bookshelf

Via @henrymort, I came across this ideal bookshelf illustration project by Jane Mount. She's drawn and painted "snapshots" of the books people have on their shelves. It reminds me of this photo essay of what people keep in their refrigerators.

Anyway, one of my bookshelves resembles #25, minus the book at the end on the right side. There are parts of other shelves in this series that could also end up on my ideal shelf.

So I thought, hell, why not put together my ideal shelf as a little creativity prompt? If I only had one shelf of books, which ones would be on it? And that led to the question – would these piles of pages represent what I like to read or would they represent what I turn to depending on what I’m doing to keep myself occupied and out of trouble?

I chose a mix of both. The number of books in Ms Mount’s paintings averages at about 16-ish, depending on if you like to ignore decimal points or round them up. I went with 16.

So here it is, my ideal bookshelf:

(click for big, btw)

(I thought it would be easier to read the titles if they were stacked, rather than lined up.)

I’m curious. What does your ideal bookshelf look like? Feel free to post links to your picture (or your drawing, if you are so inclined to illustrate it) in the comments. And do go look at Ms Mount’s illustrations – really a neat idea.

This would also be a great prompt for music and movies - maybe in another post.

It's Wim Wenders' fault

When a friend I hadn't seen in awhile asked me what I was up to these days, I mentioned that I was learning to play the cello.

He raised his eyebrows and asked, "The cello? Really? Why the cello?"

"It's Wim Wenders' fault."

(My friend is used to me giving answers that only make sense in my head. He's a patient person, though, which is probably why he's still my friend.)

Back when my panic attacks were far worse than they are now, I'd be up at night pacing, sitting down, standing up, always hoping that somehow, I could get out of my skin and let it panic while I got some badly needed sleep.

Sometimes, I'd put in a DVD in an effort to distract myself. Someone had loaned me a copy of Wings of Desire. I had seen City of Angels a few years earlier and discovered it was partly based on Wings of Desire, so I was interested to see the original version. [Confession: I didn't like City of Angels, particularly after I saw Wings of Desire.]

After Bruno Ganz recites a bit of "Song of Childhood," cello is the first thing you hear in the film as the hand-etched white-on-black credits begin - a long, slow, low note; then another; then a quiet little run, then some pizzicato (plucking), then another long, slow note, and then as the camera pans over Berlin, a little run that sounds like a despairing cry. The angel Damiel stands high up on the edge of a bombed-out part of a clocktower. His head is bowed. His wings are just visible. Only the children below in the street notice him.

The film is mostly black-and-white, which is the angels' point of view, and then it dissolves into color when you see the humans' point of view. There is a montage of the angels observing different people to "assemble, testify, preserve." They listen in on inner monologue. They occasionally comfort people. They smile at children, who can always see them. Damiel eventually encounters Marion, a circus performer, and Cassiel (another angel) starts to observe Damiel. Peter Falk plays himself with a lovely twist. I won't tell you how the rest of it goes. You should watch it.

There is other music in the film - harp, voices, songs by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Crime and the City Solution, Laurie Anderson. Actually, other than the beginning and bits scattered throughout, cello isn't prominently featured, but it's what grabbed my attention. Particularly that despairing sound. When you've panicked for days in a row and are severely sleep-deprived, despair feels exactly like that sound.

I watched it all the way through that first time while pacing the living room at 2 in the morning. Then I started watching it again, finally managing to sit down and not fidget, and eventually, I fell asleep to Bruno Ganz reciting "Song of Childhood" a third time.

After watching that film, I started hearing cello in a lot of music on the radio. I deliberately started seeking it out. I quickly found that there is more cello music out there than just Yo-Yo Ma, although he is one of the finest cellists around, and I do have many of his CDs. Abby Newton recorded in a cave. Zoe Keating makes the cello do avant things. Rasputina goes all steampunk goth singing about Howard Hughes. Charlie Chaplin composed cello music, and left-handed at that. My current favorite is Apocalyptica. Metallica covers on four cellos = awesome!

My doctor advised me that I really needed to work less and find more creative outlets if I didn't want the panic attacks to take over my life. Along with renewing my interest in story writing and watercolor painting and knitting, I remembered that film and started to seriously consider cello lessons. It took a few years before I could afford an instrument and lessons, but I was able to do it finally. I watched the movie again recently while I battled a spring cold. Even now, it still reminds me "why the cello."

In a way, I equate cello with panic, but in the sense that sitting down with the instrument to practice undoes the panic because I can get myself to focus on something outside my head, which somehow calms me down. Dunno how it works, but I'm damn grateful that it does.

Whenever I sit down with the instrument to practice these days, I imagine Damiel and Cassiel are standing behind me, observing. And wincing.

a little bit at a time

After my last post, several people asked me how in Hades I manage to be patient in the high-speed modern day.

Damned if I know.

However, I think my fiction writing process has something to do with it.

See, I several minor writing frustrations, but only one major one - story ideas never occur to me whole and entire, only needing to be written down. I know writers who have this ability, and oh, how I envy them.

Unfortunately, elements of the idea appear to me in random fashion. I have to keep a constant eye out for the Next Thing that looks as though it relates to the story idea, which often isn't chronogically next in the story or next in any other logical sense. This leads to wading through and examining all the Things and figuring out how they fit together and continually revising my assumptions about them as each new Thing appears. It sounds like a laborious process, and it is.

For awhile, I thought this meant I wasn’t a “real writer." Surely real writers have a more orderly and sane and quicker way of going about writing a story.

I have no idea why it happens like this for me, and oddly, my nonfiction writing process (including blog posts) is far more efficient and structured. It's a weird beast, this fiction writing thing.

And now that I think of it, I had a college art lesson that is very like my story discovery process:

The professor projected an image on the screen. However, the image was deliberately out of focus. We were instructed to “draw what you see.” Hard to do if you’re not sure what you’re looking at. We did our best, and then after a few minutes, the professor focused the image just a hair. It was still blurry and unrecognizable, but a spot here and there started to look like something. We had to draw what we saw, but in a new drawing, referencing the first drawing if we felt anything in it was useful. The professor focused the image a hair more again, and we did a new drawing, over and over, until finally we could see the focused image. Amazing how it looked nothing like what we thought it was in the beginning.

Since we had to focus only what was recognizable and at least guess on what was not as we worked on each drawing, detail and accuracy showed up almost without trying because there was no rush to get it all at once. We simply worked with what we had at each stage. Everyone’s final drawing turned out hyper-accurate and thorough, and we were all so surprised and pleased with them that we collectively decided we didn’t hate the professor for putting us through that after all.

Writing stories is like that drawing lesson (for me, anyway). I start out with a blurry idea, and the more I work on it, the more things reveal themselves and start to fit with other things as I continually rearrange and revise them. Lots of detail and layers come forward - if I rushed through, I'd probably miss a lot of these, and the stories would be the worse, I think.

Once I stopped fighting my haphazard method of story discovery and just got on with writing what I did have clear to me (thank you, outlines and note-taking!), I started to get more writing done. I’ve accepted that my story ideas are lumpy blobs in the beginning and gradually work up to finished pieces that are nothing like I thought they would be when I started writing them. In fact, it’s rather neat to see where they end up, and it keeps me interested enough to keep coming back to the page, which is the most important thing, in the end, isn't it?

Writing frustrations are annoyingly clever that way.