Posted tagged ‘Elephant drawing’
Country Nights (With Dog and Elephant)
June 12, 2011Lawrence of Arabia Sans Camel. (You Can Find Them Anywhere.)
February 22, 2011
Even in the Sahara?
At Cross(Word) Purposes (With Elephant)
December 5, 2010
Crossword In Bed (With Elephant)
When discipline has worn down, the brain is charred, but you are a purposeful sort who hasn’t quite succumbed to late night (or all night) television, thank heavens for the New York Times crossword puzzle. I’m not talking about the Sunday puzzle, which is somehow too long, quirky and shiny (the paper stock not plain newsprint) to be truly satisfying.
I’m talking about the mundane, smudged, predictably cycled offering of the daily paper–the Monday refreshingly easy, Tuesday harder but still pleasingly finishable, Wednesday involving some gimmick or joke (the kind one hates/loves to chuckle over), Thursday just possibly doable without cheating (except for this past Thursday grrrr….), the Friday a puzzle you can sometimes manage with only a few hits of the Internet, and the Saturday (forget about it.)
Dear Will Shortz, thank you for many a pleasant hour spent without, and especially, with company. (The crossword is a great paired activity as long as the other person will let you hold the pencil every once in a while, and, eventually, stop erasing and re-writing your E’s.)
Thank you for this activity of wonderfully-seeming purposefulness. (How good it is for our brains!)
Thank you for this terrific way of forgetting the present moment while trying to remember everything else one has ever ever learned.
BTW, who was that shipyard worker fired in 1976?
Nanowrimo Update: Adrift
November 22, 2010
Adrift
Another busy work week begins and my Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) novel is seriously adrift. Fulfilling the word count (50,000) by the end of November will likely be possible. As any follower of this blog has probably guessed, I’m pretty good at quickly typing words.
Getting the story right, getting A story,is more difficult.
On my last update, I complained about the plot problem of arranging for “California Girl” (who was not truly from California but has been staying in LA) to meet up with my other crew of characters traveling through Nevada.
Everything was happening too slowly. The Nevada crew was not getting to LA fast enough to have their crisis there.
The bigger issue is that I haven’t been sure of the connection between the two sets of characters even as I’ve danced between the two stories, writing them in one manuscript, in typical Gemini indecisiveness. (Sorry, to you decisive Geminis.)
What to do? I couldn’t just leave California Girl eating corn dogs on Venice Beach.
After a long walk below a clear sky, it became clear to me that California Girl was just going to have to be in Nevada; and since I couldn’t think of a reason for her to run off there, she’d have to be there all along; be, in other words, “Nevada Girl” right from the start.
(At least, I thought this had become clear. The sky is a bit cloudy today.)
In the meantime, my Nevada crew has also stalled. I am at the point of writing endless dialogue, thoughts, internal connections–something that would be Woolfian if I did it better–even as they race to an ambulance!
Maybe it’s a good thing I have to get back to other work today.
If these characters can’t make up their mind where they are or what they are doing, let them just stew for a while! See if I care! (Ah….good question.)
Blocking Writer’s Block – Hold Your Nose Perhaps (But Don’t Shut Your Eyes)
October 20, 2010
As a daily blogger, I probably don’t seem much affected by writer’s block. (Even when I don’t have much to say, I seem to be able to get it onto the screen.)
Here’s a confession: my writer’s block, which is intense, comes towards the end of the process.
Getting a major project done to the point of being able to say–this is the best I can do, the final shape I want these ideas to have–is nearly impossible for me.
The closer I get to completion, the more my stomach turns. My whole being becomes one huge wince. Unfortunately, squinched-up eyes don’t copy edit.
In the midst of this ongoing wince, I tend to make one of three bad choices – (i) I let the manuscript languish; (ii) giving up, I simply send it off. (When the recipient mentions that it’s not quite finished, I cringe more and let it languish.), or (iii) I change the manuscript so radically that it is once again far from completion. (Then, growing tired of it, I let it languish.)
Some of these difficulties may come from childhood, the curse of precocity. When you are a precocious child (as many writer/artist types are), you always have the benefit of a certain handicap. (“So what if his monograph spells Nietzche wrong a couple of times? He’s only four years old!”)
Precocity is a protective clothing, highlighting every good quality, blurring every fault, chafing, at times, sure, but other times cozy. But when the precocious child grows up, he or she, like the emperor, suddenly finds that all that clothing has blown away. Oops! Embarrassment sets in big-time.
Since this is a truly difficult problem for me, it’s hard to come up with tips. These sound promising:
- The classic advice is to get a little distance from a nearly finished manuscript (i.e. put it in a drawer.) This does help you to see the manuscript more clearly, but do not expect it to make the process significantly less painful.
- Make yourself begin. Hold your nose if you must, but don’t shut your eyes. (Keep in mind that eventually some interest or craft will kick in and it won’t feel so bad.)
- Make yourself move along. I really like the Apple software “Pages” because when I re-open a manuscript, it takes me right to the place I left off instead of back to the beginning. (In Word, I tend to spend months and months snagged on the first twenty pages.)
- Make yourself stop. At a certain point, you will be playing around with minor edits that do not make your manuscript better. Worse, you start making such major changes that you are really writing a completely different piece, one that is farther than ever from being finished. Maybe your original concept needs these major changes, or maybe you are just sick of it. Try to be honest. Allow yourself to begin something new. (So what if you, like Shakespeare, are using similar themes and characters?) (P.S. when your ego’s in tatters, feel free to glom on to some good old grandiosity.)
- At some point, you really should proofread the printed pages, and not just look at the screen. My best advice for this–get outside help (i.e. a really good friend or, maybe, an M.D.)
(Ha!)
Religious Outrage – Elephant Dung
September 10, 2010
We live in a country where you can use the Bible as toilet paper. You can even post a video of this use on youtube. (I hope not.)
It’s a country where you are allowed to draw horns on the President, a country where you do not generally have to memorize poems for fear that your scribbles will be discovered by the local police. (The downside of this is that no one is much interested in poetry.)
It’s also a country where silly self-promoters, like Terry Jones and several other copycat “ministers”, have a right to do silly self-promoting symbolic things.
Of course, the rules that allow for Jones are also the rules that allow for artists and writers, museums and collectors, many of whom are also self-promoters, some of whom are also foolish. (Some not.)
Remember Chris Ofili and the Virgin Mary painted with Elephant Dung, part of the Brooklyn Museum’s 1999 show Sensation, which exhibited works from the collection of Charles Saatchi. Ofili’s Virigin Mary caused such a….sensation that it inspired then Mayor Giuliani to start a lawsuit to evict the Museum, the Museum to countersue Giuliani, and all kinds of politicians, artists, religious groups and concerned citizens to speak out. The U.S. House of Representatives (typically!) passed a nonbinding resolution to end federal funding for the Museum, the City of New York actually stopped the Museum’s funding; a federal judge restored it.
I am not sure that people around the world, Muslims particularly, understand this aspect of our culture.
I’m not sure that many of us always understand it. Especially some of the ones doing silly symbolic things. (And why do so many have to center on 9/11? Ground Zero? Do these people even like New York?)
But what do you do? We live in a country (thankfully) where people do not have to swallow their poetry, but can post it on the internet. Even though no one is terribly interested in it. With or without elephant dung.
More tomorrow.
Wet Day (With Elephant)!
August 22, 2010
For more wet elephants (in color!), check out 1 Mississippi by Karin Gustafson on Amazon.
Letter from a Hot Apartment (With Elephant)
June 26, 2010
Hating Air Conditioners
Letter From a Hot Apartment
Dear dear one,
I miss you tons.
I hope you are not too hot up there.
Down here, it’s hot.
Yes, I could turn on
the air conditioners, but
you know how I am.
I don’t believe in air conditioners.
I say it’s because of the war.
I say it’s because of the environment.
I say it’s because I’m so broke.
All of which is true.
But the greater truth is that I just hate
their buzzing hum, and worse, the vacuum that descends
when windows that can open
are closed up tight.
You could say that I
am a sensitive type,
with issues of
control.
Though if you were here, I’d let you put
one on just as much as you wanted,
(for a few minutes at least.)
(No, seriously, for just as long as you wanted),
(as long as it wasn’t too long.)
Because despite what I am,
which is not
an air conditioner.
I really would do just about anything
for you, dear, whom I miss
tons.
Blogging, Mania, Late Mornings, Late Nights, Stieg Larsson
June 17, 2010
One of the great things about writing a daily blog is that it gives you something to do at night.
One of the great things about writing that daily blog in the morning is that your night is suddenly amazingly, wonderfully, free.
I don’t mean to make not writing the blog sound so great—but, yesterday, after approximately eleven months of daily posts, the prospect of a blog-free evening felt well worth the sinking anxiety that descended on me as I made my way (later even than usual) to the office.
That feeling of freedom even felt worth the shoddy speed yoga I inflicted on myself (after using up all my morning yoga time on the deficiencies of presidential desks.) (See yesterday’s post.)
When I came home last night, I told myself, gaily, that I’d make up for the shoddy yoga by going to the gym for a really good work-out. Then I might even get to bed early.
Unfortunately, staying up till 2 a.m. can be habit-forming. As is finding something to distract you at the gym. (Yes, I do understand that it is probably not optimal to lift weights with a book on your lap.)
So, instead of focusing on triceps, or sleep, I poured myself into the immensely popular Steig Larsson book that’s been sitting on my shelf several months –The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I’m not quite sure why I’ve avoided the book—maybe because a slightly pushy friend has been slightly pushing it; maybe because I’d been warned that it describes (spoiler alert) some fairly sadistic violence against women.
The violence so far (I’m about ¾ through), has been manageable. But, heeding the warnings, I forced myself to put the book down at around 2 before something so terrible happened that I would not be able to shut my eyes. (I even left time–2-2:30 – to read something else for a while, something innocuous in the sexual violence department.)
Frankly, that discipline amazed me. Even more amazing is the fact that I’m actually blogging in the A.M. again, instead of lying here in bed reading. My mind suddenly tells me that this means I’m planning to finish the book during the day somehow, and then buy the next one (the second in the trilogy by Larsson) for this evening.
Actually, I’m not sure I’d really call that discipline.
This, by the way, is one of the great things about mania—it always finds you something to do at night.
What to do when the Dark Cloud descends….
June 13, 2010
Pushing Away Dark Cloud With Cold Water and Interpretive Dance
A week or so ago I announced that the long-term, if slightly, obscure focus of this blog has been stress and creativity. (I could not quite steel myself to call it the interface between stress and creativity, which, I admit, would sound a lot more zooty.)
One follower of the blog suggested that the true sub rosa topic was something more obvious—the issues associated with being manic-d daily. This suggestion brings me to today’s particular topic: what to do when the black mood strikes.
By the black mood, I mean, that cloud, ache, depression that sometimes forms because of very specific sadnesses, other times because of a more generalized sadness (a sudden, deep, awareness of non-specific suffering).
This cloud may also simply result from a quirk of your personal chemistry, some habitual combination of molecules and electrical impulses that arises from your genetics, conditioning, and whatever you’ve just ingested.
Those with a more religious bend might considered this type of low to be a swerve in one’s tilt towards the universal, God, the Self, with a capital S.
Whatever the cause, when the black mood descends, a very practical question arises: how to get rid of it. Frequently, the sad circumstances, whether specific or general, are not things that can be changed; what can sometimes be changed though is your chemistry, and, possibly, your spiritual or psychic tilt.
Perhaps the initial most important tool is to try to keep in mind that the black mood, no matter how deep and murky, will not last forever. (Nothing does.) So, even when you don’t know how to make it go away, tell yourself that it will go away—at some point—perhaps even if you do nothing.
Once that’s understood, you may as well try something. If you tend towards the spiritual, you might go for meditation, prayer, a solitary walk. If you tend towards the chemical, there are plenty of different choices.
Or, if you are like me, and tend towards the manic, you may like to try cold water (as in jumping into rather than adding to scotch.) A pond or swimming pool is best—but if you don’t have one of those, and you do have a lot of grit and faith—an ice cold shower or bath may do the trick.
The point of the cold water is to get the blood flowing, the skin to stand on end; to shake up all those teensy-weensy nerve endings. Once that has been done, a certain hectic frivolity usually becomes possible.
Hectic frivolity may not be the right words for the state I am urging you towards—how about a certain loss of physical dignity? By this, I am suggesting that you simply move, in silly unusual energetic ways.
In setting out on these movements, I would suggest an initial focus on the upper body. Silly leg movements (“silly walks) are fun but can be dangerous. (You don’t want to trip.) But even a relatively straightforward walk or two-step can become quite silly, and correspondingly uplifting, if combined with strenuously interpretive arm motion, and curious body swings.
Think Isadora Duncan here—not strangulation but angulation, as in bold, possibly rhythmic (possibly not) gestures.
I do understand that the black mood may constrain your interpretive dance. The trick is to try to separate your conscious mind (the depressed part of your brain) from the coordination piece, the silly “why-not-just-let-go-a-bit?” piece.
It may not be possible. Or, what’s more likely, your dark mood may only be alleviated while you are actually waving your arms about, and then fairly rapidly descend again.
In that case, you will at least have gotten some good exercise. And anyone watching may find their spirits lifted considerably.
ManicDDaily 
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