NaFloScribMo hits the road and the Outlet Malls

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I’m leaving in the morning for a Road Trip With The Girls to Branson for a couple of days of shopping frenzy. And while I realize there are all manner of feisty country music venues in Branson, I think it’s safe to say we’ll not be attending any of them. This trip has a purpose and that purpose is shopping. We’re focused.
Those Tax Stimulus/Rebate checks are burning holes in our handbags.
Picture this: Five or six writing professors in a minivan driving the tornado-decimated back roads of Arkansas en route to the half-price shopping mecca of Branson, Missouri. Look out, roadside yard sales. Clear the doorways, country flea markets. The shopping starts the minute we turn on Hwy 65 and won’t stop until we’re all dead broke. Or Wednesday, because this is only a two-day jaunt. There won’t be a single man in the car, so we can stop every ten minutes if we feel like it.
Outlet malls as far as the eye can see – that’s Branson. Forget the tacky ‘Las Vegas-South’ shows, we don’t have time for choreographed entertainment. We’ve got to spend Dubya’s parting gift.
I plan to come back with photos and fresh Overheard Conversations, so look out.

Fresh ribbon as quest, and some interesting finds

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This came to me – as many interesting things do – as an email attachment from a friend. I have no idea who to credit for this little ditty, but I’d cetainly like to. All I could find were dead links. I’d love to see cartoons #1 and #2.

Update: mpclemens whipped up a little search or two and was much more successful in finding the cartoonist, Tom Gauld. You can see the first two panels here and here. Marvelous work.

As I was bouncing around the internet the other day, I happened upon A Place to Stand – a Kelly Writers Junior Fellows (University of Pennsylvania) project that finished up last year in Philadelphia. Graduate John Carrol’s project involved reproducing one short piece of important literature on his typewriter every day, then mailing it out to a random recipient. Out of the Philadelphia phone book. Every day. The link gives a list of works he slammed out on the old typewriter, and challenges anyone reading the page to do the same: Type up a poem. Choose someone out of the phonebook. Mail it to them.

I can’t tell you how much I love that. The web page doesn’t discuss what typewriter(s) our boy John used, but I’ve emailed him and perhaps we’ll soon know. The announcement notes several of John’s inspirations for this project, most notably “Typewriter Man” by Ian Frazier. If you ignore every other link on this post – fine, but read Frazier’s article.

I think she’s headed for Chesaleen’s

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(A snippet of first-draft fiction for NaFloScribMo)

When I was twelve everything became too small and familiar. My mama’s house, my classroom at school, my little circle of friends I’d known everyday of my life, even my blue jeans suddenly became snug in places snug never landed before. And then I got The Visit.

I was completely unprepared for The Visit. I mean, there’d been talk at school and I’d heard mama whisper things about it, but it was a hazy something that never seemed important enough to ask about until I was Visited.

I was dying, knew that for certain. The pull at my belly was too painful for it to be just another sour stomach from too many radishes for lunch. I saw the blood when I went to the bathroom, so I knew I had a cancer or TB or something I’d never recover from, but I kept quiet because it was clear to me I’d have to die a private death. I was never going to let anyone look at my gunny to find the problem. So I sat there at dinner with mama and daddy and my two stupid brothers with a wad of tissue shoved between my legs.

Mama said grace. I couldn’t even consider thanking God for food when there I sat dying on a wad of toilet paper right there in front of my family, so I prayed extra hard instead so I could be strong for my dying moments and not be angry at God for the timing. Teetering on the razor edge of death is no time to start up something with God you can’t take back.

“Sister, I said ‘Pass them greens.’” I’d been praying so hard that when I looked up the whole mess of my family was staring at me like I’d just spilled kool-aid on the rug. I opened my mouth to tell them but all that came out was a wail I didn’t know I owned that lasted from the table clean into my bedroom behind a slammed door.

When mama came in she was mad as hell, hands on hips like one of them Amazon women. I could hear daddy’s boots shifting one foot to the other just outside the door, but I knew he’d stay out there and not come in to see my shame and dying because he couldn’t bear a crying woman.

“Explain yourself.” Mama’s plaid housedress towered over me on the bed and I was afraid, but not nearly as afraid of her as I was this dying.

“I’ve got the cancer, mama,” I wept through a whisper, “Don’t ask me to tell you where because I won’t.”

So mama just stood there and I just cried into my bed quilt for the longest time. I wanted hugging, but I wasn’t sure if I could give someone else the cancer and I just couldn’t be responsible for spreading dread disease. When Scrap Wilson got the fever, the health department man came out and put a quarantine sign over the door and everyone whispered hot and fierce about how wrong it was to subject a whole family to one man’s dying germs. I’d have to move out, I guessed, live in a tent all alone by the pond and wait it out until they found my body.

“You ain’t dying, Sister.”

Mama was unmoved and all I could hear was the muffling shuffle of daddy’s boots making their way back the kitchen. Ill as I was, there was only one thing to do.

Summoning the last of my living strength, I leapt past mama, slung open the door, stopped off quick in the bathroom to resupply, then ran through the kitchen and out the back door into the mosquito dusk. It was a long way to the road, but I ran it all with a half-roll of flowered toilet paper in my fist, and it wasn’t until I hit the gate that I looked back. No one was coming after me.

(This is another crooked piece of the Chesaleen stories. It’s NaFloScribMo rough, but there it is. I resisted the urge to write two pages on mama standing there hovering over the bed, which was the image I started with. We’ll see what happens when our new little woman makes it over to Chesaleen’s house and find out the real scoop.)

Slight Savagery

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I just spent a few minutes howling at Candace’s latest blog post, and noticed she had this quote posted:

Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking. -Jessamyn West

Well, that’s an understatement. I know there are those who subscribe to the “grab fifteen minutes wherever you are” writing philosophy, and I’m sure it works for several of them. Kind of like knitting in the waiting room at the doctor’s office – sooner or later you have a whole sweater. It’s not working for me, though. That fifteen minutes only whets my appetite for a throw-down, pot-of-coffee, tweaking-the-infinite kind of writing session. It’s the whole reason I write at all. The joy is in total ink immersion.

There’s also the undiagnosed ADD thing I’ve got going on. Every little shiny thing distracts me, so it’s a much better plan for me to schedule uninterrupted alone time if I’m ever going to finish something longer than a poem. Hmmmm. That may be the reason I’ve always written poetry.

The thing is, I don’t really want to become the savage, slight or otherwise, I’d have to be to family, friends, students – anyone – just to get the writing done. There’s entirely too much Southern, 1960s upbringing in the way and I’ll never make enough money to have that therapeutically extricated from my DNA. I’m not sure it’s possible, anyway. I was bred to be cheerfully interrupted.

Years of single-parenthood didn’t help. When you’re the only grown-up in the house, there’s no such thing as Time Alone unless you lose a lot of sleep. I did, in fact, almost never sleep. For years. I wrote a great deal, but always with one ear listening for midnight bad dreams. that’s as close as it gets for many women and it only gets worse when you’re watching the clock on prom night.

Why, even Jessamyn West only began writing when she was recovering from tuberculosis. I’m not ready to contract an extended and dread disease to get that writing time I crave. And she was from Indiana. I’m not sure how that figures in, really, but I imagine it has something to do with a Northern ability to set personal boundaries. I may be making that part up.

Even as I write this I can hear The Perfect Grandson squealing and slamming toys and such in the next room. This wreaks havoc on that “sustain and complete” business. Not because he’s an annoying distraction, though – it’s because I want to be in there, delighting in his every moment. In a minute or two the phone will ring or the dryer will buzz and I’ll wander away. Happens every time.

Kenetic Art as Poetry

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This is an example of kinetic art. I found this about an hour ago and have watched it no fewer than nine times. It’s wonderful to have video, but this art piece begs for a live audience. I’m struck by the machinery and the magic of levitation and the wordlessness. It’s technology as patient god.

I believe this is the best wordless poem I’ve ever experienced. Watch it. Tell me what you think.

NaFloScribMo and the Incredible, Levitating Draft

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Here’s the problem. I’m writing diligently on Chesaleen and getting into the wicked flow of the moment, angels dancing on heads of pins and the typewriter muse singing to me in Olivetti and such, and I suddenly realize there’s no story. None. The whole thing is going nowhere and seems to be mysteriously levitating, waiting for something to actually happen.

It’s possible to write seven pages of a story and find out it isn’t a story at all. It’s a prose poem or an articulated photograph or something. People talk and there’s insight and self-delusion enough to go around, but the action of getting from Point A to Point B just never materializes.

It’s entirely possible I’m writing outside my genre – not that I chose one in the first place. It chose me when I was a little girl. It’s frustrating to be labeled and even more so when it’s self-labeling, but it appears that at least for tonight, I’m a poet. Or a memoirist. Or a blogger. Dammit. Tonight I wanted to be a novelist.

So I have seven pages of Chesaleen sitting in the dark and listening to trains. I could cheat and call it backstory, but that’s just semantics. I’m going to put these pages away for National Rewrite Month and maybe they’ll look different then, but I doubt it. I like it too much to wad it up, although if I had a fire going I might consider throwing all seven pages into the flames, just for effect.

Maybe I’ll just have Chesaleen set something on fire.

Fresh Ribbon…ruins a good manicure

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Before I begin complaining about changing the ribbon on my Lettera 32, let me share a little gorgeousness from uppercaseyyc’s incredible collection on Flickr. These old typewriter ribbon tins are individual masterpieces, but collectively they’re an absolute bouquet of vintage collectibles. Do take a look at her individual photographs of each tin – I dare you not to start a collection.

I’m going to have to look locally, though, because some of these badboys are going for upwards of twenty dollars apiece on Ebay. I can fill my house with with all manner of flea market/yard sale typewriters for that kind of cash. I’m not cheap, I’m just thrifty.

Now for the complaining. I just spent entirely too much time replacing a ribbon in an achingly sexy Olivetti Lettera 32 and it’s not an experience I want to repeat for a while. I assume it would be easier to replace a ribbon if I had, say, an operator’s manual with a step-by-inky-step guide, but I’m not sure. There are all manner of ribbon guides and things that screw on and off (right-y tight-y, left-y loose-y) as well as these THINGS that poke UP and are clearly meant to somehow KEEP the ribbon from TOUCHING THE PAPER.

Well, I eventually figured it out but not before completely ruining my manicure. I’ve changed ribbon in all my typewriters and have never had such a snafu. It was like something out of I Love Lucy. The thing is done now, and I’m feeling a little pleased with myself for figuring it out sans written directions. Not that it would have helped.

I’m buying a box of surgical gloves for next time. This re-manicure is going to cost me at least one Empress typewriter tin. Maybe two.