laura Flippen Photography
Josh just re-posted a neat blog post on Keats and Negative Capability—and Shakespeare and Galway Kinnell and Whitman and Obama—by a person named Santi Tafarella. Great name to go with a good synthesis, Santi. Thanks!
Josh just posted a poem of mine, “Retrospective” on Planologie.
My favorite nightmare: Fuseli's The Nightmare
I’ve been having some disturbing dreams lately. Recently, I had to watch a man get eviscerated in his driveway by a serial killer, then watch as the killer walked the through man’s house to find his wife and son. The clincher of this dream was that I thought the son would be safe because he’d gone into the woods to capture wolf-howls. I thought the wolf-howls-in-cages in the boy’s bedroom would scare the killer away. No such luck. The rest of the dream was Josh and I running through people’s yards so the killer wouldn’t find us.
I dreamed last night that one of my students slit his wrists. And also about amazing sea life in a pond—seals, octopi, turtles—and walking along the edge. Back-and-forth, back-and-forth.
I woke up in a panic.
Go here for an interactive The Nightmare at the Tate website (above photo from Tate site, too) and a retrospective of Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake, and the Romantic Imagination.
You live with someone long enough, and whatever they’re reading feels like what you’re reading. Josh is reading a book called Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales. Here’s a good gem from it:
The environment we’re used to is designed to sustain us. We live like fish in an aquarium. Food comes mysteriously down, oxygen bubbles up. We are the domestic pets of a human zoo we call civilization. Then we go into nature, where we are least among equals with all other creatures. There we are put to the test. Most of us sleep through the test. We get in and out and never know what might have been demanded. Such an experience can make us even more vulnerable, for we come away with the illusion of growing hardy, salty, knowledgeable: Been there, done that. In Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer wrote about a guide, Scott Fischer, who had encouraged him to climb Mount Everest. “We’ve got the Big E figured out,” he told Krakauer. “We’ve got it totally wired.” Fischer died up there. One of the great Stoic philosophers of the later Roman period and Marcus Aurelius’ teacher, Epictetus wrote, “Be silent; for there is great danger that you will immediately vomit up what you have not digested.”
1. What happens when you’ve got nothing to list?
2. Still nothing.
3. Still nothing.
4. Tired, still.
1. I saw a traveling production of Romeo and Juliet tonight from the American Shakespeare Center. I’ve never seen it done with such humor and modern sentiment—while keeping strictly to the original play and period costuming. Both the Nurse and Mercutio were hilarious, uproarious. And Romeo looked a lot like Jonathan Rhys Meyers—particularly the crazy-eyes thing.
2. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: “What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? / What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? / What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”
3. From Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,”
But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv’d virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.
Which reminds me of Romeo and Juliet, and so we’ve come full circle once again, as always, ad infinitum. Good night and good night and good night.
I wrote a real, live essay for HTMLGiant over the weekend. Click here to read “Animal Instincts: Destroying the Cult of Reason.”
from Unhappy Hipsters:
Also: We’re doing another Group Effort over at HTMLGiant. This time a story-ish type thing. Join in! Why I like doing Group Efforts: sometimes I get exhausted from the communal talk about the thing (the thing being art) and just want to make it as a community. Something exciting happens when people are talking to each other on a plane other than critical-and-theoretical.
