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〰️ 01 〰️ in 〰️ out 〰️

13 min
in/out  ✺  cubensis  ✺  peckii

〰️〰️ IN 〰️
These are things I read, saw, ingested, ate, listened to, or just generally thought about in the last month that I want to share with you. It's an incomplete list (obviously) but it's the stuff I'm still thinking about.

a bronze table with a computer and microphone on it, the computer has Garageband up

A friend of mine sent me a link to a Brian Eno class on songwriting through School of Song and I thought, why not? So this month I took a songwriting class.

Had I ever in my life written a song? No! But I had a great time in the class, and have now written five extremely terrible songs. Do not ask to hear them. You will pry those mp3's out of my cold dead hands. But I will share with you some insights that I found particularly helping in general from Eno.

"Artists are feeling makers – we create our tiny little worlds. Art is an invitation to engage with a little world. Artists are curators of other worlds."

"Find ways of plugging yourself into difficult but still interesting and fun situations."

"Most of the work I do on my own begins in such a kind of disorganized and unpromising way, that I would be quite embarrassed to have anybody around watching me doing it. So I'm glad for the origination of things to be doing that on my own... I don't feel too bad about looking an absolute idiot making really awful things which somehow sometimes turn into something good."

"Take everything seriously."

"Use limits and structures as ladders — ways of getting somewhere you might otherwise not have gotten. You can throw the ladder away when you're done."

At one point, Eno summarized a quote that he said came from Theodor W. Adorno (admitting, during the lecture, that it was a very loose paraphrase). Eno's version was "making a piece of art is like building a little piece of the future and bringing it back into the present." Unsurprisingly, I love that idea, and so I set off to try and find the original Adorno quote.

There isn't really one that matches exactly, but I suspect he was talking about this one: “Art respects the masses, by confronting them as that which they could be, rather than conforming to them in their degraded state.”

But in looking for that, I found a few other Adorno quotes that I liked:

I like that last one quite a lot. It reminds me of Leonora Carrington, who I wrote about in the last edition of these little notes.

After each class I plinked and plonked into a borrowed keyboard and hummed into my Voice Memos and the whole thing was delightfully frustrating — the way learning any new art form can be. I have no grand plans to make songs but it was really interesting to try.


Tide pools

I took myself on what I generously called a "writing retreat" in mid January, which was actually just renting a small house near my favorite tide pooling spot to write for a week. More on the 〰️OUT〰️ part of that below. But first, nudibranchs! My favorite tiny aliens. I saw so many I had never seen before on this trip! Look at these incredible weirdos!

I really feel that these are best observed with video:

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falling rocks

Just behind these tide pools there is a cliff — the kind that is always falling apart a little bit. Along with the wind, and the waves, and the birds, there is a constant slightly ominous background crumbling noise. Sometimes it's just sand, sliding down. But sometimes larger rocks tumble and roll down the cliff and onto the beach. And if you go to the beach at just the right time — somewhere in between high and low tide, when the beach is still a little wet, and the wind hasn't yet worn away the tracks, you can find this incredibly alluring set of marks that the rocks leave behind. Like footsteps:

an image of the beach, showing rocks that each can be traced along their little footsteps they made in the sand as they rolled down

I can't quite explain what I find so appealing about these little divots in the sand. Something about the way the rocks roll, curving in their own little pattern, reaching for the ocean. How temporary these little divots in the sand are — same as any footstep on a beach. Soon to be washed away. Evidence that the cliffs are crumbling, little by little. The sound of them rolling. I spent a lot of time looking at these little tracks.


polar bears and painted backdrops

This post is apparently going to be very image heavy, even though I spent most of my month writing rather than making visual art. Maybe that's how it goes? Anyway, I got very interested in collecting images of polar bears in zoos who are being offered painted backdrops as some kind of cruel and strange way of letting them pretend they are not captive. (I'm personally opposed to zoos, which I spoke about here, and if you're interested in reading what I think is a compelling case agains them I'd recommend Emma Marris's book Wild Souls.)

I find these images incredibly depressing and also, somehow, touching. An artist's attempt to fix something that can't be fixed. What is it like to paint this? Does the bear even register it as a landscape? Or is this really for us, the audience, to try and get us to picture them in their habitat?


surprise

I'm always gathering up snippets that speak to the idea of "surprise" in work and I found a few really good ones in January:

a Spotify playlist titled "How to Order a Pizza" that has the tracks: Hello, Pizza Place, I'd Like, One Pizza, Please, Give Me Your, Weakest, Delivery Boy, I Won't Settle for Less, We've Got A Score To Settle

odds and ends

a chalk board that says "the old world is dying; the new one struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters"
graffiti that says " "we / we one flesh / supple & unforgiving / we / break form / aggrieved and / dreaming of returning / we are / terrible & / dangerous."
Most people live in almost total darkness… people, millions of people whom you will never see, who don’t know you, never will know you, people who may try to kill you in the morning, live in a darkness which — if you have that funny terrible thing which every artist can recognize and no artist can define — you are responsible to those people to lighten, and it does not matter what happens to you. You are being used in the way a crab is useful, the way sand certainly has some function. It is impersonal. This force which you didn’t ask for, and this destiny which you must accept, is also your responsibility. And if you survive it, if you don’t cheat, if you don’t lie, it is not only, you know, your glory, your achievement, it is almost our only hope — because only an artist can tell, and only artists have told since we have heard of man, what it is like for anyone who gets to this planet to survive it. What it is like to die, or to have somebody die; what it is like to be glad. Hymns don’t do this, churches really cannot do it. The trouble is that although the artist can do it, the price that he has to pay himself and that you, the audience, must also pay, is a willingness to give up everything, to realize that although you spent twenty-seven years acquiring this house, this furniture, this position, although you spent forty years raising this child, these children, nothing, none of it belongs to you. You can only have it by letting it go. You can only take if you are prepared to give, and giving is not an investment. It is not a day at the bargain counter. It is a total risk of everything, of you and who you think you are, who you think you’d like to be, where you think you’d like to go — everything, and this forever, forever.

〰️ OUT 〰️〰️
This is stuff I wrote, created, or published.

Along with looking at nudibranchs, I did a lot of writing in January — mostly on PROJECT CUBENSIS, my historical (ugh) novel (I wrote about the ugh here). All told, I wrote about 40,000 words in January, 32,000 of which were written on that little retreat!

That's a lot, and many of them are bad, but it means that I've almost made it to the end of the extremely shitty first draft of the book. I have a lot to go back to fix — plot holes and characters whose motivations need to be sorted out and explained (or perhaps cut from the book entirely), historical bits that I need to research and put in. The book is short right now — about 60k words total and I am told that the ideal length of a novel for submission is between 80 and 90k. I still need to figure out what happens in the very end, from my three choices. Lots to do still, but hey, not bad!

I was able to write that much not because I'm a super speedy writer (which I suppose I am, compared to some), but because I did a huge amount of work preparing to write. I am a plotter, and I've spent years thinking about this story and mapping it out. Before I left for my retreat, I went through that plot outline again and edited it. Then I created files for each scene in Obsidian (more on that here), pre-filled in with the various metadata and information I would need to guide the work. They looked like this:

A screenshot of a document that has a bunch of metadata like note type, status, POV, chapter, word count, date on timeline - and then also has sections for "prep work" "actual writing" and "notes from MP's & Plot Summary"

Each of these documents in Obsidian is also listed in my Project View, so I had a clear map of what came next.

a screenshot showing a spreadsheet with a list of scenes, their characters, the date on the timeline, their status, and word count

(I have this strange gut feeling that I should blur some of this, so as not to give away too much of the plot of the book. But I think it's more likely that none of this will mean anything to you folks.)

The idea was to do as much prep as possible before my retreat so that when I showed up in Bolinas I had no excuse but to write the darn thing. And it worked! I wrote nearly 5,000 words each day I was there. I made my way almost to the end, and then when I got home I did a few more laps to get me almost to the end.

Having nine days to do nothing but write also helped me clarify what my day to day schedule should look like this year. It turns out that I can write consistently from 7-11 am and then I peter out. I can feel it, the way a hose runs out when you turn off the water supply and the tension is lost. Water still comes out for a little while, but eventually it stops.

I found this revelation quite useful, and I excitedly told a friend that I think I had sorted out what my day should look like. "Isn't that LeGuin's schedule too," she asked. And yes, it turns out, the day plan I had mapped out was nearly exactly the same as the one Ursula K. Le Guin had, including the part where I am very stupid.

a schedule that says: 5:30 a.m. - wake up and lie there and think. 6:15 a.m. - get up and eat breakfast (lots). 7.15 a.m. - get to work writing, writing, writing. Noon - lunch. 1:00-3:00 p.m. - reading, music. 3:00-5:00 p.m. correspondence, maybe house cleaning. 5:00-8:00 p.m. make dinner and eat it. After 8:00 p.m. - I tend to be very stupid and we won't talk about this.

two notebooks, on the left an orange notebook covered in stickers that say things like "being straight seems hard" and "Garassic Park" on the right a blue notebook that has one sticker of a happy frog on it
left: old notebook right: new notebook, which will gain stickers as it lives its life

Along with all those words I also:

Wow this wound up being a long one. Sorry! It will probably happen again!

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