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love and poetry

I cannot write poetry
without thinking about what it is
to write poetry.
In the same way
I cannot be in love

without thinking about what it is
to be in love.

———-

Love and poetry are the same in that they are these abstract ideas rooted in emotion. I feel them before thinking about them, but try and think before expression of either. But both are about expression. Without externalization, without sharing, they are empty and useless facets of a person; beautiful, yes, but futile and ultimately frustrating.

[entire entry taken from my journal earlier today]

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Self-Referential Movies

I started this blog entry a few days ago after watching Adaptation again, but while I knew I wanted to write about Adaptation, and how much I loved it, I didn’t realize that I wanted to write about self-referential works of fiction in film until I walked in on Nate watching the last Nightmare on Elm Street movie, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. Both movies feature the screenwriters and the screenplay, quoting themselves and eventually becoming the screenplay that is shown in the film.

This is somehow thicker and more interesting, in my opinion, than many of the films written about on the Self-Referential Movies Website, because she (Barbara Bernstein) includes movies that just make subtle references to the fact that we’re watching a movie, not the full-on hit you over the head with the fact that we’re watching the movie being talked about in the movie movie. (Although the entry/essay on Wes Craven’s New Nightmare is quite good, and out of the context of this discussion, I do appreciate and want to read more of that website.)

So I posted on the IMDB Adaptation message board asking if anyone knew of other movies that do this–other movies that eat themselves, other oroborus movies. I think I’m going to try and write one. This fits well into my current obsession with Rudy Rucker’s work, and I think my screenplay will involve the nature of infinity. (It also occurs to me that Master of Space and Time would make a great movie.)

I should also re-read Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler, which uses a similar (but mirror-reverse when you think about it) self-referential device, written, as it is, entirely in second person, about the person reading the book.

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playing with google sitemaps

Playing with google sitemaps today, I discovered it keeps track of your top five search queries, but it also keeps track of the “Top search query clicks”. So here they are:

1. wordsex
2. but im a cheerleader soundtrack
3. relationship blog
4. poems about december
5. trivial questions and answers

I think these are more interesting because they are “the top queries to Google that directed traffic to your site”. Anyway, the #1 slot is the same in both lists. (I’ve been meaning to write a blog entry about how one of my favorite phrases, “sexsweat” appeared in the recent Iain M. Banks novel.)

Two of the five results link to blog entries that heavily involve Laura. It’s a little weird reading them now. Especially the 96 question/answers, only because I had thought it was a sort of “timeless” quiz when I wrote it, but clearly it was not. Makes me want to do another one that actually gets more at my history than stupid trivial crap. Anyone know a good one?

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mindblurbian automatism

So I’ve decided I’m going to atone for not writing a novel in november by writing at least 50,000 words before next year’s nano. But I’m going with the mindblurbs style novel-length writing idea. “No plot, no problem” will be literal in my case. The difference is that I won’t even be trying for one.

It’s all a bit like prose poetry. I had briefly wondered whether others have written novel-length stuff in this vein, but hadn’t done any searching until this morning. To be honest, I hadn’t even known what to search for until today when I somehow dredged up a phrase out of a particularly dusty corner in my brain labeled “automatic writing”. The wikipedia entry on automatic writing led me to another on Surrealist Automatism, which is probably closer to what I’m trying to do.

“In 1919 [Andre] Breton and Philippe Soupault wrote the first automatic book, Les Champs Magnetiques [The Magnetic Fields] while The Automatic Message was one of Breton’s significant theoretical works about automatism.”

I know I have read a bit of surrealist writing, and all I remember was that I found it dense and difficult to get through, but rewarding. I will be hunting down both books in the near future. (This also gives me new appreciation for The Magnetic Fields, the band, which has been a relatively recent discovery.)

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blog tag

Nate challenged me to do this blog archive game. I did a quick google search and couldn’t find the origin of this game, so if anybody knows it, send it on my way. Anyway, here are the rules:

The Blog Archives and Hidden Meanings meme. The criteria:
Delve into your blog archive.
Find your 23rd post (or closest to).
Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions. Ponder it for meaning, subtext or hidden agendas.
Tag people to do the same.

“I sometimes fantasize about certain individuals having a more active role in my life… Twists of circumstance putting distance between potential romance.”

I’ll count the second part even though I capitalized “Twists”, grammatically it should have been the same sentence.

Anyway, I don’t have any fucking clue what I meant when I wrote that shit. The post is about possibly moving away to follow laura when (if) she went to grad school. And maybe I was talking about her, but probably I was talking about relationships with other people, people still in the cities when I move away. Trouble is I don’t have any clue who those people might have been. I certainly don’t think anything came of any of them. (This was about the time I had a couple of one-night stands, but otherwise I was only actually dating Laura, and I can’t find any indication of any huge crushes or anything.)

Anyway, I guess this is semi-relevant, because Katie and have talked a few times about moving to Chicago in a few years. I mentioned this to Christy and she didn’t like it one bit.

Anyway, so I’m supposed to challenge someone else. I guess Yami and Dr.Bombay, you’re both it.

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wakefulness

Twisting the shapes of morning dreams into the shapes of daytime emotions, regret and recourse, reality and renegade rhetoric–set loose on an unsuspecting landscape of innocent emotional vegetation, the omnivorous beast devours the hapless rooted instincts and flitting insect moods without distinction. Its mouth is a crane whose metal jaws indiscriminately hang open like the sifting teeth of a giant whale, sucking in all in its path. The beast is wakefulness, and upon its arrival the world is set drab again, and all the wonders of imagination cower so as not to become targets, so as not to become prey.

We wake and the slates of our minds begin tallying tasks and monotonous chores, the artistry of dreams swept away as so much chalk powder. Chalk powder that accumulates in the corners of our minds until an avalanche of it will bury us in its beauty, and we go mad.

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day two and I’m quitting

I can’t decide how I feel about this decision. I am simultaniously incredibly relieved, and also a bit disappointed with myself.

I mean, of course I’m disappointed with myself. Writing is a big deal to me… but the weird thing is that I’m also not disappointed. I feel daunted by the task ahead, and also less interested in it than I’ve been before.

I feel like nanowrimo is the wrong way to write a novel. Yes, it is good for getting ideas down on paper, it is probably exceptionally good for getting your stentences straightened out–good for the practice of writing, but it is not necessarily good for the parts of writing that I am bad at… the finishing, and the plot. I am terrible with plots.

I have this picture of myself at 45 writing novels. Maybe even at 35. But right now I want to still be in my 20s (last year for it) and enjoying life to the fullest. Not stressing about work or novel writing, or how I’m going to fit both into my day.

I am still going to make an effort to write more frequently. Perhaps I will make an effort to sit down every day and write. Yes, I will do that at least through november. I think I will try and actually finish up the novel I wrote last year for nanowrimo. But more importantly, I think I’m going to try and write a poem a day again. And I don’t want to stop at the end of november. I want to write a poem a day for at least a year. I’m going to write a poem a day until next november, and maybe then I’ll do nanowrimo again as a 30-something. (But without the something.)

Yeah, so how are things? Things are grand, things are fucking great really. I’m dating someone wonderful, and I’m learning to do aerial acrobatics. (Albiet the latter quite slowly; I think I might start going to class more than once a week.) My work has moved to a real location again, which is quite nice. I’m taking the bus to work more or less every day and loving the time I get to read.

Oh yeah, and I’m going to take at least a half-hour to read every day.

So yeah, not writing a novel this november, but I’m going to write a poem every day, and maybe a bit of last year’s novel. I’m definitely going to print that fucker out and do some major editing. And I’m going to take time to read every day. And maybe start playing guitaur again.

…and I’m not going to feel guilty for not writing 2,000 words a day.

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accidents and coincidences

So I got in a car accident yesterday. It was totally my fault, and I should have been more careful. Fortunately, neither of us was hurt. I ran into the back of a pickup truck going about 10 mph (maybe 15). The pickup’s bumper was higher than mine, and basically tore through the headlights and hood of my poor little Geo like they were made of paper mache. I posted some pictures on flickr.

Also yesterday, I heard about this Zombie Pub Crawl vlog entry posted over at mnstories filmed by my friend jeremy, and after watching it realized that I also knew one of the organizers. So as if that’s not coincidence enough, guess who I ran into at lunch today? That’s right, small world.

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blog TODO reprise

OK, so i did things a little back-ass-wards, and ended up totally fucking up the MT instance on my free hosting account (where all my friend’s blogs are hosted). So if you’re one of those friends, and you can’t post to your blog, i really appologize. I’m going to be re-creating your blogs from scratch in a new location (with a new upgraded MT), and then asking you to switch to the new login. Basically, what i think happned was that the old instance of MT just has too many spam comments on it for the MT upgrade script to handle it. I did a little searching on this problem, but not too extensively. I’m sure other people have encountered it if that is indeed the case. (My comments.db file is 204MB large, if that gives you any idea of how many comments. I believe Elia’s blog has like 30,000 spam comments on it. That’s some fucked up shit right there.)

I wanted to add another item to my blog TODO… it’s really quite a bit more than one item… but I’d really like to sign up for various APIs and start integrating the various sites and services that i use regularly into my blog. This would include my flickr photos, various last.fm (audioscrobbler) information, and possibly boardgamegeek.com information of some kind. (I’m just not very good about updating that site really.)

[Update: I also saw a post on the flickr blog today that led me to QOOP, that prints bound books of your flickr photos… that seems like such a cool idea…Makes me want to take (and post) more photos.]

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blog TODO

In order of priority:

1) Install lilina RSS aggregator. (Just discovered this today via delobius… it’s the reason for this post! I think I might also consider contributing to the project by adding a feature to “delete cache before XXX date”.)

2) upgrade MT…

3) upgrade the super-crusty 2.66 MT on various friends’ blogs. (should be able to do this immediately following #2.)

4) somehow call more attention to the mindblurbs, as they are more frequently updated than the main blog. (this may have to wait till after #5.)

5) Full conversion to a blosxom variant. (I’m hoping the options are better now than they were 6 months ago, the last time I checked around for a good package with the features I wanted. I’d prefer to have comment support out of the box, please, and i’d rather it were written in php than perl too, but that’s a secondary requirement.)

I have no idea when i’ll get around to doing any of these. obviously that last one is going to take some actual time, and what a scarce commodity that’s become lately…