Tick, tock

"Paul Gauguin was a depressed, suicidal stockbroker before he moved to Tahiti at the age of 43 and became a painter. Henri Rousseau was a tax collector until the age of 49; now his paintings hang in the Museum of Modern Art. Gabriel Garcia Marquez didn't write One Hundred Years Of Solitude until he was 40. I do believe it's never too late."
-Dodai Stewart

Tension

I have been reading The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand in an effort to draw my own conclusions about it. (It is difficult because I am already biased, based on what I know of her philosophy of Objectivism and based on the opinions of many others who deride her work.) I noticed, more than once, her use of a question mark in the middle of a sentence. This is one of my favorite literary "devices" so to speak, and she did it well. My heart fluttered.

Today, I came across a word in the book which I vaguely knew the definition of, but which I decided to look-up, to have a deeper, more full understanding of it. On a whim, I went to my bookshelf to pull down my Random House Webster's College Dictionary instead of looking the word up online as I usually do. As I flipped through the pages of the dictionary, I found my heart fluttering once again. I'd forgotten how much pleasure I'd once received from actually touching the thin pages, highlighting words, seeing the other words around the one which drew me to the book.

Since I'd long fancied owning one of those large dictionaries that one finds chained to podiums in libraries, my reuniting with my dictionary inspired me to go online to read more of dictionaries. I found myself at this article: Searching for the best dictionary. The author, YiLing Chen-Josephson, compares a number of different dictionaries, grading each one based on stock, definitions, usage guidance, etymologies, and enjoyment. I found myself following along in my own dictionary, and the fluttering in my heart began to expand throughout my entire body. I got light-headed...my limbs tingled. These were not symptoms of a heart-attack, or some other physical ailment. It was like holding hands for the first time with a longstanding crush. It was like the moments before a first kiss.

When I went to look up "nonplussed," a word specifically mentioned in the article, I found myself staring at the word "orgasm" across from the page on which the "N/O" label is located. How appropriate, I thought as my heart raced faster. After I finished reading the article, I proceeded to look up "orgasm" on the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. I found myself titillated, not by the thought of sexual excitement, but by the differences between the ways the word was presented in each dictionary. The pronunciation guides are different. The etymology is written out differently. The numbered definition list versus unnumbered, separate entry for "orgasmic" verses a non-separate entry. And where is the verb form in the Merriam-Webster definition...?

I have nothing more to say. This story has no point. Consider this the anticlimax. From Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Juan Antonio: Maria Elena used to say that only unfulfilled love can be romantic.

Perhaps the point is that there can be no completion to this excitement I derive from these things. In grade school, I used to read the dictionary for fun, but now I use words clumsily and foolishly. I love them but they don't love me back. And that is what makes it so exciting.

Inventions

I write because it is through my words and inventions that I can live all of the lives that I don't have the time and/or resources to live in the "real" world.

Favorite Link(s) of the Day

From New York Magazine:

• The 33-Year-Old Yearning for His First Real Relationship

From the Hathor Legacy:

• Why film schools teach screenwriters not to pass the Bechdel test

From Cat and Girl:

• 

What's so Right About Twilight?

What is it about Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series that is so right? After reading the first book, I've wanted to (and have on occasion) rant endlessly about everything that is wrong with the series. But the intensity of my emotional response to these books is too overwhelming. I recently stated that the only other piece of literature that has elicited such a strong emotionally ambivalent response in me was Toni Morrison's Beloved. And I assure you that my response to Beloved was for very, very different reasons. So, simply, about Twilight, I have too much to say. So I'll start with a list of the bads:

1. No writer should use any form of the word smolder unless discussing a fireplace...and she uses it multiple times in each book. "His eyes smoldered." I literally cringed every time I read something to that effect in the books. Perhaps this was the first thing that bothered me about Twilight: It wasn't that well written.
2. A reader should relate to the hero(ine) of the story but Bella is a complete and total twit. Slightly insecure klutzes can be endearing but Bella is completely lacking in self-awareness and self-preservation skills. Some readers like to feel as if they are Bella: beautiful girls who simply don't know that they are beautiful, who are loved by perfect men despite their imperfections. Ok, seriously, the chicks who are really like that are super annoying! Bella's not a bad person, I just know that part of the reason I got over my romance novel phase very quickly back in middle school was because I was tired of reading about these spunky, yet unavoidably helpless women getting saved and loved unconditionally by these perfect and condescending men. I like my romantic couples to be evenly matched.

But this is where the internal conflict comes in: I can't help but to love the Twilight series anyway. Each book has been better and better written and these insufferable characters are growing on me.

I'm trying to bite my tongue, which wants to blame Meyer's Mormonism for the obnoxiously traditional values that permeate the love story. But it makes sense. I can be considered fairly conservative myself when it comes to issues of love and marriage...but I can't help but feel nauseated by this common theme of Bella pressuring Edward for sex and him constantly telling her to show some self-control. Of course she's the out of control floozy and he's the mature, protective male full of restraint.

Sigh. I'm rambling. The final book comes out in approx. 36.5 hours. I'm looking forward to it. I can't decide whether or not I can stomach watching the film when it comes out, but we will see. No matter how much this series infuriates me for its shortcomings, what will always infuriate me the most is the fact that it is clearly doing something right.

Sometimes living is a work of art

"My life has been the poem I would have writ,"
by Henry David Thoreau

My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and utter it.

Wallowing in my Mediocrity or my way of apologizing

I've managed to piss off a lot of people lately due to incoherent tirades on various topics. I think the following link will be helpful in understanding the rants that appear in this blog: Required Reading from The Angry Black Woman blog. Those writers are much more eloquent than I am. They still manage to offend...but more intelligently. The required reading list just also explains a lot in regards to my feelings about race and gender.

Acting Out

I created a Facebook profile for a friend of mine this previous evening. While not the first time I've made a Facebook page for someone else, it is the first time I've done so without the person over my shoulder, without me giving over the reigns of the page immediately; it's the first time when I've felt as if I were pretending to be someone else. And I feel that my fascination with that thought gives birth to the notion that perhaps with a different set of skills, I would be an actor.

But isn't this why I write? So that I can create the lives I want to live? I invent characters so that they can make choices that I can't and/or won't make. I get to travel the world, meet all sorts of people, get married, fly planes, be a samurai, play baseball, run marathons, paint masterpieces, understand mathematics...without ever having to be anyone other than myself. I can sit at my computer, caress the keys, and experience entire worlds that would otherwise be well out of my grasp.

impotence...

...is searching through the depths of your mind for the word or words you need to suddenly be human, to be able to communicate, and being unable to find it or them. It is the powerlessness and frustration that comes with scrambling through your memory, grasping desperately at syllables and letters and sounds, hoping that eventually your thoughts will become clear, but knowing that most likely, they will remain firmly, inexpressibly in your head.

The Laugh Mightier

An excerpt from "Laugh of the Medusa," an article by Hélène Cixous. Some of it, I take issue with, but it is still one of the most thought provoking and profound pieces of writing that I have ever read. I can perhaps even say that it changed my life...or continues to change it.

I know why you haven't written. (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great - that is, for "great men"; and it's "silly." Besides, you've written a little, but in secret. And it wasn't good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself for writing, because you didn't go all the way; or because you wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate in secret, not to go further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take the edge off. And then as soon as we come, we go and make ourselves feel guilty-so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to bury it until the next time.

Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs; and not yourself. Smug-faced readers, managing editors, and big bosses don't like the true texts of women - female-sexed texts. That kind scares them.

I write woman: woman must write woman.