February 2007 Archives

A few years ago, my daughter took part in what started out as an entirely unremarkable dance recital. She and maybe eight other 6-year-olds were bopping around on stage along with some familiar holiday tune. "Let It Snow"? "Jingle Bells"?

Midway through, the CD starts to skip. And it's awful. One of those 15 second stretches of time that feels like the taste of melting tar. It's not right. It's not getting better. Somebody take this melting tar out of our mouths!

Then the music stops altogether and in the silence something lovely happens. The dancers just keep dancing. In silence. They finish the song with exceptional grace. And it was probably the best dancing I've ever seen.

This week reminded me a little of that. Not that we're all a bunch of dancing 6-year-olds. Just that there was the lurch of the site. And then the silence. The silence. And then out of that silence, a graceful swirl of comments that began to spin out across the Week 4 stage almost as soon as the generators kicked back in. Lovely.

Which is all my longwinded way of saying, thanks to you all for bearing with this past week's headaches. It's fun to be back on the 'march and great to see that, if need be, we can make do without a trail for a few days.

Of course, some of us faired better than others. Without the spur of daily posts, I my ownself fell about 20 pages shy of the target. But I've got some quality airport time coming up, and I'm leaving the old cylomite at home. So I'm hopeful I'll be caught back up by next week. Speaking of which...

Tuesday 3/6: We have nothing to fear but page 280 itself, where the word on the street is, "we'd better get in some drinking..."

(in other words: please use this thread to comment on anything up to page 280. Try to finish reading that part of the book and to comment on it here by end o' day next Monday)

Oh, and don't forget to check out Steve Evans rockin' readin' notes for last week right here.

Pugnax!
-Cecil

The trail is thick, I say thick! with boots. Great to have such a rich collection of folks to share the journey with. And nice to feel like we're starting to make some real forward progress.

I've been thinking a lot this week about the way that Pynchon plays us. He's got a great feel for when he can bring on the thick stuff, and when he should throw us some candy. I remember Part II of GR starting beautifully (was it the Casino and the Octopus mebbe?). Like a reward for getting past the first 100 pages or so. Similarly, the first big stretch of Iceland Spar was a great run of "yeah -- that's why I'm reading this book!" Around page 150, my head started to cave in. I was reading sentences three times. Felt a little bit like I was back in GR's London with the rockets falling. And then right as the pressure behind my eyes started to build, we're off to Yale, meeting the various Vibes, humming along with Mischief in Mexico.

Another kind of manipulation: Around page 167, as Yitzhak Zilberfeld began to lapse into a stereotype, I wrote in the margin: "is he trying to make us uncomfortable?" And yeah, I'd have to guess he is.

Don't forget to search for "Steve Evans" in the W3 comments to find his hugely helpful fly-over of last week's reading. You can also jump straight to it right here.

Tuesday 2/27: Let's dry our socks out on page 232, where someone's "pretend(ing) to lament."

(in other words: please use this thread to comment on anything up to page 232. Try to finish reading that part of the book and to comment on it here by end o' day next Monday)

Pugnax!
-Cecil

Algorial.

Maggie Nelson is the author of The Red Parts (Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 2007), a nonfiction book about her family and criminal justice, and a critical study, Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, Fall 2007), as well as four books of poetry: Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, Fall 2007), Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull, 2005; finalist, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir), The Latest Winter (Hanging Loose Press, 2003), and Shiner (Hanging Loose, 2001; finalist, the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award). She's taught literature and writing at the Graduate Writing Program of the New School, Pratt Institute of Art, and Wesleyan University, and is currently on the faculty of the School of Critical Studies at CalArts.

Maggie Nelson on the web: Amazon.com, Simon & Schuster, Soft Skull, CalArts

Cecil Vortex: Can you describe your creative process?

Maggie Nelson: I have few to no patterns, and even less dogma about how to write, or how I write. Poetry tends to come to me naturally or not at all. I spent years trying out different exercises and forms like most everyone, but the truth is that I don't do that anymore. It may sound mystical or retro or simply depressing, but I increasingly feel myself to be a hostage to poetic impulse. I usually have to wait until a poem comes along, or until I see what's there to be written, as Robert Creeley once put it. For me a poem often begins as a constellation of words coursing through my head like little electric shocks. This often happens when I'm in great pain or pleasure, doing laps in a pool, or in the bardo between sleeping and waking. I don't know why. The words feel like irritants in the soft lap of an oyster, as Henry James had it. Then the pearl -- if one could call it that with a straight face -- starts to congeal around the irritant. A snowball in the muck.

As for non-poetry projects, that's a different story. Usually I do a lot of reading or research until something takes possession of me. I think of research like throwing lots of crap in a cauldron -- bones, feathers, blood, everything -- and turning up the heat: eventually it has to come to a boil. (Whether you make something edible is a different question.) Or, let me put it this way: Often a baby in a subway station will scream back at a loud train hurtling through. If you send a train of information hurtling through your brain often and fast enough, and if the train screeches loudly enough, you may eventually find yourself yelling back.

CV: Are there any techniques that you use to spark new poems or gather up ideas?

I just learned something so wonderful, I felt compelled to use the world wide web to let people know about it. Were you aware that the Monday after Easter is a Polish holiday called "Dyngus Day"? It's true! Dyngus Day! Pronouced "Dingus Day!" How cool is that?!

Dyngus Day involves boys and girls splashing and slapping each other with water and pussywillows. Here's a translation of a fair-warning poem they sing, knocking on doors:

Smigus! Dyngus! All for fun, Dump some water with a smile! If not from a cup, then from a pitcher, Smigus-Dyngus starts at dawn! It's an old Polish custom, just so you'll know and not yell, when on the second day of Easter, your jacket's all soaking wet.

And where, you're probably wondering, is the Dyngus Day Capital of the USA? Not suprisingly, Polka Music Hall of Fame luminary Lenny Gomulka has an opinion on that:

"I have enjoyed the excitement of Dyngus Day in several cities and towns," he says, "however, no where is this holiday celebrated unilaterally and dynamically as it is in Buffalo, New York."

See? I told you humans aren't all that bad. How can you not love a species like this?

And just like that, we're at the end of Part I.... Lots to like in this last stretch: The dual identities of Blinky Morgan. The Aetherists and their Asylum. That oily Zombini ("I don't suppose you'd have a spare electrical coil around?" (68) -- how could Merle not see trouble brewing?). "Skip" the ball of lightning, who seemed like a distant cousin to "Byron the Light Bulb" of Gravity's Rainbow fame.

A foul-mouthed Finn. A talking Tesla. An attack on the current administration even? ("Why, you could write a whole foreign phrase book just on what Republicans have to say." (93)) A slice of Scarsdale Vibe's past, the Traverse clan, and a rising extrasensory shimmer from Foley and Miles. All that, plus The Chums of Chance and their turn toward the Center, wherein Rodney and I get an excerpt from that Chums novella we crave....

Also: How creepy would it be to get sneered at by a guy named Darby Suckling?
Also also: On page 112, a passage that could have been plucked from Gravity's Grainbow -- the description of the rocket's ascent, followed by Darby shouting "Stop, stop! ...it sounds like Chinese!" -- as if TP's promising that we won't be going back down that road this time around.

My thanks to Steve E. for his summary notes in the comments. They're a great condensed way to give us a quick-glance back over the last week's reading. Steve, if you find the time, please keep 'em coming..... (and if anyone's looking to review them, search "steve evans" on the W2 comments page.

Tuesday 2/20: We'll plant our dynamite sticks at the bottom of page 170, right next to "the purity, the geometry, the cold."

(in other words: use this thread to comment through page 170. Try to finish reading that part of the book and to comment on it here by end o' day next Monday)

Pugnax!
-Cecil

How many times must I not
watch you before you get the point?

If I must not watch you a million times.
If I must not watch you till the solar core
inside my TV cools and its silver casing cracks

until my many remotes retreat into open palms
rush back toward some lost part of my
insides

until my eyelashes gray and wilt
and spiral off
that

will be
my pleasure.

When I was small you could
get a paper cut from just about everything.

From a computer display.
While petting a puppy.
You could get several paper cuts pressing down hard on
a pinkening snow ball.

We wore gloves in the summer.
Heavy mittens in the pool.

For the last thirty years, Jeff Raz has performed internationally with circuses and theaters including The Pickle Circus, Lincoln Center Theater, Dell'Arte Players, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and the Marin and S.F. Shakespeare Festivals. Since 1990 he has written ten plays and two solo plays. His television work includes Live From Lincoln Center and Disney's The New Vaudevillians.

Raz is the founder and director of the Clown Conservatory, a program that has trained some of the top young clowns working in Cirque du Soleil, Cirque Eloize, Ringling Bros., and other circuses around the world. He's currently performing the lead role of "The Dead Clown" in Cirque du Soleil's Corteo.

Jeff Raz on the Web: Jeffraz.com, The Clown Conservatory

Cecil Vortex: Do you have any techniques you use to help you get into a more inspired mode?

Jeff Raz: You know, I usually don't think in [those terms] because I've made a living doing this since I was 15. I'm kind of a blue-collar guy in that way. I go to work. The way I look at it and the way that works for me is, I just keep plugging ahead.

I started as a juggler. As a juggler, you can always get up and throw the balls. Or you get up and you throw the clubs. No inspiration needed. Throw the damn things. If they're in the air, wonderful. It they're on the ground, throw 'em again. It's kind of simple.

When I write a play, what I do is, once I've got the research going and I've got it floating around in my head, I'll try to write the whole play in a week. Just write the f****r. And it's terrible. (I got this from Annie Lamott, from her book Bird by Bird.) So I just do that, and then I can edit it, which I do better than creating from whole cloth. And again, both of those [steps] are kind of designed to make sure I know what the job of the day is. I don't do well waiting for inspiration.

Now, the other morning I was working ten-show weeks, which means I'm on stage for twenty-five hours a week, which is a huge amount of stage time. I get done at 11 o'clock. I get home and the turnaround between Saturday night and when I have to be back on-site at 11 o'clock putting on makeup the next morning is the tough one. And then we had a cabaret after, so we actually had an eleven-show week. I was getting really tired. But sonofabitch if I'm not up at 6:30 on Sunday morning with ideas about the show.

CV: And why do you think that is?

Regular visitors to this site know that I'm quite literally 175 years old. What you may not know is that just five short years ago -- at the ripe old age of 170 -- I had a series of micro-epiphanies regarding the creative process, the most important of which was this:

I'd always thought art was about sitting around, waiting for inspiration to strike. As a result, I did a lot of waiting and not that much creating. But it turns out, art and inspiration don't have to (entirely) work that way. You don't have to just wait. There are actual techniques you can use -- habits that help drive inspiration, ways to tackle a blank page and to catch ideas as they spark through the day. Why didn't anyone tell me that before? Like, when I was 140?

Anyways, hoping not to lose any more time, I began to gather up a personalized set of these techniques -- what seemed to work for me. And then I started to wonder, what techniques have other artists come up with?

The result of that question is this here brand-new cv.com feature: "Conversations about Creativity." Over the next several weeks, you'll be hearing from dancers, poets, computer graphic effects artists, illustrators, stand up comics, musicians, and a host of other creative professionals about how their creative process works, how they deal with dry periods, and what they do to stay productive, keep their work fresh, and generally tap their personal woosh.

The first interview goes live tomorrow, and new ones will follow each Thursday. In the future, if you ever want to jump straight to the Creativity in Practice page, you can bookmark it right here.

I've really enjoyed these initial interviews, and I feel like I've learned a lot already. I hope you'll enjoy 'em too and come on back for more.

Tomorrow: a conversation with Jeff Raz, clown, actor, playwright, teacher, and the star of Cirque du Soleil's Corteo.

-Cecil

If I knew Tesla was coming, I might very well have baked a cake. Because, well, you know how much Tesla loves to eat cake.

Lots of fun this week -- excellent comments from an international crew of 'marchers, plus a promising start to the novel with all sorts of rich plot threads. It sounds like many of us, me included, are thinking "hey -- that was actually kinda fun." But we can't rename this a "funmarch" can we? That would just be silly. And of course, who knows what lies 'round the bend....?

Like several of the commenters, I've been making lists of characters. I tend to write "intro so-and-so" in the margin when a new character makes their first appearance. Another habit I picked up when we read Gravity's Rainbow is writing a quick summary of the action on the top of each page. So, for example, page 13 was "naked lady below," page 42 was "Lew can notice things," and page 48 was "a fight avoided."

If the slew of references gets you dizzy, bookmark the AtD wiki. I'm mostly staying in the text and avoiding a ton of extra research, but I did drop by the wiki twice this week -- once to find out what a "charabanc" was, and once to confirm my suspicion that "The Unsleeping Eye" referred to the dread Pinkerton's.

All in all, a great start. I'm really surprised how downright excited I am to back in Pynchonville.

Next Tuesday: Let's stretch our page count just a touch so we can get to the end of Part One. We'll pull over for nuts and clementines at the bottom of page 118, "toward a fate...few would willingly have chosen."

(which is to say: use this thread to comment through page 118. Try to finish reading that part of the book and to comment on it here by end o' day next Monday)

Pugnax!
-Cecil

She took too many pills or something
and nearly died
but the main thing I remember
is sitting down at their
kitchen table and her
telling us how at that critical moment
she saw the light and turned back.

I thought: "She seems sad."
And: "I can't believe a grownup is
telling me this and treating me
like I'm a grownup
when I'm not."

On Halloween, she dressed me
up as a 50s kid and put my hair
in a DA with goop.
She told me that the look worked --
that I had a 50s face. And I
took that as a
compliment.

****

Legends from My Childhood, #2, card art by eb.

They date underground
they do.

And they skip by the mushrooms
they dance with the dwarves

They sleep under waterfalls
lightless with dark sparkle and foam.

They leave the sun and the wind and banana peels
to the squirrels.