fallen verses

Is art for?

2008-11-17T20:43:33Z

Maybe I’m the only one who isn’t familiar with Lewis Hyde, maybe not. I don’t recall having ever heard of him or his book The Gift. If that NYTimes piece is indicative of his views, I probably should look into it.

Intellectual property is a murky idea. How do you really “own” and idea? How can you hold it in your hand? Or lock it away in a safe? Really, the only way you can own an idea is to never express it. That only prevents people from hearing your idea, not from coming up with it on their own. And, I suppose in fairness, generally ideas are not what is copyrighted, but the expression thereof.

Now, increasingly in this wikied and hyperlinked world, it is so clear the debts we owe to other authors, other artists, both contemporary and historical. To think that we, without respect of the contributions of others to our thoughts, ideas, and expressions, should own them seems, I don’t know if arrogant is the right word, but something along those lines.

Perhaps it’s a warranted desire, though. Perhaps.

I mean, we all understand the reasons for property rights (I hope). And they remain valid for, say, sculptors or painters. What real difference is there between those and poetry or songwriting other than medium? There isn’t. Ultimately it comes down to being non-tangible. There is, fundamentally, an unlimited ability to split it among “consumers;” unlike some of my other favorite things (viz. chocolate. that there is a limited supply of chocolate is a tragedy).

How do you reconcile these two ideas: infinite supply (or, at least, supply limited only by difficulty in sharing which increasingly approaches zero) and wanting to control and live doing creative work?

I’m not sure where that balance point is. On the one hand is the hobbyist artist (as I think many of us are) and the other is the professional artist. I don’t know if both can be the beneficiary of a intellectual property theory. As Lessig claims, restrictive copyright laws prevent creative arts that involve using other works, or reduces them all to using old works. That really hits contemporary creative conversations. On the other end, paid work gets more difficult to accomplish in the face of it being unprotected.

It’s tough when both sides have effective arguments and are largely irreconcilable.

Poets need to learn from the christians

2008-11-15T16:56:30Z

Complain loudly enough, and the mountain will move for you (via Poetry Hut Blog).

Or, if not mountains, you can squelch free speech and artistic expression that does not match with your iron-age belief system. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems the “moderate christians” should be with the people standing up against this. If that group wants to play in the modern world, they need to invigorate the Jesus 3.0. The 1.0 guy has been dead for a long time, the 2.0 guy is a bigot and needs to shut up. Jesus 3.0 is the opportunity to look for the positive things faith can add to the world (if you believe there are any), rather than the fear and intolerance bandied about by the vocally religious.

Just when you think the world maybe has a chance, you keep seeing stuff like this. Makes me sad.

Vote for RWP

2008-11-14T17:00:46Z

Mashable Open Web Awards

Er, yeah, once per site per email address. I know I’ve got a few email addresses. Get to Work!

Serious Play

2008-11-08T00:47:04Z

This is me not working on my NaNoWriMo project. Video from here about this. Usual caveat that if you see a gray bar, click it.

It didn’t take too much of that talk for me to understand it and realize I’ve been doing it wrong in a lot of my creative endeavors recently. In writing, or in my oft-neglected visual media, I get very goal-focused. I spend too much time thinking about the end product and I miss out on a lot of the things that makes creativity and art so wonderful which is the surprise that comes of it.

I haven’t been participating in many of the read write prompts for a while, but Nathan’s prompt and Dana’s Read Write Word were excellent prompts for me and, I think, are some of the better pieces I’ve written recently. Why? Why were those good but the image prompts escaping me? Why is Read Write Word 2 not as inspiring?

I think it has to do with being in that second form of play: building. The original prompts had so much to start with it was very neat to me to start pulling them apart and putting them back together. The first Wordle had thirty words, which I used only a portion of. The other prompts become more like the first type of play, the exploration. With so few options at our disposal, it becomes more about how many things can be done with a paper clip. And that is a situation where having knowledge gets in the way. If you don’t know what a paper-clip is, there’s no preconception, there’s nothing telling you can’t be… um… something else. Once you know, just by looking at it you wouldn’t see it as an element of wire sculpture, but once you’re holding them and molding them and twisting them together, you can build the new ideas that you would never have thought of.

Which is not to say that any type of creativity is better than any other. Seems to me they all fit different style and suit different purposes. But as a creative individual (or someone pretentious enough to cal myself one) all of these things are aspects. Some aspects may be strengths and things I should develop. Some things are weaknesses and should be avoided or worked on.

This NaNoWriMo experience is teaching me many things. I do not work as well from a blank page as I do from a full one, even if the full one is full of random nonsense things. When I was younger I used to draw (poorly). Then, I was more of a LEGO kid. It suited me better having chaos as a starting point than openness, I guess. Anyway, what are your thoughts on playing as artists and wordsmiths? How do we take those styles of play and put them into our writing practices?

“It’s called fiction

2008-11-02T04:18:49Z

That means it’s made up. It’s not real. Sure some of it is based on my life and people I’ve met; have to get ideas somewhere and all that.”

It’s difficult to get people to believe that when you inadvertently start typing a real name where the character name is supposed to be. I’ll have to remember to do a global search before anyone sees this thing called a novel(-to-be).

Pictures, not words, of NaNoWriMo

2008-11-01T22:42:40Z

The urge to procrastinate is really strong, and it isn’t being outweighed by the perception of brilliant prose, so… Anyway, pictures! Well, icons. from here.

What to write about

2008-11-01T04:58:46Z

(This post has nothing really to do with anything. If I had the least sense of decorum or shame, it would be password protected. For fans of schadenfreude, you can be glad that I have neither of those things. I anticipate this coming back to punch me in the future)

NaNoWriMo starts in a little over an hour. I have only the vaguest idea what I’m going to write about. This doesn’t worry me as much as it should. Rambling for a hundred, hundred-fifty pages should be no big deal. Right…

However, that is only tangentially related to this post.

Several fine bloggers rate confession as an integral part of their creative process. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I’ve never really tried “confession.” However, I don’t want to spend NaNoWriMo writing about me, and that’s what I mostly think about (narcissism? obsession? dunno).

Maybe confession can be cathartic. I hope so. I hope that writing about what I’m thinking about can be the end of all of it. A grand letting it go.

I was on the younger side when my parents separated, reconciled, separated, reconciled, separated and divorced. Honestly, this has never bothered me. But that was a factor in how I felt about marriage. For a very long time I thought it was a waste. It was a religious ceremony I don’t believe in. It’s just tradition; it’ a social construct I had no respect for, blah blah etc.

Even when I met Andrea, my view on marriage didn’t change. Dating Andrea was wonderful. Living with her was… complicated. Sometimes, it was better than I imagined life could be. Sometimes it was frustrating. It was sharing a life with someone: messy.

She was, is, the first person I’ve loved more than just superficially. I think the concept of ai is the closest way to describe something that is rather difficult to pin down and is, to some extent, inexpressible. One day I was rather startled to find that I wanted to marry her. It made sense from the legal standpoint. Socially it was the only way to give greater recognition to our relationship. But more than that, I wanted her to be more than my girlfriend. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her and for that to be the end of the discussion. So we got married.

It didn’t last long after that. We had been together for six years, living together for most of it, and less than a year after taking vows that included the word forever, she left.

I wish that I could paint a better picture, but the failures of communication that I believe were a large part of of relationship ending did not go away with her leaving and I never got much of an explanation. This was not so pleasant an event from my perspective. Here was a person that was the reason I overturned so many views on life, the reason for so many choices I made (things that could be called sacrifices if I had not simply been choosing the more important outcome), as clichéd and pathetic as it is, she was the light of my world. With Andrea gone, it felt like nothing could ever be right.

I’ve suffered from had insomnia for as long as I can remember. Strangely, sleeping in a bed where I was able to keep the sheets all night and not be scrunched up the edge made sleeping worse and even more tenuous. (And I still can’t sleep) There was one day I didn’t want to survive to the end of it. I realized that was silly. Later I came to realize that hope is a cruel bitch.

I know, I know, that there isn’t anything I could have done. Not by the time there was a problem. Our ways of relating were just different enough to make it need work from both sides and, really, neither one of us knew it. Until she did, I guess, at the end. I can’t even fault her decision. Ethically, the greatest responsibility I believe we have in terms of happiness is for ourselves. I want her to be happy and have the life she wants. I just think it really sucks that it excluded me.

The movie Swingers has a short scene

How did you get over it?
Every day you wake up and it hurts a little bit less. And then one day, you wake up and it doesn’ t hurt anymore. And then you realize you miss the pain.
You miss the pain?
Yeah. For the same reason you miss her—because you lived with it for so long.

Except I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t feel it’s true. I don’t think it’s true. It would be nice…. I think the past haunts us like something unburied. We can, however, use the good things in our lives as a covering, as dirt, grasses, flowers, maybe even castles, to cover them up. The pain is always there, but we can put it in a controlled and forgettable spot unless we need it. Sad trick to that is it requires sufficient “good” to obscure the bad.

So now I find myself in my late twenties, the jeering, mocking specter of happiness haunting every memory. I’ve always had a small social group and that has scattered over the years. Socially, politically, artistically, etc. I do not at all fit in with the area I live in, but I have something of a life here. Not a great one, but enough that giving it up is a fairly high cost that would require a high benefit to outweigh.

Balanced against that is my complete lack of understanding about what I should do. I have a job that could be a career if I wanted it to be (though I do not). My interests are so varied and so variable that no goal worth pursuing remains a goal for long. I try so hard to live a rational life and I cannot find the answers in all of this. We all have our own blind spots.

Every job interview I’ve had has asked that ridiculous question: where do you see yourself in five years. I’ve always made something up. What it so clear, is that every answer I’ve ever given, has been completely wrong. Let me pretend for a moment, that I am being asked that question.

In five years, I see myself where I am now, but mid-30s. Just older. And I hope—this time, I’m wrong too.

(And NaNoWriMo starts in but a few moments. I just need this blog post to hold these thoughts, these obsessions, these feelings, for thirty days. Forever would be okay, but I only need thirty days…)

Creativity and Flow

2008-10-27T01:47:59Z

from TED

This video is about this guy with the unpronounceable last name’s research into the mental states of creativity, etc., which he calls “flow.” An interesting look at the psychology of creativity in relation to the “normal” world.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives. A leading researcher in positive psychology, he has devoted his life to studying what makes people truly happy: “When we are involved in [creativity], we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life.” He is the architect of the notion of “flow” — the creative moment when a person is completely involved in an activity for its own sake.

Er, if you don’t see a video, click one of the gray bars and it should load the player.

ineffability

2008-10-27T00:49:46Z

I’ve been writing at fallen verses for a while now. I don’t plan to stop so you can stop worrying / start worrying depending on your perspective.

However, there are some things I don’t blog about, because I kinda figure they’re separate from what fallen verses is about. Decided I wanted to. If anyone cares, that’ll be ineffably tom (ineffably.net).

RWP#49: Hobbyhorse, hobbyhorse (A Paradelle)

2008-10-23T19:34:32Z

Hobbyhorse, Hobbyhorse (A Paradelle)

Every letter in the preaching scribed-
Every letter in the preaching scribed-
Truths formerly barred, allowed by this recharter.
Truths formerly barred, allowed by this recharter.
The scribed truths in this letter barred,
Every recharter formerly allowed by preaching.

Imperfect results sent turbo up the chain,
Imperfect results sent turbo up the chain,
Flooding the inbox of the falsifier of records.
Flooding the inbox of the falsifier of records.
Turbo flooding sent up the inbox. The records imperfect.
Chain of results. Of the falsifier.

What is called a guide is astraddle a hobbyhorse.
What is called a guide is astraddle a hobbyhorse.
Replying to dismay, he had sportingly offered a refund.
Replying to dismay, he had sportingly offered a refund.
A called guide is replying sportingly to what refund?
Astraddle dismay, he is offered a had hobbyhorse

The recharter is astraddle a barred dismay.
The hobbyhorse guide is called, allowed by
Imperfect truths formerly in the inbox of preaching.
This letter turbo-scribed is a what? Results falsifier.
Every chain had records replying to flooding
Sportingly sent, the refund he offered up of the A.

The Read Write Prompt for this week was to use echolalia as the “hinge” of the poem. The wikipedia description of immediate echolalia seemed suggestive of certain poetic uses of repetition and it occurred to me the paradelle, as a form, seemed kind of echolalaic (anyone?). And, because I like to surprise myself when I write, I headed to WatchOut4Snakes and used their random word generator to get some “seed” words. Anyway, other people’s variously echolalaic or ekphrastic poems will be shared here.

Briefly, regarding the paradelle, they are tough. Not so much to write (unlike, say, a sonnet), but to write well.