Aura again

         Was the light pulsating because I had accidentally gazed too long upon an overhead lamp, burning its glow into my retinas, or was my brain blazing with fire because I was getting a migraine?  There’s always a few seconds where I think maybe I just looked too long at the light.  There were spots in my eyes, a cluster of them in the lower right hand side of my vision, like a flower formed of glowing dots.  I thought the light had stained my eyes, that I had stared toward it overlong.  But wouldn’t that be weird, indoors, at nearly six pm?  It wasn’t like when I’m outside in daylight and encounter a blinding flash of sun reflecting in the mirror of a passing car.

         The cluster paused there a while before forming inevitably into the flaming ring.  And once that happened there was still a smaller horizontal line of bright white light inside it.  This was unusual, as was the placement of the ring, though that seems to be changing in recent months; it used to be always in the upper left hand corner, now it has become movable, in a slightly different position every time.  But once it settled into its classic flaming ring it was the normal routine, notwithstanding the horizontal glowing dash, and that faded and disappeared at some point as the ring grew bigger.  The circle flamed with a rainbow of colors, brightest near the top and one side, fading along the other side, the bottom almost completely muted out. 

         This burning ring filled my eye and my mind’s eye (shutting them doesn’t eradicate it), slowly expanding 'til I could see right through it to, as it were, normality.  Then it was so big it was just the outer frame of my vision, a pulsating firework moving out until it was just white lights flashing in my periphery, a shiny diamond necklace encircling my world.  Even this continued to expand until it was gone and I just waited for the pixels of my vision to stop flashing like strobes and for the lights to quit being so bright.

         

In the details

         I was discussing my mystery novel Gossip Kills with a friend the other day, and they told me that their one criticism was that it didn’t seem to have enough detail.  I’d heard another intimation of this too, when someone told me it was “like a screenplay.”  I took this as a comment on the sparseness of detail and the emphasis on dialogue (which was influenced by my love of golden age and noir mysteries), though maybe I read it wrong (and it’s true that I wrote three screenplays before I completed a novel).  Of course I welcome criticism at this stage in my career (trying to finish my second mystery novel).  I didn’t have a professional editor to help me with Gossip Kills; I didn’t even have a professional proofreader.  I did the best I could, obviously, but any critiques are priceless. 

         This “lack of detail” rings true and I’m glad it’s been brought to my attention, but it’s not even the only part of Gossip Kills that has room to improve.  The setting itself, the boring office of a bureaucratic health insurance company, carries some dullness with it – though I think I captured what I wanted to about this monotony and expressed it with humor.  Another arguable flaw is that the first murder doesn’t happen soon enough, that there is too much initial setup.  I’ve been aware of these “flaws” or weaknesses with Gossip Kills and I’m not repeating them in Split Screen (the one I’m working on now).

         This new insight about the amount of detail comes at a good time, because I was already working on that with Split Screen ,  trying to add that more detailed layer of writing (is it serendipity that I find myself briefly in Hollywood again, which is where the story takes place?).  I sensed that this was an area where I could improve.  It’s good that it was brought to the fore of my consciousness and can hopefully help point me in the right direction.

Bye Bye Tarot 3

         Beyond those experimental, obsessive years of late adolescence, I never revisited the Tarot cards consistently.  When I was twenty my apartment was broken into.  The Tarot cards had been (untouched) in my underwear drawer, and the thief, searching for hidden valuables, had pulled the cards out and dumped them, scattered them, all over my bedroom.  I remember thinking, while gathering them up, “have these been contaminated now?” It didn’t seem a very fortuitous thing for a supposedly sacred set of cards to have been through.  But, I thought, if they have any power or mystery it couldn’t be wiped out simply by a home invader dropping them, could it?  So I kept them.  I may even have used them in the following years, but that’s a long time ago now so the memories are vague. 

         I don’t even know how the Tarot cards were in my possession in recent times; I can’t remember if they were in Maine for years then I got them back, or if I’d had them in L.A. all that time and mailed them to myself back east.  This is how insignificant they were to me.  But then when I was back in Maine  going through various tough and confusing times, and finding the old Tarot cards, I decided to try them again.  Three, maybe four, times I did them.  The results were as inscrutable, vague and in need of serious interpretation as ever, and I just didn’t have the patience for it anymore.  Tarot cards may work, they may be a window to the truth.  But in order to get there you have to spend so much time thinking about yourself; the expression “naval gazing” comes to mind. 

         When I was moving this time and I was letting go of things left and right, deciding I didn’t need those Tarot cards anymore was an easy choice.  But I wasn’t going to give them to Goodwill.  Though I no longer wanted them, they retained personal significance for me; and no one else needs my used Tarot cards.  So I threw them in the trash.  It was almost a significant moment.  Whatever their value or lack of value, those cards had been with me at some emotional times in my life.  But I’ve decided to quit keeping things for sentimental value alone, and those Tarot cards just had to go.

Bye Bye Tarot 2

         When I was a teenager I would use (“do”) my Tarot cards.  It fit my magical thinking drenched adolescent anguish to seek answers unknowable. 

I still believe there may be something to Tarot, some unconscious connection, but that it is only discoverable with obsessive self-focus.  Maybe this is why a (storefront) psychic once told my friend Raina that it was unwise, even dangerous, to “do your own Tarot spread.”  Possibly the more objective nature of one person reading another’s cards really is better.  Of course I thought the psychic was just protecting her own industry by insisting that you pay a professional!

         So, even if it works, Tarot takes a lot of time plus a certain philosophy and desire.  I don’t say there’s nothing to it, but it’ll consume your time trying to decide if there is.  And even if it does seem to work . . . I think it’s very similar to astrology in that what you get is expressed through words.  Words can be interpreted by different people to mean different things, and if a horoscope or a Tarot reading is “supposed” to be significant to you, you will find a way to make the words meaningful.  

Bye Bye Tarot

         I threw out my Tarot cards.

         This may not seem like a big deal, but it is mildly significant that I have, somehow, had the same set of Tarot cards for twenty years.  I got them when I was fourteen.  I haven’t always “used” them, not even close.  They’ve been dormant more than active.  I can’t even recall having them in my possession most of the time.  But I did have them a couple weeks ago, when I threw them in the garbage. 

         The set was called (I believe) The Mythic Tarot, and it had beautiful illustrations based on Greek myths.  Lovely.  But Tarot cards reportedly originated in 15^th century Europe, and have no real connection to ancient Greece or its mythology.  The illustrations, and the book it came with, connected the Tarot symbolism to mythological scenarios and characters.  Looking back on it now, this seems stupid and a stretch, but as a teen I accepted it.  I liked Greek myth and I thought the pictures were pretty.

         Do you believe Tarot cards have some power, that they work to reveal reality, or at least your subconscious take on reality?  And do you believe that they are equally powerful no matter what form their symbols take, as long as the symbols have the same rough Tarot meaning?  Even if, say, they go back in time to adhere their symbols to those of ancient Greece?

Subliminal Advertising

         I first read the full story of the subliminal perception hullabaloo in Age of Propaganda (by Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson).  This debacle began in 1957 when a businessman/advertising expert named James Vicary reported that he had successfully experimented with subliminal advertising – messages flashed too quickly to be consciously seen – in a movie theater in Fort Lee, NJ.  He claimed that these messages telling viewers to buy popcorn and Coca Cola had effectively increased the sales of both.  After a few years of controversy, excitement, horror and many experiments, these results – any results – could never be duplicated.  In the end, the whole thing was pretty much concluded to be a publicity scam.

         Freud on Madison Avenue by Lawrence R. Samuel is a recent book about the use of psychology in advertising, particularly its golden years in the 50s and 60s, and it focuses on the subliminal issue in great depth.  It’s really fascinating how flipped out people got as soon as Vicary’s boasts were publicized.  Of course, it was the Cold War and Americans were particularly paranoid about brainwashing and Communists taking over; apparently some people worried that subliminal messaging would be used to get a Red elected president without our conscious knowledge. 

         Personally, what strikes me about the subliminal perception bubble is that subliminal advertising was really nothing, but people were so worked up about it, and even if it had been something, it would have been invisible, but that’s why they were so scared of it.  I find this thought-provoking or at least amusing.

         

Overcoming Book Hoarding

         Browsing in a used bookstore the other day, my (hopefully) erstwhile problem with book hoarding and my position on the slow climb to recovery were brought into sharp relief.  I did not succumb.  I didn’t buy a single book.

         I saw quite clearly how my ridiculous hoarding problem had manifested itself, and I wondered why I would ever have bought books when I already had so many still to read.  But it was hard getting over some of these deeply ingrained habits.  I looked for a book of Dashiell Hammet’s short stories, and probably would have bought this if they’d had it, but they didn’t.  But I saw some things I wanted enough that previously I would have bought them: a biography of Nathaniel West, some P.G. Wodehouse novels, Trilby by George du Maurier, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. 

         In the past I would have bought these without hesitation because I knew I would want to read them in the future or near future, because they caught my fancy, and because apparently I enjoyed adding to my monstrous library.  But this time I paused and listened to my new fear of having too much stuff.  I asked myself if I planned to read the book right away or maybe next in line.  And if the answer was no, as it was each time, I said to myself, “when I want to read it, I’ll buy the book; it’s not like I won’t be able to find a copy then.”  This seems so simple and obvious, but I assure you: it represents a huge change from my previous era of out of control book hoarding.

God spoke to her through numbers

         I once worked in a store with a young lady who was mentally ill.  I’m not sure or can’t remember now what exactly her problem was, but she was about as insane as a person can be and still function and show up for a job.  She was very friendly and talkative (though it’s possible I’m only remembering her manic phases) and did interpretive dance: limb flailing hippie movements you might take as a joke but they weren’t.  She had a self-chosen name (wonder if she still goes by the same one?) and if I knew anything about her history, I forget it now.  

         What I do recall distinctly is one of the finest, most extreme examples of Magical Thinking I’ve ever encountered (yes, I think we all know it’s enhanced by insanity).  She said to me one time when we were working together, “God talks to me every day through numbers.”  Apparently the random numbers she saw as she went through life spelled out a significant message to her.  For me, if I were crazy or just a hair more eccentric than I am now, I could maybe see taking meaning from words or phrases I came across, but it’s difficult for me to conceive of a message sent through numbers, and this just makes the idea all the more fascinating.  I felt, when she told me this, a little twinge of jealousy.  I knew she was not sane and I certainly didn’t envy her in general.  Yet the idea, even if it came with lunacy, of receiving secret messages only you could read, sounded kind of fun and entertaining. 

         This is still, a good decade later, one of the strongest examples of Magical Thinking I’ve ever encountered.  I imagine, in order to receive these holy missives, she had to build up an intricate numerical philosophy in her mind.  Or maybe she just thought she had a coherent key between numbers and meaning but she really just made it up fresh every time.  Maybe she just said it because she thought it sounded good.  I’ll never know.

Editing in Limbo

         For the past couple weeks I’ve been getting used to a new home in a new city, and it has not been without stress.  I’ve even had an awful head cold, and I never get sick.  Basically I still have that limbo feeling: where am I, is this life or am I in a dream?  Also I haven’t worked (at a job job) in two-and-a-half weeks and this is enough to cause the willies in its own right.  I’ve been working on my writing still and I think I’m pretty committed, considering the lingering limbo.  The problem at first was endurance: I’d be working well but only for half an hour at a time.  I believe I see some improvement here so hopefully it continues. 

I’m in the editing stage on Split Screen – I have a manuscript, but as I know from my experience writing Gossip Kills that pretty much just represents the end of the easy part.  At this point you have the hard task of actually making everything work plus the frustrating repetition of toiling again and again on the same text, the same words.  Sometimes I have to discipline my brain so it doesn’t shut down or go into autopilot just because it’s read the damn thing before. 

I don’t have a real writing schedule yet since I don’t have a general schedule or a job.  But I’m trying all the same, still working on Split Screen.

Victorian lit 3

         Over 200 pages into Middlemarch and my now 21^st century brain simply does not have the patience.  Maybe patience isn’t even the right word.  Maybe I should just say it was boring.

         Reading Middlemarch I’d be enjoying it for a while.  As many as 10 continuous pages I’d really be entertained, and then along would come 10 pages of filler, village politics and philosophies on the life of a country doctor.  This broke my stream of reading and deflated my suspension of disbelief.  I found myself skimming past a paragraph or two, then three or four.  Then I skipped two pages; well, it looked really uninteresting.  When I found myself wanting to skip five or six pages, I took pause.  That’s just way beyond.

         Either you read a book or you don’t read it.  It doesn’t seem to me that there’s so many points in between.  What am I going to say? “Middlemarch?  I’ve skimmed it.” Should I force myself to keep reading just so I can say I read it and be true to my word?  What’s the point?  It’s better to just cut my losses and move on.  And my only feeling upon doing this is one of relief.

         The question presents itself to me: as time passes has the Victorian novel lost its relevance?  Psychologically speaking people have changed so much since the 1870s.  Middlemarch is more valid now as a historical marker, revealing how different things were then.  Human experience may be universal across time and space, but the delivery method has changed so completely that 19^th century literature is now archaic and, yes, less pertinent than it was.

         

Victorian lit 2

         It’s been years since I watched As the World Turns and now that endless narrative has ended (RIP ATWT 1956-2010).  It’s also been years since I read a Victorian novel quite as long as Middlemarch (Well, I did read Tess of the d’Urbervilles about three years ago- thought it was too long and not as good as the other Hardy I’d read). 

I’m struck by how very like a television soap opera Victorian literature is.  The slowness of the story, stretched to fill vast lengths of time.  Daytime soaps are made to fill a TV timeslot five days a week and, plotwise, exciting things can’t be happening all those days, so most of the content is really just filler. 

19^th century fiction comes from a time we can barely even understand now.  I don’t suggest that the majority of people were literary or even literate then, but those that were had attention spans.  These were the days before radio and comic books, let alone movies and all that followed.  If you were going to read a novel you wanted it to last a good long while, entertain you for a couple of months.  So, just like on the soaps, the Victorian novel is chock full of filler.  Not that it’s all pointless: George Eliot usually has intelligent points to make.  It’s just that the plot is diluted with philosophy and filler to the point of being obscured.  It’s like, let’s stretch this out so it’ll take you more time to read. 

The first hundred pages not much happened.  Then a whole bunch of new characters were introduced (just like on a soap), but it didn’t turn down the faucet of filler.  Middlemarch, moreover, is the small town where all these characters live.  Just like Oakdale.

Victorian lit

         Over a hundred and fifty pages into George Eliot’s Middlemarch. 

I used to be a regular reader of the 19^th century novel – Wilkie Collins, Hardy, even Trollope, though the only George Eliot I’d previously read was Silas Marner.  I guess practice brought an amplified patience level. 

         Reading Middlemarch isn’t like reading more modern novels.  The end is not in sight.  I’m in the middle of a behemoth, stretching out on either side of me; I’m standing on an endless curve watching time and page space unfold around me.  But unlike more current epic novels there is no attempt made for excitement or suspense to carry me along.  Five or six pages go by where characters discuss business or local politics and from a twenty-first century perspective it just feels like so much filler.

         Of course, if you’re in the mood . . . if you just moved and your life feels excessively chaotic and unsettled, something as static and harmless as a Victorian novel might just hit the spot.  You open the book and enter a world where nothing’s changed and little will change.  If anything does happen in the plot it will probably be encased in a hundred pages of gentle prose and slow cushioning, lest the change feel too sudden.  It’s like evolution, continental drift: you won’t see the changes in your lifetime. 

Book Hoarding 3

         On a deeper level I believe my book hoarding habits speak of control issues.  When I examine my motivation for accumulating several hundred books, the core emotion I identify is FEAR. 

How could fear lead one to surround themselves with books?  Well, I think fear and its associated control issues reside at the heart of hoarding, at least for me.  Some sort of concern that all will be lost, that life will become scary and I’ll have no control or, I guess (more rationally) that I’ll lose all my money and the ability to make any more.  We never know what is going to happen in the future.  Hoarding can be an attempt to control the unknown.  Fill the cabinets with canned food and you’ll be covered no matter what comes at you.  For a while it even makes you feel better.

“I have so many books that no matter what happens I can read forever.”

         This is a false sense of security.  Trust me, having several hundred books actually makes you substantially less flexible.  You find yourself paying rent for your books.

         In addition to my (semi-conscious) fears of natural or financial disaster, there is another, even deeper and more psychological terror.  It’s as if I’m scared of developing amnesia.  Not consciously (though “Desperately Seeking Susan” did have a big effect on me growing up).  It’s like I fear I’ll forget everything I’ve read and if I keep the books they’ll serve as a kind of talisman helping me retain the memories.  This realization goes a shade further and I can see that I’m afraid of losing my identity altogether, and keeping books and other material possessions proves to me that I am who I think I am.  This is so false, stupid and pointless.  I am who I am and I’m going to be who I’m going to be no matter what books are on the shelf.

         This leads me to the real hoarding realization: the attempt to hold on to objects (books in my case) and identity is really an attempt to hold on to time.  In the face of time’s passage we have no control and this is, for many of us humans, a very difficult thing to come to terms with.

         Even now, after moving once again and shedding more possessions, I still have over a hundred books (though this includes more than ten copies of my own novel Gossip Kills).  I’m a reader.  I’m a writer.  Books will always be a major part of my life.  But I feel like I’ve made priceless progress in learning that I don’t need to own everything, and these epiphanies have left me physically and psychologically freer.  

Trying to Define Magical Thinking

         The most common definition of Magical Thinking I could find (through my elaborate intensive research – I googled it) involved seeing a causality or correlation between arguably unrelated things and events.  Apparently this is also known as Associative Thinking.  It relates to the Jungian concept of Synchronicity, but that’s not so much about causality as the meaning or significance revealed by the connection of these seemingly unrelated events.

         Are there invisible connections between things, times, phenomena?  Is there an alternate unseen causality that we, with our modern focus on science and coincidence have pushed from sight?

         Magical Thinking is widespread and multifarious.  It has many faces.  It’s a catchall definition of something that manifests in near-infinite types of behavior.  That’s one of the things quite interesting about Magical Thinking, all the different forms it takes.  You’ve got the major religions, you’ve got cults and self-help books.  On the opposite end of things there are all the personal practices, idiosyncratic and creative or as simple as one little good luck charm.

         If there’s any underlying principle shared by these various forms of Magical Thinking it’s found in one’s relationship to the concept of coincidence.  Belief in coincidence, randomness and causality is the opposite of Magical Thinking; I suppose you could call it a classically scientific view of the world.  So it all boils down to how you feel about coincidence.  Any time you feel one is significant, that’s a touch of Magical Thinking.

Book Hoarding 2

         So I had the epiphany.  I accepted that I am a book hoarder.  I’ve now moved again, for the third time in two years, and this was likely the epiphany’s impetus.  Previously I had already shrunk my library considerably, but as mentioned, it had always grown back like a wart or a starfish’s leg.   

         How many books, I now ask, does one person need?  I have to be careful to not be a hypocrite here, because in all likelihood my library will grow again (though hopefully not to such monstrous proportions).  There are certain books it makes sense for me to have, and I’m sure I’ll always have a good sized collection.  But, let’s face it, I do not need shelves upon shelves of books I bought at thrift stores and charity sales because I might want to read them someday. 

         I read always and I do go through books aplenty.  I’m no speed reader, but constant practice makes you faster at anything.  I work and I work on my writing and there’s only so much time for reading.  Long past are the days I would call in sick to work and spend all day in bed reading a book.  Realistically, how many books do I read a year?  My guess is around 25, maybe 30, but I could be way off; I don’t waste my time counting things.  So if I kept 100 odd books (which I did), that’s a few years covered right there (and I do re-read things I’m fond of; you never really get something the first time).  So is there really a necessity for owning several hundred books?

         I cut down more drastically than ever in my recent divestment.  It was like I was seeing things with a new eye, fresh perspective, a fresh realism.  So many of those books I just did not need.  Or the likelihood of my ever needing the book again is balanced against the sheer bulk of material objects owned and how they weigh on my life.  And it’s not just books.  That happens to be the area where I have compulsive shopping habits (okay, full disclosure: I also hoard tea, but being a consumable, it doesn’t pile up the same way).  There were a lot of things I was keeping for “sentimental value,” stuff from my childhood.  Well I hope the Goodwill appreciated my paper dolls, beloved stuffed animals and 1980s Archie comics.  Sentimental value and nice memories may be valid, but if you care about these things your life becomes saturated with material objects; you live surrounded by unnecessaries, wrapped in pieces of the past.  If you own a house and are planted, then it’s fine to live immersed in your objects if that’s what you like.  But when, like me, you’re moving three times in two years, it might be time to make some changes in your accumulation habits. 

        

         

Book Hoarding

         I’ve broken through the veils of denial.  I can admit it now: I am a book hoarder.  Granted, I certainly read plenty of books.  There might be some logic in stockpiling a few.  But does anyone need several hundred?

         I’ve always had a library, and when I moved from Boston to Los Angeles in 2000 I brought it with me.  And then at some point when I was living there I took on the habit of shopping for books at thrift stores.  I found good stuff.  Books at thrift stores tend to be 1-3 dollars or less, so it’s easy to let yourself go crazy. “Oh, I’m sure I’ll probably want to read this someday” or “If I get locked in my apartment for two months I can read this to distract myself from starving.” 

         I was also buying books for their covers alone.  This habit set the hoarding into high gear.  I can date its extreme manifestation to the spring of 2005, when I was working at a Starbucks in Pasadena.  I didn’t have a lot of money, but apparently I still had a strongly developed hunter/gatherer instinct.  I mean I wanted to shop.  Thrift stores provide a good service here for poor people.  And I adore book cover illustration, particularly cover art from 60s and 70s paperbacks.  I was buying these at a quarter each, building a collection at less than a dollar a week (when I was lucky enough to find good ones).  I collected copies of Wuthering Heights (available, over the years, in a dizzyingly delightful plethora of paperback covers) and the works of Daphne du Maurier and Agatha Christie, plus any good 60s gothic romance or sci fi paperback.  Of course I would also buy books to read.  Suffice it to say my library grew.

         I’ve shed books many times over the years, but the library, like some unkillable monster, grew back every time.  Well, I’ve just moved again, for the third time in two years, and this time, something had to give.  Rest assured, I am not bookless.  I kept a few more than a hundred.  But I got rid of my paperback Wuthering Heights collection and the Patricia Highsmith novels I had read before (with the exception of my two favorites, This Sweet Sickness and A Suspension of Mercy).  Things I never would have let go of in the past.  So something changed.  I had an epiphany.  

Magical Thinking

          I said, when writing about my old journals, that I find myself envying my former propensity for magical thinking.  It sounds, I know, silly.  How could I envy something that is so easy to attain?  Well, luckily, I’ve changed since I was a teenager.  I was definitely more anxious, more uncertain, less sure of myself . . . all the typical ways a 17 year old’s life differs from someone twice her age.  And isn’t Magical Thinking the recourse of the sad and disenfranchised?  I’ve heard that it's at its height in times of depression, war and hardship.  It’s the times when one feels the least amount of control in one’s life that deals are made with God and beasts sacrificed. 

So sweet as my symbolism-centered teenaged life may seem now, the spurs behind it were unhappiness and lack of control.  I was in a difficult circumstance as a 17-18 year old, living with a very drunken grandmother and her dying husband, still recovering from the death of my father some six years before.  I clung to any meaning I could find or invent.  Is Magical Thinking wrong, a crutch, a weakness?  I don’t know.  Millions (billions?) of people have religion, is it wrong if I do?

Style Cycles 2

         One of the strongest manifestations of the Perversity of Fashion is seen in teenagers, and I don’t just mean their susceptibility to trends.  My generation of teen (coming of age in the 1990s) wore baggy or boot cut jeans; one look at the current crop of kids and you see skinny ankles everywhere.  It was barely conscious, but my group of teens was reacting to/rejecting the tapered ankles of the 1980s, and the new teens are positioning themselves against the pants of my day.  This is part of the fashion cycle in general, but seems more intense, direct and necessary in adolescents. 

         In the June 2010 issue of The Atlantic there’s an article by Caitlin Flanagan about the modern “hook up” culture teens are experiencing (“Love Actually”).  This article chiefly discusses the cycles and changes of youthful sexual experience, but it refers to the adolescent fashion reactions as an example of teen cultural transition, and I thought Flanagan expressed it with remarkable precision and insight.

         She writes: The answer lies – as does the answer to so much teenage behavior – in the mores and values of the generation (no, of the decade) immediately preceding their own.  This tiny unit of time is always at the heart of what adolescents do, because as much as each group imagines itself to be carving new territory out of nothing more than its own inspired creativity, the youngsters don’t have enough experience to make anything new – or even to recognize what might be clichéd.  All they know is the world they began to take notice of when they turned 12 or 13 ; all they can imagine doing to put their mark on that world is to either advance or retreat along the lines that were already drawn for them.

         Wow.  Caitlin Flanagan got it spot on and said it so well.  

Style Cycles

         it’s been interesting so far to observe the turning of the gears as the cycles of fashion and culture roll along in my lifetime. 

I believe in what I call The Perversity of Fashion.  Another term for it is The Cycles of Style.  These cycles are always moving away from what was in place before them, so it’s a constant emergence of what’s currently unfashionable transitioning into the vanguard of the cool: thus the perversity, as something bad is always being chosen as the new good.  It’s not as easy as it sounds, though.  Everything currently ugly and out will not be rising to the world of chic; this perversity of coolness requires an editing process, something some individuals seem to have intrinsically and others will never develop.  And fashion, if predictable in its perversity, spreads beyond it to something indefinable: the zeitgeist, the bubble, the collective unconscious.  This is even more difficult to chart. 

         I’m using fashion as an illustration (it’s visual and obviously trendy), but the wheel turns for everything, certainly for any sort of culture.  Words, thoughts, lifestyles, memes.  Pop culture may move the fastest, but the wheel turns for all culture.

Journals Past 2

         Revisiting my journal (reading as I type it) from when I was 17 and 18 has been like discovering a window or a wormhole to myself at those ages.  I was still an adolescent: I was rather dramatic and a lot more anxious and negative than (luckily) I am now, but I was also often surprisingly mature (verbally anyway – it’s apparent that I already had a strong relationship to the written word).  Reading these missives from the past I’m occasionally struck by how wise I could be.

         I was more melodramatic, and while this may be typical of a teenaged girl, it is also one of the parts of myself back then that I’m learning from now.  Because, at 18, I saw the world as a symbolic place imbued with significance and double meanings.  I suppose life has made me more cynical, and there was a time when I eschewed “magical thinking” (though, honestly, never completely obliterated it). 

         Reviewing my life at age 18 – an intense transitional time - now, at another transitional time, I am almost envious of my ability then to see life as significant and even magical.  Granted I’m happier and more together now and the magical thinking of that time was born of desperation; any envy it causes me now is probably just twisted nostalgia.  But if nothing else, it’s so cool to actually get to see clearly and revisit these paradigms my mind shifted away from so long ago.  

Journals Past

         I kept a journal when I was younger.  I still do, more or less, but somehow the journals I wrote half my life ago carry a different significance.  This vintage text (the first book stretches from 1993-5) isn’t exactly a scribbled, scrawled mess, but some of it is, and it’s all written in different pens, some of which are fading.  Years ago now I thought it might be a good idea to retype my old journals.  It’s a different experience reading something typed than hand-written.  They feel psychologically distinct; the method of delivery can affect the reception, the reading.  So I’d been thinking of typing them up for a long time, and I finally started doing it about six months ago.  I had not read the journal, beside a rare quick glance here and there, since I initially wrote it, and revisiting these old entries has been illuminating.

         One fascinating revelation regards the strengths and weaknesses of memory.  I’ve always known (don’t we all) how malleable and untrustworthy memory can be, but it’s so interesting to actually see how this has played out it my own life.  My memory is pretty good.  But naturally there are things I recall in the journal and then there are things I don’t.  Most often I’ll remember some but not all of a situation; I’ll remember events yet be unclear on the context and continuity.  The best is when I don’t currently recall something then reading/typing the entry will bring the memory back.

        

Retail Memory

          I’ve had a plethora of different retail and service jobs in my life.  In this kind of “profession” a lot of different people pass through your workspace.  Some customers stand out in your mind - you’ve made an actual connection with them, or just through some idiosyncrasy of memory.  But then there’s the humanity that passes through your life, sometimes frequently, but whom you only vaguely recognize if at all.  Obviously you don’t have time to pay close attention to every detail, especially when you’re working. 

What I’ve always found interesting – and it may just be my own brain for all I know – is the way my memory works in this situation.  Because there have been many times – and this spans back over years of different jobs – when I won’t recognize the customer’s face at all but then my memory will be jogged when I see their bag, wallet, jewelry, or some such insignificant  marker. 

         Why does my brain recognize and remember material objects over human faces?  The human brain, looking at something unrecognizable, will often see faces and other visions of humanity. Pattern recognition.  Maybe memory is different; maybe it’s too much to ask it to store all those people.  So I recall material objects before the people they belong to, who I’ve obviously spoken to before or I wouldn’t recognize their objects.

Writing about frustration about writing (it's a palindrome!)

          One of the hard things about being a novelist is the difficulty of sharing your art with others.  Even in the best of circumstances – a willing reader who wants to read your book – it’s going to take them a little while.  Then you have the people who say they want to read it and don’t, and they feel guilty and then you feel sort of guilty . . . I’m not complaining about these potential readers.  Reading novels is a niche activity; it always has been, and it is more than ever in this super modern world we live in with all its distractions and devices.  If anyone actually wants to read my book I am grateful. 

         My gripe is based on jealousy.  Jealousy of the practitioners of every other art form.  A visual artist or a musician, it takes someone 30 seconds to look at or listen to their artistic output – okay, I get that chances are the looker or listener still won’t give a shit, but at least in that 30 seconds they got an idea of what that artist does.  As a writer you don’t even have that.  You’re lucky if your work exists as an abstract concept for most people you know. 

         This is why, a few years ago, I quit writing for probably the third time.  The frustration had built to such an extreme, I felt that writing was pointless and no one cared.  Living in L.A. exacerbated this.  Los Angeles is shallow and technology-driven and everyone’s reading screenplays, not novels.  I stopped writing altogether, tried to throw myself into visual arts.  It lasted about a year.  It was forced and false and after a while of repression I could no longer deny that I wanted to write novels.  I was like a drug addict who put my all into quitting but was unable to resist the lure of old habits. 

         Now that my first mystery novel Gossip Kills is out for readers to find if they care, the frustrations have eased a little.  At least I have something for people to read if they actually want to.

Skulls Are Evil

         There was a customer in the store I work at, with her son who was probably 7 or 8.  The son was looking at some buttons (buttons as in pins, brooches) with slightly irreverent cartoon images on them.  The kid wanted one of these ($1 each!) and the button he chose had a rather heavy-metal-looking skull on it.  The mom clearly found it distasteful or tacky.  So when the boy asked for it she said no, but her stated reason was, “skulls are evil.” The kid of course pressed her, but she held firm and kept repeating that skulls were evil.

         From my eavesdropping position behind the register I was shocked.  Skulls are evil?  I kept waiting for her to qualify this with, “Of course you have a skull, it’s under your face and over your brain and it’s an important thing you need to live; while biologically natural, skulls are sometimes used to represent death and evil things, but this is only part of the story.”  But no.  The mantra continued: “skulls are evil.”

         I found this to be lazy and pathetic parenting, and decided the woman had something of a weak mind.  Especially when she allowed the boy to buy his second-choice button, which was a cartoon image of a mushroom cloud.  A mushroom cloud.  And she didn’t blink.  I was floored by the ignorance and the irony.  I can only assume she couldn’t identify a mushroom cloud or didn’t know what it represented.  I know it’s hard raising kids and you have to pick your battles.  But really.  Skulls are evil?

        

        

                  

Nullifidian

        I came across the word “nullifidian” in George Eliot’s Middlemarch.  I don’t believe I’d ever heard it before.  It sounded charmingly Victorian and rather insulting and I had to look it up. Turns out a nullifidian is a religious skeptic, a person with no faith or belief.  Basically an archaic version of “atheist.”  A spectacular word and, in my opinion, closer to an endearment than an insult.

Horror Décor

Contrary to what one might assume, contrary to may of its fans, I do not love horror movies for the blood and gore and shocking violence (this despite the fact that I’m partial to European horror, which tends to include more of these than its American brethren).  The adrenaline rush one gets from a good horror movie can certainly be stimulating, but the grisly violence leaves me pretty cold (in a desensitized way). 

I love horror for the atmosphere, akin to fairy tales and cautionary tales.  I love it for its transparency as a cultural marker: horror serves as a magnifying mirror for society’s desires and, particularly, its anxieties.  And I love Euro Horror for the interior design.  

Equivalent Aura

         The glowing dash becomes a spangled pulsating ring.  It grows until it fills my entire scope of vision with its crazy multicolored lights, then keeps expanding outward ’til it grows so large my eye can’t contain it anymore.

My migraines are mere hallucinations.  Well, actually, they’re migraine auras.  But, at least in the last year, they have ceased to be accompanied by any pain.  Apparently this is called a migraine equivalent.

My first sign of these neurological occurrences, when I was18, was a blind spot and a halo; I can’t remember if I had a headache or not.  In the years after that I had all the classic migraine symptoms, headache and vomiting.  The thing was, this horror was always preceded by a visual aura: a big jagged firework circle with moving lights; always the warning sign, harbinger of the pain.  I discovered that if I took painkillers at the first sign of this glowing brain aberration I could stop the full migraine from coming.  This was my routine for years, and I only got 1-2 of these auras a year anyway.

Then, a little more then a year ago, having moved from Los Angeles to my peaceful home town in coastal Maine, I started to get a migraine aura a month, sometimes more.  I proceeded as normal: two Advil at the first sign of flashing lights.  After about six months of this, one evening I got an aura late at night while I was folding my laundry.  I was tired and I didn’t feel like eating food so I could take Advil (never on an empty stomach!), so I just lay down and waited for the migraine to play out, hoping I’d fall asleep before the pain came.  But I didn’t fall asleep and the pain never came.  Possibly they had simply been migraine equivalents for years, and I’d ingested all that unnecessary Advil! 

I’ve still been getting the auras.  There’s no pain, though they leave me feeling slightly weak for an hour or two.  If I’m home I just lie down and wait for the hallucination to pass.  If I’m at work or writing or reading or socializing, they are much more disorienting; but still, no pain. 

A speck of light in my eye grows into a glowing ring that expands to fill my entire vision.  I can see through the ring (and around it, depending on its size - but it is not comfortable to try and look).  All I can see are lights, moving lights, and the circle keeps getting bigger and bigger until it departs my field of vision and is gone.

peril of promotion

         When I was in Los Angeles, I sold my first mystery novel Gossip Kills (originally titled “Planned Obsolescence”!) to someone who was starting (or, as it turns out, intending to start) a small publishing house.  I was very excited at first but then, as months and then even years went by and nothing happened, I finally caught on that nothing was going to happen.  Meanwhile, the manuscript had reverted to my ownership.

         I was working on my second novel Split Screen, which I am close to finishing now (I don’t even, at this point, want to think about how long this one has taken me so far).  I got majorly sidetracked with personal upheavals plus my own insecurity about being a novelist (in L.A.), and I moved home to coastal Maine.

         I couldn’t decide what to do about Gossip Kills.  It had been over five years since I completed it.  I’m proud of it, particularly as a first novel.  But I just didn’t feel like putting the (extreme) effort into trying to find an agent and publisher.  So I decided to put it out myself, with what was once called a vanity press but is now known as subsidy publishing (or something like that).  I used AuthorHouse, and my book is available on Amazon and other places, and for digital download as well.  With no effort from me (just money).

         As I get closer to completion of Split Screen, I am thinking I’m going to put it out the same way.  I find I still don’t feel like trying to get an agent and seeing years go by before the book is available.  I found AuthorHouse wonderful and easy to deal with.  But if I put the new book out myself, I absolutely have to make some effort at promotion this time.  Should I start by trying to actually promote Gossip Kills?  This is terrifying.

Liminal

         A month or two ago I came across the word liminal, and I looked it up.  As an adjective, liminal means “situated at a sensory threshold, hence barely perceptible.” The noun, limen, is a threshold point of physiological or psychological response, the point at which a stimulus is of sufficient intensity to begin to produce an effect.  More prosaically, it can also mean the sill of a doorway or an entranceway. 

         I became slightly fascinated with this word, though, other than as the doorway threshold, I’ve been a bit stumped on how to use it in a sentence or even an idea.  Psychological threshold?  Amazing.  How about, “I feel I’m on the limen of a mental breakthrough today,” or, “The internet has made modern life so culturally liminal.”

         After musing a month on this interesting word it occurred to me to find the original context in which I came across it.  I remembered seeing the word in The Cult Film Reader, but in which of the many essays?  I thought I’d seen it in an essay about director Jesus (Jess) Franco, and my recall was right on: I quickly located it in Joan Hawkins’ essay "The anxiety of influence: Georges Franju and the medical horrorshows of Jess Franco." 

So here is the context: The demanding nature of the jazz score in The Awful Dr. Orlof helps to situate the film in the same kind of liminal space occupied by Franju’s Les Yeux Sans Visage.  Invoking both the cerebral work and reception associated with high culture and the physical affect and response associated with low sex-horror, the film seems permanently poised between high and low genres, belonging to both of them simultaneously. 

So, liminal space.  Cultural limens.  I like it, but it is, I thought, an academic word not a conversational one.  Who wants to use a word in a sentence that only snobby academics will get?

         Then something occurred to me: SUBLIMINAL.  Obviously, I thought, I know what this one means, but I decided to look it up anyway.  Subliminal means “below the threshold of consciousness.” 

         Isn’t that funny that liminal should be an obscure word, difficult to use or even make sense of, but we all know what subliminal means.  The evolution of our language is ever fascinating.

Attention Span Opera

         The internet is obviously the big assassin in the slow death of the soap opera, striking a fatal blow to attention span and focus.  Soap operas were never something most people would be proud to give their attention to, perhaps, but think how much attention it was: everyday an appointment with the show, then a measured wait until the drama returned the next day.  Does anyone have this level of commitment and focus any more?  Think how slow soap operas are, a stretched-out series of moments that you watch for a whole hour then wait the ritualistic period to watch the next chapter.  Incredible.  I know the soaps have tried to modernize as best they could but, really, I’m surprised they made it into the 80s with this demand on the attention span.  It’s been a long collapse, with their death throes as slow and measured out as the genre itself.

Elastic Perception

Time is an abstract force.  True, biologically we are undeniably moving forward, going somewhere, growing and aging and dying.  Biologically we obviously live in time’s grip.  Yet our perception of time is elastic. 

         Different people may perceive time differently.  But even for one person, time perception varies.  It’s practically a cliché, but don’t the good times fly by too fast and the bad or boring times too slowly?  This is the time perception issue that really snags me.  Any job I’ve ever had (usually, I must admit, in the service industry with a low hourly wage), I’m watching the clock like any other worker out there.  I’m thinking, “ok, two and a half hours left, I hope that passes quickly.”  I’m willing the time to rush by, begging it to.  Yeah, fine, I’m at work; don’t we all do this?  But when I’m home or off work - say I have two and a half hours before work or before I have to go to bed – I want that time to pass as slowly as possible.  Wishing the time to speed at this point would be an anathema.

         Sometimes when I’m at work wanting time to sprint by I get a superstitious feeling like this is wrong: if I wish time to quicken when I’m at work, might that make it go more quickly when I’m not at work?  This might be silly or, given the interpretive, changeable nature of time, maybe it’s a reasonable concern.  So how do I reconcile this?  TIME is so sacred, mysterious and precious.  It seems wrong to want it to move faster.  But it’s pretty hard to envision being at work and hoping time would move more slowly.  How to reconcile this difference in desired time perception?

I Heart Reading

It would not be an exaggeration to say that books are my favorite thing in the world (defining “thing” as something nonliving and non-digestible of course).  This has been so since I’ve been able to read, certainly since I’ve been reading “chapter books” in first or second grade.  I don’t know why this is.  I don’t remember there being a choice; I just loved books, and I love them now. 

I’m an only child who never had a speck of interest (or skill) in athletics.  I was always imaginative and I guess it was easy and fun for me to imagine what I was reading about.  My father died suddenly when I was twelve, and in my grief and confusion, books were my escape (this word sounds cheesy to me too).  I didn’t stop paying attention to life, but I did stop paying attention to school.  My avid reading had already reached new heights (in sixth grade I fell in love with Agatha Christie books which, at that age, I found to be very sophisticated and adult).  But the combination of grief and junior high school was enough to amplify the reading even more.  Escapism, diversion, suspense . . . As I got older I read more difficult, intellectual things.  I guess it was an experimental teenage phase.  Now, as a adult, I appreciate nothing more than a well-crafted page-turner.  Long past are the days when I, for instance, attempted to read Joyce’s Ulysses (I didn’t make it past page 200).

I once read something Stephen King said- I believe in was in Danse Macabre and, as I read this over a decade ago, I may be poorly paraphrasing, but I don’t think I’m making it up.  He said that reading and writing is the closest thing he knows of to ESP.  One person thinks something, envisions something, and they put it in writing – these abstract symbols most of us can decipher – then someone else reads it and they transfer the symbols into visions, thoughts and images, in their head.  This obviously stayed with me, and I’ve thought about it over the years.  For me it crystallizes how magical books and writing can be.  The fascinating thing – this is true more of fiction perhaps than non-fiction – is that no two people reading a book will envision it (the world, the characters) alike (as far as we know).  We can never see what others pictured, even if we’ve read the same books.

It really is amazing: a writer fills pages with letters and words then a reader translates these abstract symbols in their brain into images, thoughts, worlds they may never forget.  And the writer has no control over the world the reader made and no two readers make the same world . . . to me it is MAGIC.