Not-so-daily blog . . .

I've changed my signature that appears on the bottom of all my emails. Part of the signature used to have this blog address, implying that it's a daily blog, but time and truth have surfaced. Now the blog address is prefaced by the words: not-so-daily. Some days I may even post twice, but then a week or 10 days might go by with nothing new. The busier I'm getting in this fall season, I'm finding that my walks are getting shorter and the zip that went into thinking of my blog first as my entry point into the day's creative action is changing. My latest foray into the land of inventing something out of nothing is songwriting. Now I've been listening to music and especially lyrics for years, but once I finished my behemoth novel FLORIANA a few months ago, I'm gravitating to shorter pieces of writing. Through a set of serendipidous connections, I've been immersed in songwriting for the first time and sometime in the not-too-distant future may actually make my way onto a stage to bark at the audience in whatever voice comes out. But let me tell you, short doesn't mean easy. The form of songwriting is full of craft traps that force you to express complex thoughts in simple language with the fewest amount of words. Call me a Jill of all trades, but I do love/hate being a beginner. Every time I learn something new I am a beginner and in this genre I'm at the lowest rung, but there's a kind of joy and ease in that. No expectations. I'm just doing it for the pure joy of it. Which brings me to a quote I've wanted to share with you for weeks now. It was on someone's office bulletin board and I copied it down so that I would never forget it. And today's the day I want to share it with you. It's by G. K. Chesterton. Not sure who he was, but he said,
A man must love a thing very much if he not only practices it without any hope of fame and money but even practices it without any hope of doing it well.

negation of the negation . . .

On a lesser scale than what Robert McKee had in mind when he borrowed the phrase "negation of the negation" to describe pushing a story past any point of predictable outcome in the midst of the highest possible conflict—in the photo above, Nature has found a way to negate the man-made confines of these metal walls that enclose a parking garage in Cambridge. The roots of this phrase go back to the Greek philosophers and have continued through the works of great thinkers. Engels said: "The law of the negation of the negation is a concrete form of the law of the unity of opposites, that is, the law of the struggle of opposites and the resolution of their contradiction." The film Pulp Fiction illustrates this concept when two warring characters— each on a mission to kill the other—are both captured by a third character who uses them in sadistic, life-threatening sexual games. One of the prisoners escapes, but returns to rescue his arch enemy. The two opposites have been bonded by their shared experience of being captured and tortured by the third character, bringing their conflict to an unexpected and satisfying resolution. That's enough philosophy for tonight, but I wouldn't have even thought about it if it weren't for taking a closer look at that garage wall as I ambled along toward the Kendall Theatre.

Scars on our city . . .

As you must know by now, I'm fascinated by the aesthetics of decay. These two images are close ups of the crumbling surfaces on the concrete walls on Mass Ave that bridge the four lanes of Commonwealth Avenue that pass underneath. These decomposing walls got me thinking about not only city scars, but human ones, too.

How does one live this life and escape scarring? Even if we've managed to survive without scars on the body, there are always some internal ones: scars on the mind, scars on the heart. How many of us have phrases that were said to us by parents or lovers, or children—phrases that we can never forget? Hopefully, we have a balance between the ones that cut deep and the ones that have built us back up. For some reason, it's those deep verbal slashes, often said thoughtlessly, that fester and stay with us our whole lives, often casting spells over us in some psychic way.

Sometimes, I'll ask my writing students to make a list of four or five of those phrases, then have them pass their list to another writer in the group, and that writer picks one and creates a scene in which that phrase is uttered by some fictional character. It amazes me how someone who does not know the details of our personal history—cannot possibly know the context in which that scarring phrase was uttered—can show the truth of that scarring quote. Other times, students pick one of their own phrases and write for twenty minutes without worrying about grammar, spelling, or whether or not the resulting piece makes any sense. One night during this summer's workshop, I asked them to write about the history of a scar.