Today’s sermon at the local UU church ended that way. It was an interesting message about active waiting, and the phrase was based on a piece from Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in which the narrator “stalks” a muskrat, i.e. spends a lot of time waiting on the creek bank for a muskrat to show up. The theme was that sometimes, we have to wait. And we can spend our lives passively waiting for the next big thing, or we can realize that waiting is an integral part of the human experience – as every funeral reminds us, life is one big wait for death – and spend the waiting in something productive, learning from the wait.
Right now, as I’m on The Great Agent Hunt, there is a part of my brain that’s always waiting… for an email, for a phone call, for some message, yes or no, that means I can put that transaction in a category and move forward or move on. But other than making sure I always have a query (or two. Or five) out there, there’s nothing I can do to hustle things. I just have to wait.
When I started this process, the best advice any writer gave me was to write something else. And so I’m working on my third novel, and after endless critiquing and reviewing of the first two, it has been a wonderful miracle to get back to the first stages of creation again. Those days when characters and plot are still being carved from the silence, and themes and motifs are appearing, frequently unbidden, in the words. So I’ve found my way of stalking a writing career, as maybe the minister would say.
So many faiths right now have a waiting – an advent – for the birth, for the light to go out, for the light to return, for the year to end and new resolutions to begin… this built in annual reminder that sometimes as humans we have to wait and hope, and yet continue to find meaning inside of that space. Blessed Advent to you, however you choose to celebrate it (or not to celebrate it). May you find peace, hope, and a reason for goodwill.
Saw New Moon this weekend. Yes, I know. I’m 32, I shouldn’t be seeing a Twilight movie on opening weekend. I have seriously decided that magic must be real because as many complaints as I have about those books, I can’t put them down. I know Stephenie Meyers is Mormon, but somebody cast a spell on that manuscript. It’s like a crack pipe made of story.
So for good or ill, when my mother agreed to go with me, I snapped up that offer right away, and we were installed in the theater Friday (yes… don’t start with me…) for a pre-school-release feature (no screaming 13-year-olds this time, as I was subjected to on viewing Twilight; it was easier to hear, but less atmospheric). I think I like this one better than the book, although if I hadn’t read the book, I’m not sure I’d like the movie. If that makes any sense. As I mentioned in my original review of Twilight (the novel), I really don’t like the way genders are portrayed in the book. Bella is too dependent, too willing to let men tell her what to do, and too readily falls into gender roles and stereotypes. The movie, which lacks Bella’s narration proving she needs a swift kick into the post-feminist revolution era (although they did a clever bit with emails to Alice to give a little of it without having an actual narrator), she comes across as too angsty and man-dependent, but a lot of the stuff that really made me want to throw things wasn’t there.
Other thoughts…
Big balls on the ending; I really like what they did.
Nobody under the age of 18 should be allowed to go shirtless that often in a movie.
Makeup department, read my plea. Pick. A. Skin. Color. Preferably not FRTE (see title).
Especially not for Carlisle. Peter Facinelli is a cutie-pie, and I’m allowed to think that. Unlike with other actors in this movie, whose chest I never even glanced at once, despite its prominent placement throughout. In fact, can we come up with some way to get Carlisle’s shirt off in Eclipse or Breaking Dawn? Please?
I liked Jasper much better in this one; gotta admit, I was totally wtf’d by everything about him in the first movie, from the makeup to the script to the acting. It was… bizarre. But this time? Pretty cool.
Other parts of the movie made me feel like a dirty-old-hag who needs therapy because, officer, that beautiful, beautiful creature… that I never once looked at… really, I swear… didn’t look underage. Not after the haircut anyway.
Special effects were much better, and there was a cool sequence at the end that combined several plotlines into one music-backed menagerie. Pretty cool.
Pattinson needs somebody new in charge of Edward’s look. He is a good looking guy in a unique way, (which is one of the things I liked about him being cast as Edward, that handsome but not commonly so), but he looked like a heroin junkie in the Volturi sequences. I know the character’s not been eating and he’s miserable, but c’mon guys, this is a ROMANCE. The guys are supposed to be even better looking when they’re brooding… not bruised, emaciated, pallid and drugged.
Which brings me to the same question that I had reading the books. Why does she choose Edward when Jacob is friendly, affirming, brave, supportive, and cute? No, wait, I get it now! ‘Cause Edward’s legal.
*sigh*…. when do Eclipse and Breaking Dawn come out? I need this series done and out of my system.
This was really interesting to me, because I had a sort of epiphany. We always talk about “killing our darlings” as in getting rid of scenes that don’t work or whatever, as if we have this feeling like each word from our brains is gold… but that’s not really true. Most writers I know don’t think that their words are all golden. Most writers I know seem to think most of their words are crap (even when they’re not), so why the trouble cutting?
Reminds me of my high schoolers, and sometimes with their writing it would be three pages long, but it would take two pages to get to a point, and I’d be like, “You need to cut the first two pages; they’re brainstorming. They have no meaning,” and I’d get these horrified looks like, “But I did that work! I should get credit for it! How will people know how much work I did if I only show them 1/3 of it??” I think a lot of our reluctance to let go is not that we’re so in love with everything we put down, but that we want ‘E’s for effort; a “what I lack in quality I make up for in quantity” sort of thing. And a lot of the world growing up seems to work that way – from the simple: show your work in math – to the more morally complicated: we don’t ask where the money comes from, we just know that more is better.
But that isn’t the case anymore. As artists, we need to so enjoy what we do that we create without the need for credit. Then every scene we excise, every doodle that ends up in the recycle bin, every camera shot that gets erased was a fun day that we had with our craft, and that is sufficient to satisfy. A little sacrifice to the muses, if you prefer to think of it that way. I realize that that must be damn hard when you’re on a deadline, but I think the principle is sound.
My second creative love after writing, the art of theater, is very frustrating and fascinating at the same time because by it’s very nature, the act of communicating your art is the act of deleting it. Once a performance is done, it will never again happen just that way. Once a show closes, that piece art is gone from the world, and no recording can ever bring it back with it’s true creative magic. (Food and wine are another one of these art forms, though I think mentally easier to deal with the “consumption” thereof). I think those of us that concretize our work in its creation (by committing it to paper or clay or whatever your medium) have a harder time letting go because we don’t have to. But an actor would scoff at the idea of holding onto a rehearsal. How do you do that? And if you did, what would be the point? All the effort of actors, directors, scene designers, etc. produce a product that is an insane reduction of all the work that went into it. Two hours in the viewing from months of labor by tens to hundreds of people… and then the product is lost to oblivion. But theater artists revel in that ephemeral nature. That “if you weren’t there, you can’t have it.” And I think all of us can learn from that attitude.
Most of the shots Michael Jordan made in his lifetime were not during a game. But each one he made alone, outside of an audience, helped him be the man we loved to watch on the court. And so shall I learn from his example.
(And I somehow managed to get writing, teaching, theater, basketball, and Star Wars all into one post!!! Hmm… what is missing…. VAMPIRES, VAMPIRES, VAMPIRES!!!… OK, now I think I have all the topics my life revolves around. )
Normally I’m not a science person; it was totally my dreaded subject in high school (even more-so than math, if that’s possible). But on Sunday I was checking out the local Unitarian Universalist Church (they got a cool philosophy) and found out that they do a lecture every week with a different speaker on totally random topics. This Sunday an astronomy professor gave a talk on stars. I went in with Walt Whitman running through my head (“When I heard the learn’d astronomer; When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me… How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick…”). I love the stars, but talks on them seem to devolve into math with alarming regularity, and then I just get lost.
He was fascinating. I learned that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, that our sun (at 5 billion) is about half-way through it’s lifespan, that stars (which usually fuse hydrogen into helium to produce their heat), after their first death can have new life by fusing helium into other elements, and those elements into other elements… until stars make iron. Then they die for real. I learned that dark matter – which potentially 75% of the universe is composed of, and we don’t even know what it is – is pushing the universe further and further apart, so we likely won’t collapse back into another big bang like I’d been taught once upon a time. This sort of changes some of my meaning-of-life philosophy, but that’s OK; I’m flexible on our reason for existence.
But most importantly of all, I learned that the universe didn’t have any carbon when it started. Carbon was created by stars and their fusion power, and spewed out into the universe when some of them went supernova (at least I think it was during supernovas; I know that stars made and spewed carbon). Life, at least as we know it, is made from carbon. You are made from carbon. So am I. So is your cat. And your houseplant. So if you think about it, we don’t need to wait to become stars, as promised in “I Sing the Body Electric”. We already are.
Baby Avery was frowning at me when I came over, and I told her that she was made of stars – science had proved it. She smiled an enormous smile and laughed. I think she already knew that, but it was a good reminder.
Particle physics has a long history of zany theories that turned out to be true. Niels Bohr, the doyen of modern physicists, often told a story about a horseshoe he kept over his country home in Tisvilde, Denmark. When asked whether he really thought it would bring good luck, he replied, “Of course not, but I’m told it works even if you don’t believe in it.”
"Maybe I just have a limited attention span, but life is keeping me pretty busy. I’m going to be dead a lot longer than I’m alive. Plenty of time to figure out the afterlife then."
Urban Fantasy is…
“In urban fantasy you don’t leave the chip shop and go to another world to find the unicorn. Rather, the unicorn shows up at the chip shop and orders the cod.”
–Elizabeth Bear
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