(too used to unchecking FP box, so have to promote my own damned FP piece… – promoted by pfiore8)
I’m listening to a musician, new to me. Sam Prekop… heard his music playing as i passed by a small shop. i walked in and asked… who is that. Sam Prekop. Oh.
So now i’m listening to Who’s Your New Professor. I love it. I love the acoustic guitar. And the acoustic piano. The tone… the depth of the music. And listening, i hear the electric elements there too. but it is the acoustic parts that are warmest, most intimate.
Can writing be acoustic? … a writer so intimate with a pen or keyboard… wanting nothing more than to touch a conversation…
Writing like this is the closest thing to reading for me. There is nothing hard or fast about the images, yet I know it… the room, the people in the room, the sound of voices, the lights, the smell of evening, and the crickets, like generators, humming, vibrating in the background
I wonder about you, though. You could be living on the Baja Peninsula for all i know. Maybe you’re playing it down low… down under. Ha! you could be right next store. Maybe it’s slipping into spring where you are. Or dipping into evening. my dutchman is more than 3,500 miles from here.
where’s the touch then? being able to get up and walk over to you. rub your arm. hug you. kiss you. pull your hair. pinch you. bite you. where are you????
i’d love to see how you smile. or hear your laugh… do you snort or make funny contorted faces? i want to touch your laughter with my ears and my eyes… take it with me into my mind.
wait. there’s more to it than that, isn’t there. i want more than just your body. i want your mind. to touch THAT.
so while your steeping that tea for our tete-a-tete, i need to warn you: i have eXpectations. about talk, ideas, challenges, being eXposed, being heard, hearing. no!… listening to you.
think about it for a minute. i am… i’ve been given a forum. a platform. hoLY shit. it’s HERE I AM and then some. because you should know what you’re getting into, here. you have eXpectations. so do i.
read me… love it or pull me apart. make me better. don’t come here for personality (i lie)… i want to get somewhere… i have eXpectations. i don’t want to be a shell. i want to get to you. i want you to grab me, astound me. take the damned thread over, if it’s meant to be… argue… be maudlin… but be something… feel something… be aroused and want something… we deserve to have some… eXpectations
touch you… touch me…. no smells and nothing to quell the need to touch. it’s raw… it’s writing in the raw… here, it is allowed to be. here, it is just us and there are no mirrors, just perception and our minds creating at the speed of sound who we are… who we want to be… getting closer in every keystroke…
there’s cold comfort in the electric warm touch of my laptop. the keys, the touch pad. the screen… and this wormhole mess of wires and cables, the only portal i have to you out there…somewhere.
buhdydharma, he always says here i am… well, buhdy, HERE I AM. the question is, where are all of you?
tell me a little something about yourself on this first of what i hope will be many Thursday nights… of writing in the raw.
welcome to docuDharma.
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our time is now
because i think it’s going to get really good.
Kinky…
Here’s my theory – writing is the most personal and intimate form of communication. The intimacy explains why love letters are so powerful, why books remain classics for centuries, why people can be truly inspired to change their lives over what they read, and why blog wars can blow up beyond anyone’s logical expectations.
Nice diary. Cheers.
Should have used it as your title.
Love that.
and it is off to write the essay that is now over a week late.
on every other blog but this one (and don’t ask me why because i don’t know) i have written under the name of conchita. a name chosen because it made complete sense. conchita is my dog and she runs my life, so why not my alterego as well. it is only with her brown-eyed agreement and a hopeful, little wag of the tail that says “yeah, sure, i can wait a few comments longer before we go for that walk you promised me two hours ago. we are going, right?” when i finally sign up for a photobucket account, i will post a photo of mi jeffa and you will understand too why she has taken over my life.
but now and here it seems i am sharon. gulp. and i have an essay to write that is now a week old and it will be my first here and my first ever as sharon. wish me luck as i head off to write.
I really felt ya there!
Even when you got a touch self-conscious and pulled back a bit!
You are learning to project through the screen….or off the page. I knew you had it in you! Keep pushing!
feeling a little down this evening, actually. too many blessings to count, so, all told, things are good.
but i’ve been lumbering for quite awhile along a path where what i do and who i am mesh not so well. mind you, i do no evil. can’t. won’t. i work with games and puzzles. i know, sounds cool on paper. and there is an intrinsic goodness and decency to getting playthings into the hands of children of all ages. i get that.
but it’s retail. ugh. f%#@ing retail. grinding on my 175 vendors for free shipping and better discounts. tracking freight and filing damage claims. it’s. f^#%ing. retail.
i have opol to thank for my funk. that joan baez quote (you can’t choose how or when you die, only how you live your life now) has been rattling in my brain all day.
i really do mean, genuinely, thanks to opol for that. consciousness necessarily precedes growth, and for that matter anything of the human condition of lasting value.
I’m a sucker for the Epic. For me, the sound of the epic comes in like a sustained Pacific swell, all echo and reverb on top of deft drumming and big dumb bass. Big sounds, however, don’t easily lend themselves to easy lyrics. Bono thought so, and look what happened to him.
His guitarist the Edge knew better, though (sort of). When I was 16, the guitar solo in U2’s “The Fly” was the height of soaring epic for me. In some ways it still is, even though I like to think I’m much cooler than they ever pretended to be in bombastically plastic pants.
And yet here I am, all this time later, still a predictable bitch for Bigness in Rock, plunged deep into the third Interpol album, in all its simplistic, one-note riffing glory. “Pioneer to the Falls” now does what “The Fly” used to, but once again, the secret is the big dumb bass. Not the ice-cold axe, the workmanlike drums, or the boyishly stentorian vocals. The big dumb bass, in this case de-tuned by Carlos D down from E, the people’s key, to D.
And D minor, as every amateur hack knows, is the Saddest Of Keys. Mark Sandman knew that, and rode his two-string slide bass for four albums with Morphine, and finishing a fifth, before his heart gave out, never to see its release.
Black Rebel Motorcyle Club knows that too, even though they look for all the world to be Way Too Cool For Your, or Anyone’s School. Even if that’s not true, they can hide behind the tunes- the slow thud of “Red Eyes and Tears,” the pounding, earsplitting tremolo of “In Like The Rose,” and the elegaic sadness of “All You Do Is Talk”.
But what the hell? Why waste time reading what I say about them? Music, as Declan MacManus once said, is to be written about just as surely as architecture is to be danced to. Or something like that- but he needed an editor too, just like me. Music is too easy to abuse with the written word- hell, I’ve just done that for this whole comment. I should be writing lyrics like my deranged heroes would be right now.
That’s for another comment, though. I’ve only just touched on the multitude of shabbily simplistic bassists that shake my shack. The lyricists will have to wait for next time.
When I write about the law, or my pet theory of politics, Politics of Contrast/Lincoln 1860, I write fairly analytically and carefully.
But a lot of my blogging is very fast and emotional, though grounded in what I know and already think.
I am very repetitive in my writing.
Very much into reprises.
that I am pixelalalalal (slap!) ly.
But I am hanging around the water cooler.
‘acoustic’ to me is about tension and vibration. but i have perfect pitch in my ears (cant sing a note)
writing that is more rhythmic lacks that tension…again, to me. what is the ‘distance’ between the vibrational levels in acoustic writing becomes a more patterned and expected (or should i say eXpected) rhythm. humor creates its own vibrational level. as does change in emotion. even abrupt interruption…like the insertion of a pony picture into written work. yet, when its expected….a ‘pattern’ we can predict…its more soothing…
because rhythmic writing is soothing
acoustic writing is exciting..even if it excites things that calm us, like feelings of home. home is hardly ever rhythmic. but it comforts. the tension of home will always comfort.
they say all touch is exciting at first, and can become soothing or exciting….as a trained massage therapist, i could talk for hours about how massage strokes are applied…pressure, direction, speed…and yet its the INTENT that ultimately defines the reaction. this is more difficult to achieve with writing or music. skin on skin…zero degrees of separation…way easier.
yet this is hardly about me. there’s not much ‘about’ me tonight. i played with that 3/y/o at hannah’s practice again tonight. he had me digging for fossils with sticks…which he called ‘ground bones’. and told me i was doing it wrong no matter how i did it. and he wanted to look for fossils in the tree…and i told him if he dug the tree i wouldnt be able to play. so we dug in the dirt.
Bits and Bytes
There is no sound but the clickety-clack of fingers on the keyboard
There are no sights but the electronically formed letters on the screen
But there are people in my computer
Riding the crest of the technological future
And I have joined them
We have stripped ourselves down to the thoughts we express
Mind meeting mind with no distractions
The carefully chosen phrase can be undone
By the carelessly tossed word
A misplaced comma may cost a friendship
We become our vocabulary and our usage of it
Our emotions are expressed only through punctuation
Yet we bare our souls to each other
And form relationships deeper than those in the real world
Because we must always trust each other
Finland, Australia, South Africa and Canada
Maine, Virginia, New Hampshire and Kansas
Baltimore, Cleveland, San Francisco and Boston
I have trod on your virtual streets today
And visited with some of your most caring inhabitants
We embrace each other thought to thought
And love each other’s wisdom
We share our joys and pain
And support each other through our sorrows and triumphs
This is life in e-space
–Robyn Elaine Serven
–June, 1993
paleta from the mexician store in town, yum.
…writing is like pulling teeth to me. The older I get the more words I lose…ugh.
http://en.wikipedia….
…one of my great writing teachers said writing is love. She said this a lot. Unfortunately I don’t think love is particularly easy, it’s every bit as hard as Fromm said it was, and then some. I don’t know if it’s still art, when the mirrors come down, or even craft — pfiore8, you spoke eloquently to the process of seeing it before it was spoken, how that knowledge ramifies and expands, in a comment on here the other day. Even if the mirror is something high and shining and in motion, far enough away to ignore for moments and then catch a correcting glimpse, without it — we stop communicating.
Where I am tonight — eh, despair is common as dirt, as I tend to say. But maybe it’ll get better.
For all that, the new blog is very cool and I certainly enjoyed my pony parties today. Hope others did too 🙂
Yah asked 🙂
I was at college with a guy who could give words taste and smell. He had been educated by monks and the splendour of his words was dressed and finished by the copperplate hand he had learned to the sound of plainsong in cloistered peace.
I admired him. As I admire the Thompson of Fairport who, at the return of an old love, “lost his tongue in the tangle of his senses”.
Nice Thursday night jam you started.
This week, I became the last of my friends to discover The Decemberists. Sounds like you might enjoy them too.
Writing is one.
My mom brought things into perspective for me. She said there are those who can do. And there are those that can appreciate.
I guess I’ve accepted that I’m an appreciator.
So I sit back … and appreciate.
I think I’ve mentioned it before- Prekop is also part of a Chicago band called the Sea and Cake. To me, they are literally the sound of sunshine. There’s a song called “Four Corners” that kicks of their album “One Bedroom” that is the exact, exact soundtrack for the drive between Ventura and Santa Barbara, along the lip of the edge of the earth.
spent recuperating from an active one yesterday. A ruminating day spent lingering on the blogs.
A new book arrived in the mail: “Walking on Alligators: A Book of Meditations for Writers” by Susan Shaughnessy.
I dwell on the first three paragraphs:
“Writing can feel like stepping off into thin air. Some of us can write no other way.
Not for us the well-thought-out outline, the step-by-step recipe that brings the project to success. When we try to apply ourselves to such a well-mapped course we stall out.
We are the writers who start every day walking off a cliff, fearing there are alligators below.”
(An aside here. A call for help: How to do block quotes.)
I think I am sad and angry. Sad for the losses recently – the poet Grace Paley and the great tenor Luciano Pavarotti. May they speak to me in new ways. Angry because I feel like I’m dancing with skeletons: Bushit and Cheney-shit and war and grief. And a new skeleton, the stripped down, withered Constitution. And I wonder how naive I had been about this country’s direction for so long.
There’s only one message that has stood out in the last couple of days. It’s from this blog: “Be excellent to each other.” Excellence. It takes some digging down into the permutations of the definitions, until this: impressiveness, magnificence, grandness, richness.
Magnificence. Grandness. Richness. Impressive words.
May we act always with magnificence, grandness, richness. How difficult that is when we get down to the details. How not to be humdrum, or mediocre, or doing just to get the doing out of the way, a form of “whatever” in action. It takes love for magnificence.
I’d wish it for the world. Swirl a magic wand and knight everyone:
Be excellent to each other.
Despite the cliff. Despite the alligators.
I just signed up and I’m allowed to comment? A sign of of the pockyclips I say.
Anyway, I live on the red, red, red South Texas coast.
Don’t hate me because I’m pretty.
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music here … i think most of what we do here all leads to the same thing: an open forum… we go where it feels right to go
this is a workshop for all of us…
“It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine tonight in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows’ weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.”
Played in near darkness. On a double bass and barely heared player’s breath against narrator’s mellow lilt. As it should be.
It is 04:40 here and I’m nodding. Thank you pfiore8 . I have been entertained and enjoyed being here tonight. I bid you all a fond goodnight.
a “your favorite final paragraph” diary. I’d probably crosspost (since I owe a diary for real on dkos, and not just the overdue series item)…those last paragraphs you can’t get out of your head…
some people do this with rock lyrics…my ambien has kicked in and it’s probably time to go…heh, you said let it rip…though I’ll be more circumspect in the future…
Who am I?
Why, I’m the smartest fool in the room, of course.
I know not what I know not…but, I know it.
Where am I?
I live in the cardboard box of idealism, in the alley behind the Wal-Mart of reality, tended only by the twin rats cynicism and mockery; holding on with both hands to the hope that the world will improve during my lifetime, but stepping out into the sunlight enough to imbibe the inherent beauty in the world that makes the wait enjoyable.
When am I?
At least once a day, I try to be right now. It is sometimes the effort to do so that gets in the way.
— * —
I am happily married and human enough to be mildly turned on by your essay.
I have 2 beautiful, wonderful daughters who daily bring to my doorstep the battle between my own inner child and the responsible parent I hope to become.
From the world, I want better, I want it now; and, the better I want can’t be bought.
And lastly…I read a quote recently (too late to go source it now) that said a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult that the average person. If that’s the case, then perhaps I’m also a writer.
A keyboard can be a virtuoso instrument whether in the hands of a pianist or attached to a computer, but in either case it trades efficiency and perfection for the nuance that comes with handwriting/acoustic instruments.
It’s not totally a bad thing. It’s just a thing.
But I can’t imagine hearing the deep rumblings of a Scriabin sonata on anything but a piano, and I can’t imagine the warm, friendly wit of Pushkin in anything but his scrawl… Even if I’ve heard the first on keyboard and read the second on typed text. It’s just a different medium.
Early 20th century author Vasily Rozanov tried to mimic that by fucking around with type sizes and styles within his excerpts (he looks like Cummings before Cummings was out of diapers). It doesn’t totally succeed, but Rozanov has more personality in each sentence than most writers can pull off in a book.
congrats on opening night! I laughed, I cried. You were mahvelous dahling…
heehee – just wanted to let you know I stopped by
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then i have to know the other nine…
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wow… loved that you saw them too…