I used to leave my blog entries untitled.
On Thursdays everything seems to be in line. This is the second week in a row I’ve come out onto this roof, had coffee and Pathmark ice cream and worked on a drawing or a word.
At work the other day I thought about trying to write a scifi or a fantasy novel. Two summers ago when I was conceptualizing Working Title I wrote a short article about how genre fiction isn’t taken seriously by intellectuals or academics, and only ever invoked to illustrate some Freudian or Lacanian point in an “accessible” way. Anyway, the thing I was interested in was how genre stereotypes transcend their status as such and become traditions or unalterable lore, how they’re so omnipresent in genre stuff that even by consciously breaking them an author still invokes them in that negation. Working Title was going to be a scifi book but I ended up choking on my own vomit and writing what I wrote instead. For those that don’t know or might wonder, I’ve been drawing on the back of the printouts since.
This is all on my mind lately because Todd asked me at work two weeks ago whether or not I’ve been writing. This got under my skin in the worst possible way and plumes of smoke came from my head as I mopped. Of course I haven’t been writing, writing what? Working Title, Literature, was the most horrendously demoralizing thing I’ve ever convinced myself to get involved with. I haven’t done a damn thing since, and have been detoxing myself by pursuing art junk instead of writing. While the year has been somewhat productive on that front (off the top of my head I can count four large paintings, eight small ones, five small maga-zines, one medium one, the newspaper, the holiday prints, dozens of drawings and piles of junk, my band), even bigger successes (the newspaper) and developments (touring) have felt ephemeral, like small distractions, like colorful graffiti along the bottom edges of a windowless gray building that towers out of sight and off into the distance.
Todd suggested I write for Reader’s Digest. The jury is out on that suggestion. In the mean time, I’ve been working on something for the last few weeks and maybe I will finish it before abandoning it, like everything else I’ve worked on in the last year.
Oh but wait yeah a scifi book. I might do that. Also I have daydreamed repeatedly about epicca, which I parted ways with when I got to college and decided that everything I had ever written in the long years previous was terrible. While that opinion still holds largely true (and extends as writerly self-hatred does up and into the very sentences I am putting into this fucker right now), what seems important beyond completed articles on that old project are some of the better, complete ideas. I frantically email Jeremiah every six months or so (and always think of his birthday even though I never, ever remember to email him on it) saying I’m going to reinvent that thing or get regoing on it or whatever and then I never do. One of these days, though! Jer if you are reading this and I haven’t already sent you one, email me your update.
Also if you don’t know what any of this is about try googling my name and reading all of the stuff I’ve written for D&D websites or worse for my own. Or just wait until I collect my favorite ones later this summer and print them out.
Meanwhile, I’m designing the new letterhead for the Mansion, if I can get off my laziest ass and just go do it. All of my time is going into band junk – I spent about a day last week sending and replying to emails about tour. We’re playing at Kenyon College, Version Festival in Chicago, Jamie’s house in Madison, a friend of Mike’s in Minneapolis, an art gallery in Columbus and a house somewhere in central PA. (Maybe I will blog about tour while we are on the road, whoa!) We’re also playing near St. Joe’s on Saturday. I’ve been dreaming about it all week.
I printed shirts last night but they came out terrible. I am going to have to customize every single one of them in order for them to be decent, which is okay I guess, but I had only wanted to dedicate eight hours to that project, not 24. Mike’s advice was “Shirts!” and he shrugged and laughed. I was in a miserable mood until we watched The Cruise, and then when he showed me that guy Speed’s book, I wondered why I haven’t read anything in so long.