notes & things | 9/12/2024

fauxtography experiment, 2024

Sometimes, the weeks vanish and fold in on themselves. These last couple have been busy, with trips to McHenry to the drive-in, the cool, mildish weather of September, more films (including delightfully bad 70's zombies, religiously-inspired comic characters, domestic terror about horrible in-laws, and a 20th anniversary screening of Sean of the Dead. )  Last night we also caught Book of Mormon on tour, which was of course, hilarious given my long time love of South Park. We have a bunch of theater nights planned this month and through the fall, including some Shakespeare coming up and a couple of my personal favorites (Les Mis and Into the Woods.) Otherwise, there have been pumpkin spice flavored things (coffee, muffins, late night ice cream), glorious breakfasts cooked by J, and the usual things of life like plotting my fall wardrobe switch out, Halloween costumes, and my autumnal decorations.  

I have been otherwise keeping my head down and working furiously in writing and editing things when I'm at home--less creative stuff like decorating and DIY pieces, but with occasional snippets for the mariana series. I have also turned my thoughts to getting a final draft assembled for RUINPORN to begin combing through and getting ready for proofing and design, but am waiting to finish a few more delayed DGP chaps before really digging in toward the end of the month. I also have some fun ideas for new journals and paper things over in the shop I would love to launch this fall. 

We were out Tuesday nigh, but caught a recording of the debate later in lieu of our usual late night streaming (we are a little ways into Breaking Bad, which I am watching for the first time.) It went about as suspected, with a whole bunch of WTF moments and both Harris and the mods having to keep things on the rails. It is alarming that many do believe the nonsense from the far right wholeheartedly, though I think its becoming less and less whatever your political leanings. Or at least I hope so. 

broken places

 

It's September, which means new month, new zine project filled with poems and fauxtographs  You can read BROKEN PLACES here...

books and seasons

Earlier, I wrote a draft of a general post that encapsulated the past week, but I lost it when blogger glitched out on me before saving. In it, here were awesomely disturbing movies, new tattoos, and the usual ramblings about weather. But I don't want to write it all out again, so instead I thought I'd write about books and seasons. How mariana feels like the perfect project to be working on now, with all its sea and salt-drenched monsters. How my final ediits on ruinporn, which will be coming as soon as September arrives, is a very fall project filled with decay and crumbling houses, just as much as the carnival poems I just finished earlier this month felt very summery and swampy. 

Looking back, the fever almanac, though it was published in the fall was always a summer book, while in the bird museum was very winterish.  girl show and major characters... were definitely summer, but shared properties...was more spring.  salvage, with all its mermaids was summer, while sex & violence and little apocalypse were definitely autumnal. In newer titles I would say dark country, collapsologies, and granata are pure summer, while feed, automagic and animal, vegetable, monster are definitely winter or fall. 

Sometimes its about subject matter and imagery (Victorian inspired books def have a colder weather vibe while things like the Persephone book are more sunlit and Mediterranean.) It doesn't necessarily have to do with when it was written, but I suppose timing also may have some impact, since I tend to like to work on summer-ish projects during warm weather months.  This fall, I have plans for a couple things that may be winterish in nature, so will probably wait til November to start them. 

in which the poet returns to the sea

I've been fiddling away with the mariana fragments this past week since my rather auspicious start last weekend and am liking them so far. I initially thought they might be footnote-ish in style, but they are feeling more whole. As a writer who has probably written a hundred mermaid poems in her lifetime (including shipwrecks of lake michigan, which was a more modern interpretation of the lore, plus the entire segments of siren poems in GRANATA (though they were the winged, non-tailed, version of the original myths) it's a subject I return to often, despite living many, many miles from any sea beyond the vast expanse of Lake Michigan at my doorstep. 

I was recently telling J about my fascination with sea creatures that initially spawned my desire to study marine bio when I was 17--a complicated mix of low-key peer pressure, charismatic AP bio teachers, a desire to save the world, and endless environmental editorials in my high school newspaper. I quickly learned I was not cut out for science due to what I suspect, in hindsight,  is a serious learning disability when it comes to math and numbers, However, I lived briefly along the Carolina coast taking marine science classes and loved it.  Science's loss was ultimately poetry's gain.

This project is, of course, a little different. Inspired by that series of images I generated just on a lark, but now, as I progress through text fragments, is becoming an eerie story of a cursed seaside town whose houses keep collapsing into the surf and whose women become monstrous hybrids--not mermaids at all, but slimy, slithery, darker things.. If I manage to progress smoothly, I may even have it done in time to share during the lead-up to Halloween, when I have quite a few other surprises in store both here, IG, and in the shop. 

 

bird girls and bloodshed

 

We decided to invest in another theater monthly subscriber program in addition to Alamo, which has most new things we want to see (and lots of older stuff) , but not everything, particularly as we move into the high horror season of September and October and one-off tickets are very pricey these days. We can see 3 movies a week if we like for just slightly more than the cost of a single ticket each month.(we probably won't but even 1 a week is a steal) Thus, we found ourselves christening our first A-List tickets with this movie, which we had seen previews for this summer, but weren't sure what to expect. This was exactly the best kind of indie horror, in that it starts off with a mystery, but then slow builds, with lots of violence and body-horror, to a disturbing and relevatory conclusion, touching on themes of scientific ethics, experimentation, and fertility while also just being a good spooky romp though the disarmingly beautiful German Alps. Another case where you ask how can someplace so beautiful harbor such horror?

The setting itself, much like a French film we saw months back where people started inexplicably turning into animals. The monstrousness of the human/creature hybrid as well as the way such creatures fit into, or don't fit into, society. It also reminded me of one of my favorite horror films of recent years, which involves similar themes of motherhood and transformations.  There was also a lot of disorientation, for both the characters and the audience.

It was particularly good intellectual fodder, both for the current project I am working on with mariana, a new series/story about a cursed seaside community sliding into the Atlantic that features a lot of sea creatures and monsters, and for something that may be on the horizon for the winged things images I generated a month or so back. I will be starting to share some pieces form the former after the first of Sept. so keep an eye out for those on IG. 

emergelings

 

I go through cycles of hopelessness when it comes to writing. Well, at least writing creatively (I am pretty content with the how and what of the writing I do to pull in a paycheck.) But poetry is slippery, and sometimes feels not like poetry at all, especially when buried in more prose-centric projects,. I often say I am a fiction writer trapped in the body of a poet., meaning my mouth and my hands work out what is happening in my brain, but they don't always work together well. And poetry, specifically, as I see the publishing community, often leaves a distaste I cannot always describe. I used to be much more enthusiastic and enjoyed certain things I no longer enjoy at all. But the poems, they still want to be born somehow.

A couple weeks back, I stumbled on this Brenda Hillman piece and laughed out at the mention of a poets audience, the five people and one of them a tree. I have no idea how many people read or are interested in my work, and its probably better I do not know the smallness or the largeness of it. What frustrates me perhaps more is that as I feel I've gotten better at the art of it, that my skills have gotten keener, it feels like the world's interest in poetry in general, and of course interest in my own work, has gotten narrower and narrower and smaller and smaller. Claustrophobically so. 

So I started the year, wanting nothing from the work but its own rewards--aside from audience or sharing or readership, however small. Whatever dime I am dropping into the ocean of work being produced at any given moment. It's a kinder place, but far lonelier sometimes. I try to go back to when I was just starting. When I was 19 and writing terrible slender poems and submitting them to vanity anthologies in the back of Writers Digest,. Or later, when I was moving in on something like good writing and sending out work to publishers. That girl would be grateful that anyone was interested enough to want to read or publish her work at all. But that girl also want to play the game, which had nothing at all to do with the poetry itself. the awards, the book deals, the acceptances. I played for a very long time with minimal results (but then even those results would have astounded baby poet me. )When you take those things away, there is just the work and trying to share it. 

Unlike cicadas, our emerging isn't an identifiable thing with a start and end date and life cycle. We are emerging all the time...

beginnings...

 

Yesterday I was up unusually early at 9am and decided to embark on a new writing project, having pulled the carnival series to something like a comfortable close the latter half of this week. It was a rare few extra hours before I had to turn my attention to a lengthy Thanksgiving decor article, so I seized it. an, in a rare frenzy, wrote about 9 fragments I was happy with for some bits to accompany the fauxtographs below I am newly obsessed  with (we will forget there are other writing and art projects in the queue, some for a couple years, but this new shiny is working, so lets do this. ) 

It also was a reminder of how difficult putting the first few words down on the page are for a new project. It's a moment in which it feels like all the weight of the world rests on the pin of that first sentence, which is totally not true at all, but FEELS like it is.   This is probably true for all kinds of writing, though I give myself a little more leeway and just dive in on other things. That initial sentence can always be cut or replaced or rewritten once you know where you're going. But so often it feels like taking that first step out the door for a long journey. You are excited, but also a little dreading it. 

I've talked before about endings, about when a project feels like its complete and whole. I was aiming for something around 40 in that last series, but with some of the poems/prose fragments I've cut along the way, it wound up more like 30, but it did feel like the last couple pieces put a lid on it. I've been working on it over the course of the summer, so I suppose August is as good a time to wrap it up as necessary. There will still need to be some edits when I return to it, probably later in the fall, but probably not any major trimming by then. 

Starting out, there is always the excitement of not really knowing the destination, even if you think you do. But even then, that is part of the fear. The worry that he horses will tire or the engine will run out of gas, and maybe you'll abandon the project by the side of the road. A road that is, in fact, dotted with a number of half-conceived manuscripts and zine projects that go back more than a decade. I think only once have I been successful in picking something up once it idled for too long. And that project (unusual creatures)  had many elements, the written text, but also collages and an installation piece at the library, all of which occurred over a decade before the written segments were wrapped up. I really only finished it because I needed those poems for a longer project manuscript that was coming to a close where they were too perfect NOT to include.