When life is getting you down, sometimes you need some super-ridiculousness to make you giggle. Enter the literal music video. What is it? Simply, a music video re-done so that the lyrics we hear accompanying the music are literal descriptions of what’s going on in the video. We were dicussing our favs on the way to see NIN/JA at Great Woods last night (whatever, Comcast Center. I don’t care who owns it. It will always be Great Woods to me.) and here’s what we came up with:
and my absolute fav:
The reason I’ve been so lackadaisically updating:
I’m writing a novel right now. And it’s taking over my life. Not in an “oh, god! please save me from myself” kind of way, but a “I’m obsessed with this world I’m creating and am pretty much just living inside of it and have no energy to focus on other things like blogging, eating, sleeping, or paying my bills.”
So I thought: why not blog about writing the novel? It kills two birds with one stone AND helps my process immensely. I don’t know about you but I’m not one of those writers who locks her ideas away in her brain like a 12 year old locks away her secrets in a diary with the note “For my eyes only. Keep out! This means you mom!” scribbled on the front. I find my work really grows and develops and changes in very important ways if I discuss it with other writers and really, if I talk about it almost constantly. Not necessarily the details of the story but mechanical things like scene and dialog and frame and suspense.
Another thing that’s really helped is having folks look at and give critical and constructive feedback on my work, especially in these early stages. It is immeasurably valuable. And it’s helped me really look at my work with more perspective, which is so hard to do when you’re so inside of something, when you’re actually living inside of it everyday.
I’ve also been crazy productive. As a poet it usually takes me about two years to amass say…150 pages. As a memoirist and cross-genre writer it takes perhaps 6 months for me to reach 30 pages (I write memoir at an INCREDIBLY slow rate). But writing fiction? It’s been like my brain is on fire (I’m crossing my fingers, toes, eyes, and legs as well as knocking on my forehead since there’s no available wood near me). In the past two weeks I’ve knocked out 50 pages. And I’ve been re-writing as I go so my actual page count is a bit above that.
Do you find your process changes depending on what you write?
When I first saw the preview for X-men Origins: Woverine, I knew it was going to be a self-indulgent, cheesy action flick. It was going to seek to explain (badly, with lots of contradictions and plot holes) the “origins” of one of the most popular comic book characters of all time (well, at least if you’re me, my Dad, and my stepbrother).
If one went by the trailer, it seemed this movie had it all: fight scenes, sibling rivalry, a love story (um…yeah…), copious name-dropping (with promises of one of my fav X-Men, Gambit), and of course, lots and lots of explosions. In short, it promised to satisfy almost any viewer, whether their interests in the X-men franchise be pedestrian or hard-core.
And yet, anyone who looked closely (or really had watched the latter two films in the X-men series) knew it was going to be horrible. The question remained, would it take itself too seriously and just be lame OR would it have a self-deprecating sense of humor (a la any Sam Raimi movie) and be DELIGHTFULLY horrible?
I’d come to not expect wonders from the X-men movies after the first two, so I was really content to sit back and turn off my inner comic-book geek (also known as the discrepancy-o-meter, which has a tendency to go off whenever adaptations stray from the original and sacred text, which for something like X-men is easy to do since it has been written over DECADES by numerous writers) and watch the ridiculous come-backs, one-liners, and bright, fiery explosions. And I was not disappointed. Craziness ensued in blood and mayhem with adamantium claws and it was delightfully fun to sit in a crowded movie theater and grunt out collective cheers and disses during the most action-packed (and whack) moments. (Except for the love story. Oh, god. Just the worst. Lame doesn’t even cover it. And nit-pick? For next time people, make Wolverine angrier. He’s supposed to be surly for god’s sake! And that’s when he’s in a good mood!)
I think the Wolverine movie was enjoyable for me because I went into it with low (and not very specific) expectations: I wanted fierce fights and cheesy come-backs and explosions. And those are pretty much guaranteed in any action flick.
Sometimes, I’m not so lucky. Sometimes, I let my expectations get the better of me. Sometimes (often?) I am disappointed by misplaced fervor.
For about a month, I’ve been anxiously awaiting Sarah Rainone’s Love With Tear Us Apart which promised to be, to quote Rob Sheffield, author of a book I love, Love is a Mix Tape: “…like flipping though a high school yearbook in hell…” with (as the back of the book puts it) “a killer soundtrack–from Madonna to Nirvana, the Geto Boys to the Grateful Dead…”
Maybe it’s because “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is one of the best, most honest songs ever written (and by one of the bands that has had the most influence on my own work). Maybe it’s because I use music and lyrics and song-titles in my own work. Maybe it’s because I wanted this book to be a beacon, a friend, and compatriot, another lone soul obsessed with the alchemy that happens when you put words to music, when you stretch and poke and tease and create and destroy that relationship. Maybe I wanted it reflect my own ideas, my own deeply emotional attachment to music and how that forms me as a writer.
Maybe it’s because of all of that that Rainone’s book was such a huge disappointment.
I’m of the mind that thinks about the craft of writing very carefully, methodically. I question each and every choice I make as a writer and really search for the word, the lineation, the rhythm, that will present my ideas in the fullest and most interesting way possible. For example, if you have a piece of work that uses song titles (and I’m going to come right out here and say that I do in fact have a cross-genre piece called “Love Will Tear Us Apart” that uses song titles, lyrics, and myth to tell a story about how love is destructive) you must use them, these rich resources, fully, completely, to the hilt. Just tacking on a song as a chapter title or a book title without really working the meaning behind and within that song just relegates it to mere pop culture reference. And while pop culture refs are wonderful and make those of us who are in the know feel special, they don’t really elicit a deeper meaning. And I guess that’s what I was searching for: a deeper look at the intricate layers of words and music that make up our lives.
And while she’s got the bourgeois Rhode Islanders down pat (in a very funny way), her characters never really get beyond sketches of themselves. Her four narrators are hastily “layered”, revealing not their idiocyncracies but their adherence to/ divergence from stereotypical character types found in John Hughes movies and their spawn and as such are underdeveloped.
So what’s the take-away here?
I’m not sure myself. To have realistic expectations, even low expectations, and maybe, sometimes, be pleasantly surprised (or conversely, not so disappointed)? Or to keep feeding my (often misplaced) fervor for all things musical, poetic, and true?
I get the Boston Globe delivered to my inbox each and every morning. Not because it’s a bastion of fine writing, but because I like to keep abreast of what’s going on in my community.
In the Living/Arts section on Tuesday morning, there was an article about the new book, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, a debut work by Reif Larsen that is getting lots of attention these days. Hailed as: “A brilliant, boundary-leaping debut novel tracing twelve-year-old genius map maker T.S.Spivet’s attempts to understand the ways of the world” (this is from the publisher, Penguin), it’s got the literary world in a right tizzy. The Globe article focused primarily on just how revolutionary Larsen’s melding of text, map, and fragment is, to quote the president of Penguin: “I thought it was a unique, very highly original debut novel of a new voice[...]The uniqueness of that made me very excited to edit it and publish it.”
And while I will come out right now and say that I haven’t yet read the book (I think I’m something like 40th in line at the library, so it’s going to be awhile), it really perturbed me that this “brilliant boundary-leaping debut” is being lauded as so unique. While there may be ways in which this novel is quite unique, the mainstream literary world is forgetting (or simply ignoring) the face that there’s a whole history of ‘boundary-leaping” going in literature, in particular, with cross-genre works that have been traversing these very real genre boundaries for decades.
Maybe I’m in a snit because I am one of the few who study, teach, and write cross-genre works and I know just how far back this history goes and how rich it is–not to mention how it has not been given its due by the mainstream industry. Yet I am surprised that no one is pointing to the burgeoning cross-genre movement in small and independent presses or the writers who have written works with imperatives similar to Larsen’s.
I asked a few talented writers who also write cross-genre what they thought about this lack of literary-historical memory. My good friend, Kat Good-Schiff had this to say about it:
“My feeling is that everything, even the most “original” work always has antecedants. This is not to detract from the work of creation, but just the fact that we all exist within our cultural context, both consciously and unconsciously.
You know those poets that just know how to speak dead to your heart? Whose words jump, fly, soar through your soul without flinching? Without pausing for breath, so sure are they in their power, their beauty?
Martín Espada is one of those poets for me. Unlike many poets, who rely heavily and oftentimes, solely, on imagery and overly complex metaphors, Espada’s poems are grounded in a reality that is full of the beautifully ordinary–realities that even while dark are bright with blood, calling out against injustice.
The reality that Espada grounds us in is the one we live, the one we see everyday: in the Bronx, in Chelsea, MA, at immigrant rights’ rallies, in the bodega, in our tall city apartment blocks, burnt coffee and sugar candy wafting up through the vents from Mrs. Baez downstairs.
Espada grounds us in this reality with the use of dialog and humor (sometimes ironic, self-deprecating, sometimes, joyful). These are devices I see so few poets use effectively. Early this morning, as I lay in bed with a crazy case of insomnia reading a few of Espada’s collections, I was struck by his use of dialog and humor and just have to share it:
DSS Dream
by Martín Espada
I dreamed
the Department of Social Services
came to the door and said:
“We understand
you have a baby,
a goat, and a pig living here
in a two-room apartment.
This is illegal.
We have to take the baby away,
unless you eat the goat.”
“The pig’s OK?” I asked.
“The pig’s OK,” they said.
[From City of Coughing and Dead Radiators]
Revolutionary Spanish Lesson
by Martín Espada
Whenever my name
is mispronounced,
I want to buy a toy pistol,
put on dark eyeglasses,
push my beret at an angle,
comb my beard to a point,
hijack a busload
of Republican tourists
from Wisconsin,
force them to chant
anti-American slogans
in Spanish,
and wait
for the bilingual SWAT team
to helicopter overhead,
begging me
to be reasonable.
[From Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover's Hands]
Check out more Espada here and go out and buy his books from a friendly, local bookseller or borrow from your local library.
“The way to a man’s heart is directly through his ribcage.”
So this goes in the category of things SOMEONE (the god of awesomenesses) made JUST FOR ME (ok, I know that sounds incredibly self-centered but sometimes (especially when I get excited and tell people what I’m excited about and they start to back away slowly), it feels like I’m the only person who gets excited about the undead, singing, anything-Buffy related, dark and gothy yet whimsical, horror, and generally things that are just kinda screwed up).
REPO: THE GENETIC OPERA is a rock-opera! Yes! A rock opera!
Here’s the promo from the site (for those lazies who haven’t YET been convinced to click though!).
“In the not-so-distant future, an epidemic of organ failures devastates the planet. Out of the tragedy, a savior emerges: GENECO, a biotech company that offers organ transplants…for a price. Those who miss their payments are scheduled for repossession and hunted by villainous ORGAN REPO MEN.
In a future where surgery addicts are hooked on painkilling drugs and murder is sanctioned by law, a sheltered young girl searches for information about her family’s mysterious past and the cure to her own rare disease. After being sucked into the haunting world of GeneCo’s GENETIC OPERA, she won’t turn back until she finds what she’s looking for.”
Ummmmm…..yeah. AND did I mention Anthony Stewart Head is in it? (GILES FROM BUFFY!!!!) And he SINGS?!
What I’ve heard of the music is awesome and what I’ve read of the history of the project (began as 10 minute rock opera and became a stage play and now film) makes me swoon. In a serious Dead-Alive-Zombies-Are-Comin’-To-Get-You kinda way.
If you’re in the Boston area, it’s showing at the Coolidge the last Friday of the month through the summer. For those you who didn’t know, the Coolidge is where the Buffy Sing-Along phenomena began and they always kick ass with their midnight events.
I’m planning on being at the May (and probably subsequent) showing and will, of course, report on back.
Til then, bloody hearts.
PS-Joan Jett, a long-time fav of mine, is also an uncredited guitar player in it. Cuz. She rocks.
Carol Ann Duffy (who has written some wonderful dramatic monologues, among my favorite poetic forms) has been name the first female poet laureate in the UK. It’s astonishing that in the 341 year history of the post, there has never been a woman named.
Read about it here.
And read Duffy’s amazing work here.
