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by doug | February 21st, 2010 @ 7:43 pm
 In today’s installment, I am going to jump on the ‘share the Roger Ebert Esquire story with the world’ bandwagon. I know I am at least a couple of days late, if not more. Ah well. I will start out by saying that I do not read Roger Ebert. I do not really watch movies that often anymore, and so I care even less about one particular man’s opinion of them. I never watched his television shows with Gene Siskel or Richard Roeper. I have, however and oddly enough, linked to Ebert’s material on two previous occasions: his deeply personal write-up (and what I called at the time, on twitter or something, probably his most important review) of Alcoholics Anonymous, and my favorite film critique of all time, his evisceration of the movie North. So I suppose I hold some affection for the man, or at least his writing, even though I can hardly claim to keep up with him (I did not, for example, have any idea of how sick he had been until I read the Esquire piece).
Anyhow… yes, Chris Jones’s article is touching. It is sad in places – in the places where such stories are supposed to be sad. And it is inspirational in its description of Roger’s perseverance and courage and prolificacy in the wake of his life’s recent misfortunes. But the feeling I came away with was an overwhelming sense of shame.
Here is where I am posting the link to the Esquire article. Click it. Read it.
How dare I complain about a lack of inspiration? How dare I wax quasi-poetical on the modern rat-race world’s intrusion on my personal creativity? How dare I make excuses for why I do not write?
Here is a man for whom writing is all that is left. He cannot speak, eat or drink. He is disfigured (though not horribly, I must point out… I enjoyed Jones’s observation and description of Roger’s permanent smile). He struggles to walk. He has endured numerous surgeries – mostly, it seems, failed attempts to restore some of the more basic faculties that we, the unafflicted, take for granted. He must write to communicate with his family, his friends, and the world. For him, every word counts. Each is important. To write is to live.
That is an oversimplification, of course. By all accounts I’m sure he still enjoys movies. He enjoys the companionship of his wife. So on. Etcetera. Still, even though he has always been a writer, now he writes not simply by choice, but out of necessity. Meanwhile I am content on most nights to procrastinate – to put off writing until tomorrow. Until there is time. Until it is convenient. Until my muse inspires me once more. What a crock.
I understand why so many people feel moved by the story. It is uplifting and inspirational and absolutely should be read by everyone. Take those words as ones with real gravity – as they come from someone who carries a hearty disdain for celebrity profiles and pop culture pieces.
by doug | January 23rd, 2010 @ 12:12 am
Today I came to the realization, some time between 2:30 pm and 5:45 pm, that one of the major problems that needs to be addressed re: my literary and pictorial creations is that neither my writing nor my photography resemble the literature or the photographs I admire. Not even remotely.
 I blame DeviantART (to which I have recently retreated after a Flickr flirtation that went nowhere, and where I am currently having to re-migrate my older photos so as to have some recent-ish work to show to the critical masses – that I find more photography that I admire on DA may be more a result of site-navigation preference on my part than a failing of what I am sure is a hefty and vibrant Flickr artist community… nevertheless…) for the epiphany’s onset. Upon browsing, my eye and attention is continually drawn to photographs that depict washed out, dreary, hazily-haloed landscapes and unnaturally faded/flawed portraits seemingly beautiful merely by accident but surely concocted purposefully and, well, artfully. Meanwhile, where I can look back at the photos in my online portfolio – a year or so of work, thereabouts – and enjoy them for what they are, they really do not represent what I would ultimately envision my art to be. My photographs remain the experiments of a novice still figuring out what all the pretty buttons on the camera are for. And I am ready for that phase to be over.
Whether that metamorphosis should take the form of learning new, more advanced digital manipulation techniques or of devolving and experimenting with film and development, I really cannot say. One way or another, though, I think we are just about done with the era of the Technicolor flower close-ups.
The same holds for my writing – not that I have been doing a heck of a lot of that lately (intentions, intentions, intentions, etc.). Surveying the past, say, five years of scribbled nonsense, however, what I perceive most clearly is not only a lack of focus and a lack of consistency (both prevalent flaws, mind you), but also an unforgivable lack of growth. Again, my writings do not come close to reflecting what I find most admirable and exciting in the world of literature.
My favorite writers are those who are either masters and lovers of language – Nabokov, Eliot, and more recently for me, DFW – or soul-crushingly sharp observers of humanity – Pessoa, Dostoyevsky and so forth. The point is: I cherish inventiveness, insight and intricate detail. Where is that in my writing? Hell, I signed up for a contest whose very premise was speed over substance. How does that further the skills I care most about?
So, while I must stick to my original goal – to produce and to keep the creative wheels oiled and spinning – I must also remain mindful of whether or not I am making any progress. Whether I am growing artistically. Not that I imagine I could ever construct a poem or a story or compose a photograph that would scrape the ground that those great artists stand on (I do not even really need to publish or sell any of my work… that is the least of my intentions), but I hope that I might be able to look back on these things and see that I worked on moving toward a higher ideal.
Meanwhile, it is tax season.
by doug | October 26th, 2009 @ 5:47 pm
 I have been bogged down in an epic writer’s block for going on what must be two or three years now. Sure, I’ve had tantalizing little spurts of creativity – but all in all, it is approaching half a decade since I truly felt like I have crafted anything meaningful. I used to write furiously – almost orgasmically – every single day. I would find a quiet space and just let my pen rush across the paper. Most of it was shit, of course. But every now and then something amazing (i.e. something beautiful to me, at least) would burst through. Despite all my attempts to jolt the creative beast back to waking life (the blogging, twittering, new notebooks, new distraction-less writing software), I have only really managed to rattle the bars a bit.
Enter NaNoWriMo. Because what better way to jumpstart the writer’s mind than to commit to penning the first draft of a novel within the space of a single month? As soon as I heard rumblings of this little movement (that has grown into quite the phenomenally large movement), I loved the idea. I have never attempted to write a novel before. Hell… I’ve only written one or two short stories in my entire quasi-adult life! “I’ll leave the fiction to other writers.” “I can’t sustain a story for that long.” That’s the sort of thing I would tell myself whenever the ‘great american novel’ motif teasingly appeared in my struggling poet brain.
Well, too bad. I’m doing it anyway. The philosophy is: it doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be words. 50,000 words in one month. That month, by the way, is November. Yes, this November. The one that’s a mere six days away.
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Now, correct me if I am wrong, but I believe I have at least one friend (nudge, nudge) who may have participated in NaNo before. Share with me your insight. How did you do? Are you participating again? Care to make things interesting? Eh?
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Okay. My intention is to post a little sidebar widget of some sort whereby you may track my progress in this marathon… at least a word count or something. Anyway, it should be fun. Probably in the same way a marathon is fun – which I would assume would be brutal in the moment but exhilarating and gratifying afterwards. Stay tuned.
by doug | September 18th, 2008 @ 2:08 am
Natalie Goldberg is an advocate of writing for the sake of writing. One of the exercises she proposes in her unparalleled Writing Down The Bones is that of sitting down and making yourself write — and once you start, not letting the pen stop until you are finished (usually these are timed sessions). Just free-flowing thoughts from brain to hand to page, not worrying about making sense. And the discipline is, of course, to make yourself do that every day, whether you feel like it or not.
It is in that mindset that I lay in bed tonight with my computer on my lap, contemplating what to write. I had stumbled across a neat little open-source text program called Q10 earlier this week — an extremely stripped-down word processor reminiscent of those early ’90s PCs with their monochromatic screens. I found that it lends itself very well to a typed version of Natalie Goldberg’s method.
Here is an excerpt from what I produced in the 5 minutes or so that I gave myself (I hope you like your syntax scattered and your metaphors mixed). If you enjoy writing, please consider hunting down Ms. Goldberg’s book. And if you’re feeling nostalgic for amber type on black monitors, check out q10 as well. I think it’s pretty neat.
At night every sound is a snare drum. The breath beside you. The street noise out across the lawns and under the pale, undulating lights; the car doors and dogs. Wooden skeletons pulsing in and out — the house lungs. Loud whispers.
You roll your neck, rub your eyes, rustle the bedsheets, twist, arch, scratch, curl, rest and repeat. Your mind is a twenty-eight page to-do list. Your stupid mouth is just another pore sweating in the early morning autumnal blush.
This is your every, your continuous. Your birth. Spill into the mattress and dissolve there, suspended in the tufts and coils, until you radiate away — your little particles flicking off one by one, counting down, 47, 46, 45, 44, 43.
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In today’s installment, I am going to jump on the ‘share the Roger Ebert Esquire story with the world’ bandwagon. I know I am at least a couple of days late, if not more. Ah well. I will start out by saying that I do not read Roger Ebert. I do not really watch movies that often anymore, and so I care even less about one particular man’s opinion of them. I never watched his television shows with Gene Siskel or Richard Roeper. I have, however and oddly enough, linked to Ebert’s material on two previous occasions: his deeply personal write-up (and what I called at the time, on twitter or something, probably his most important review) of Alcoholics Anonymous, and my favorite film critique of all time, his evisceration of the movie North. So I suppose I hold some affection for the man, or at least his writing, even though I can hardly claim to keep up with him (I did not, for example, have any idea of how sick he had been until I read the Esquire piece). 
