just jen

blog holiday you tube marathon: IU's Straight No Chaser

blog holiday you tube marathon:ani difranco 32 flavors cover

I'm going to a family reunion on my husband's side of the family.  I will be without WIFI for almost a whole week.  (Pray for me.)  It's unclear whether or not Gertrude (my Blackberry) will have a signal (please, God) so if you comment or write to me there may be an uncharacteristic delay in response times.  

I've set some vids for your viewing pleasure to autopost.  

Leading this one--one of my favorite things to do is to search You Tube for regular people doing covers of my favorite songs.  This is the best one for this song, though there were a few others I could have posted.  I love how real these kinds of webcam videos are, the mistakes, the vulnerabilities, the lack of polish.  This has a good background for filming, but I also love it when you can see people's ironing and laundry, family photos, and stuffed animals in the background.  I love the internet.  I love real people.  

This song always gives me a little sass when I'm feeling low.  And what is a workaholic without her work--a low, low girl.  But it will be great, there will be fun, and family, and I will be (partially, only, I hope) unplugged. 

Werd, y'all see you on Friday next.  (And Tuesday's Enchanted 15 is set to autopost.) 

joseph pearce's quest for shakespeare

I've been hard at work with the Monkey.  Yes, you know what Monkey I'm talking about.  I've been doing some serious time with Joseph Pearce's The Quest for Shakespeare and I just wanted to bring it to your attention.  

For those of you not familiar, there is a huge scholarly debate about Shakespeare's religious affiliation during the English Reformation---which Christopher Haigh points out was really a series of ReformationS. Shakespeare was a Catholic.  Shakespeare was a Protestant.  Or my personal favorite, Shakespeare was a secular humanist, remarkably similar to the secular humanists today.  

I'm writing about Shakespeare in a Catholic context--while I freely admit we have no ultimate evidence of his personal beliefs, my contention is that regardless, Protestant theology was way to new for him to be writing in a truly Protestant context, and the very least he is writing in reaction to Catholic theology.  Since the Reformation, scholarship has undergone a period of forgetting to the point of amnesia.  Scholars write about Shakespeare freely with no knowledge of the Catholic medieval philosophy that formed the Renaissance mind of Shakespeare's time.  

I have to do some heavy lifting to be able to talk about Shakespeare in this context.  Again--let me define the context.  The context was the Renaissance, shaped by Catholic medieval philosophy and the English Reformations, which was a Catholic country undergoing a top-down shift in religious orientation.  In Germany, the Reformation was bottom-up.  It was populist, and the elites went along with the tide.  But in England the move was in no way populist--it came from the top down.  It was a monarchical decision that was hoisted upon a populace that had a sympathetic Protestant minority.  

My dissertation does not want to do the Shakespeare Was A Catholic battle because for my examination, it is sort of beside the point.  My point is that he wrote from within a Catholic context regardless of what his personal beliefs might have been.  However, I have to at least address the argument in order to move on from there.  

Pearce's book was an excellent resource for me in this regard.  Pearce has a remarkable ability to work from an intuitive position objectively.  He starts and ends with a strong intuition that Shakespeare was a Catholic and ruthlessly distills and investigates each point in the argument, pro and con with vigor and honesty.  He is fearless--and will bring weak arguments from both side to the fore and allow them to fall apart under scrutiny, even if it puts his ultimate hypothesis at risk.  This is a form of academic integrity that is as exceedingly rare as it is admirable.  

It has come to my attention that his book was attacked in First Things.  Pearce responded to the attack with aplomb.  I draw your attention to it because I want to point out--as Pearce does himself--that though the attacker casts Pearce as a hopelessly biased investigator, he seems to either have not read Pearce's book thoroughly or read it with a venom-induced hysterical blindness.  The reviewer completely lacks the academic integrity that I have identifed in Pearce.  The sort that allows one to see the truth in a particular argument and acknowledge it, even if it works against an opposing argument you wish to advance.  I think most laughable about the reviewer is that he fails to acknowledge "the Catholic turn" in Shakespeare scholarship amongst even secular humanist scholars like Stephen Greenblatt, who now accept Shakespeare's undeniably Catholic context as a point of fact, even if he does not ultimately believe Shakespeare subscribed to Catholic belief.  

If this subject is interesting to you and you want a compendium of facts about Shakespeare's religious identity what Pearce has provided is nothing less than a definitive source.  Whether or not you share Pearce's conclusions, his scholarship is thorough enough and even enough that you will have the data to draw a conclusion of your own.  That is if you actually read it.  

the enchanted 15: be the savage

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

I  can't emphasize enough, how it starts with just 15 minutes.  But that is not as easy and simple as it seems.  Sometimes, in order to protect your space you have to be The Savage.  

No one likes to be The Savage.  I mean, really.  Okay, so some people take pleasure in being The Savage, I've worked with them, and lived with them and, okay.  Yes.  But they are the exception not the rule.  Most people don't want to have to get tough with the folks they love and the folks with whom they work.  Because most folks just want to get along and be loved.  (Is that so wronG?)

But if you want to write, you must sometimes be The Savage. 

It's unbelievable how difficult it can be.  I recently burned about 30 some odd notebooks, journals that I have kept since about age 7 or so, and for a variety of reasons I won't go into here, I felt it was time to stop lugging my past with me, and let go.  So I got rid of them.  

Before I did I read through them, and one thing strikes me about 1996.  I had decided that writing was to become a huge part of my career path and heartwork.  I had always written (obv--30 some odd notebooks, yah?) and had always considered myself a writer.  Always been praised for my writing.  But the writing lacked structure, projects lacked completion, and most of my writing had been self-aggrandizing and therapeutic.  In 1997 I got my first paying gig as a writer and editor in a pharmaceutical company, 1998 I completed the play that would become my first produced effort, and, well, it has all grown from there.  

But what happened in 1996 was a strange sort of necromancy, as the Chaos of my life begins to fall in line behind my stated objective to write creatively and professionally.  Reading my journals I can see myself fighting the murk and decay of personal emotional chaos in the relationships around me.  I write in my journals of being unable to think clearly, of being unable to master my time.  I distinctly describe the sensation of some revelation sneaking up on me that I was fighting.  It is so clear now to me what it was.  It is also clear to me, that I did not want to face it because I feared letting it go.  It was of course--early 20s what else--a relationship with a man, that was emotionally bleeding me dry and ultimately very harmful to me.  I was fighting The Savage in relationship, and avoiding becoming The Savage myself.  The Savage was the person who had to cut the ties to this man even though I knew it would be painful for him and for me.  Every part of me knew it was time to do it, that it was holding me back, and that as long as I was in this relationship I would have virtually no energy left for my writing.  That if I wanted to do bigger things, to develop, I had to cut loose.  

And that IS what happened, and things did immediately fall into line behind that one Terrible Action.  It's not as if that fight has ceased.  Every new circumstance and life change brings situations that threaten to take you over, that you must fearlessly beat back in order to protect the space and time you need to write.  Of course, I'm not about to cut my children and husband loose, these are relationships that are rewarding and in proper order whereas the one I had in 1996 was not that, in any way.  But I do need to assert boundaries and not let the bottomless pit of need in family life take me over.  

By that, I mean:  No matter what you do to serve children, to serve spouse, to serve neighbors, to serve friends, to serve employers, it will never be enough. You can always give more because there is always more to do.  I think about this from a woman's perspective--many of us like to jump in and serve wherever we discover gaps.  Some of this is altruistic but some of it is the illusion is that we can be The Source, the tireless supplier to need, and this gives us a sense of empowerment that's a bit dangerous.  It gives the illusion of Mickey Mouse in the Sorcerer's Basement waving the wand and conducting brooms and a Magic we can't quite control in our naive uptake of it.  (It's always been strangely evocative to me because the threat is water, an archetype of emotion, that is pleasing and cool and essential but can threaten to consume and drown.)

But I am absolutely sure this applies to men and women of slightly different temperaments as well.  All of us have time-sucks and emotional tar pits.  All of us.  

Sometimes, when you start asserting these boundaries, as I did in 1996, it seems absolutely impossible to get mastery of your time.  The day gets away from you.  Another day passes and you still haven't written.  Days turn into weeks.  Weeks, months.  

Unless you decide to be The Savage, mark out your territory, and defend.  

Be as fierce as you need to be, without guilt.  Nothing, no situation, no person, no sense of fatigue or apathy, can overcome 15 minutes. No one will die of need in 15 minutes.  No person will abandon you or leave you completely alone, if you demand your 15 minutes.  Your Facebook friends, and Twitter friends, and Instant Message friends will not go away if you don't respond for 15 minutes.  No one of worth, anyway.   It takes some effort, some Savage Effort, at first, because you are overcoming inertia.  Sometimes, you'll get backlash, and people will make accusations, and whine, and complain, and make you feel like you are A Bad Person.  Don't give in.  It won't always be thus.  Gradually, they get the point, and decide, hey she's worth the 15 minute wait.  Those 15 minutes are yours.  As long as you can be brave enough to defend it.  

RIP Michael Jackson

I read this article about the Michael Jackson media blitz:

This lopsided allocation of media attention and public focus is an ominous indicator of how shallow and superficial we've become as a nation, and calls into question whether a nation fixated on entertainment possesses the maturity, discipline, judgment, and civic virtue necessary to preserve freedom in an increasingly hostile world.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 

I think this article is an ominous indicator of how shallow and superficial this man's appreciation of art can be.  Identifying Michael Jackson as something new to the culture betrays a Philistine lack of knowledge of the history of dance and art.  Michael Jackson is hyperlinked all the way back to antiquity.  And how there is another threat to freedom on our horizons: a hatred of art and a hatred of the desires and tastes of the common man.  Assaults on common taste are really just another form of hatred for humanity and a wish to control the public attention and taste is nothing more than an expression of fascism dressed up in elitist attire. 

While I agree that there are other things going on in the world that deserve our attention--there is something about Michael Jackson that stodgy-old art hating neglects to see.  Our hunger for celebrity and popular culture is a hunger to be moved.  Michael Jackson, for whatever sensationalistic problems the man suffered, was an artist and his music and his dancing was a phenomenon to be respected, whether or not he reflected one's personal tastes.  The art of Pablo Picasso, for example, is not something that all agree is beautiful, but it is an art that deserves consideration, for its technique, form, and impact.  

I think the vigor in this assault on public taste is motivated by a misplaced division between high culture and low.  And of course, the older generation always finds the taste of the next deplorable.  Would this writer have complained about media attention to Fred Astaire or Frank Sinatra?  Both Astaire and Sinatra, before there deaths names Jackson as the inheritor of their traditions.  Astaire and Sinatra have both said the following about Michael Jackson:

“Oh, God! That boy moves in a very exceptional way. That’s the greatest dancer of the century”. - Fred Astaire

“I didn’t want to leave this world without knowing who my descendant was. Thank you Michael!”- Fred Astaire (shortly before his death)

“The only male singer who I’ve seen besides myself and who’s better than me – that is Michael Jackson.” – Frank Sinatra

I continue to take our culture's need for "entertainment" as an optimistic sign of our health.  The use of the word "entertainment" here is an insult, and one that, I think, unfairly reduces what it is Michael Jackson was and what he did.  On the issue of his predatory instinct toward young boys--we continue to confuse the artist with his art.  If it is, in fact, true that Michael Jackson was molesting young boys, (it is not at all clear that is--the evidence is largely in the conclusions of the public based on bizarre behaviors that have multiple explanations) that really bears no relationship on the lasting impact of his art--of which I think the most significant portion was his dancing.  If we are to take the personal behavior of the artist as the sign of the integrity of the work, we'll have a huge problem with as many (if not more) of the artists of the high tradition as the low.  (Think Mozart, Caravaggio--as one of our friends brought to our attention in the combox this week--Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.) History tells us that beauty in art is not necessarily correlated to beauty in moral character--in fact, the two often exist in stark contrast to each other.  James Hillman has commented profoundly on the depths to which artists sink and its seeming inverse proportion to how high their star and skills reach. (He uses the degrading deaths of Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, and Elvis Presley as examples noting the contrast of the conditions of their deaths to what their work represented in life.)  

As a dancer, Michael was an indescribable genius.  His movement vocabulary was drawn from the history of dance and he is unparalleled in his ability to bring "street dance' to the very edges of high art.  His body, ravaged at the end of his life but his own self-destructive impulses, was built from and around the vocabulary he created, until his very limbs and tendons conformed to his drive for higher expression.  Though some of his movements could be construed as vulgar, all of dance, emanating from our body, has pointers toward sexuality.  I read recently a quote (the source of which I cannot find now) that said something to the effect of: all dance is an upright expression of a horizontal impulse.  If you begin to qualify dance moves as high or low, as beautiful or vulgar based on its reference to sex acts, you'll find yourself in very murky, grey territory.  

The world mourns the loss of Michael Jackson because of the food he provided for those who long for substantial art.  Whether or not his art was your taste is a side issue--his world-wide popularity is not a sign of his lack of ability but an ear mark of how we all long for beauty.  

The writer of this article calls the media attention on Michael "lopsided" but I beg to differ.  Michael Jackson is the product of the freedom this writer cries out to protect.  That we were able to experience a Michael and that a Michael was enabled to make such beautiful poetry in motion is the strongest sign we have that the human desire for freedom will not perish.  I cannot see a Michael Jackson evolving from anything but a culture that is free.  

Criticize the lack of media attention to violation of freedom across the globe--but don't criticize the common man for mourning and wishing to understand the individual who provided such  masterful expressions of freedom in voice and movement.  What is the Moonwalk but a body, through skill and mastery, defying gravity?  What is the elastic movement of those limbs but an expression of the spiritual control of the body to express higher values and freedom from physical restraint?  What are those unbelievable scales and phonetics in the upper-ranges of masculine falsetto but an expression of freedom from biology and cultural expression into the outer-reaches of sublimity?  Lest the homophobic recoil be triggered too quickly--what were the Castrati, then, as part of a religious high art tradition?  There are more than a few parallels between Michael and the Castrati, as a viewing of the movie of Farinelli might evoke.  (I deliberately chose this clip to illustrate the fervor and ecstasy Farinelli created in his audiences.)

Even Michael's de-evolution through plastic surgery and his documented anorexia nervosa is a result of the mental anguish he endured for the sake of art--the desire to control the body for higher artistic expression, expression that blasts through the limitations of the body into the realm of spirit, obviously preyed upon this man endlessly, until that desire to reach sublimity destroyed his face and body.  I'm not sanctifying his disease--only noting the connection it has to his desire to reach artistic height. It seems that, like, us, Michael became unable to separate the man from the art he made. 

RIP Michael Jackson.  

If you doubt the link between Astaire and Jackson, then I think you need to see this video.

food and wine fridays: eggs florentine

Eggs Florentine from The Broke Ass Gourmet

I'm starting to think of these Friday food and wine posts as food p*orn.  

technorenaissance: printing devils and add/adhd

My colleague  recently posted an article to Facebook written by Susan Greenfield.  

The article warns against the dangers of the Internet, social media in particular, and its effects on our children.  I run into this technophobia in a broad variety of media, from a column on Fatherhood that fears the effect of the iPhone on fathering (because men are watching their children while plugged in) to this book, to this Associated Content article about the negative effects of the Internet.  

And this is of course a direct outgrowth of the power of the Internet.  Anytime something with enormous power arrives in the culture there will be a sort of backlash phobia that emerges against it and, in a certain respect this is healthy.  But it is sometimes humorous to note that these same sorts of fears appeared against phenomena we take for granted as being unassailably good.  

For example, I don't know, let's take something at random, shall we?  Like, say, the printing press:

The printing press also created its share of trouble as far as some people were concerned.  It took book copying out of the hands of the Church and made it much harder for the Church to control or censor what was being written.  It was hard enough to control what Wycliffe and Hus wrote with just a few hundred copies of their works in circulation.  Imagine the problems the Church had when literally thousands of such works could be produced at a fraction of the cost.  Each new printing press was just another hole in the dyke to be plugged up, and the Church had only so many fingers with which to do the job.  It is no accident that the breakup of Europe's religious unity during the Protestant Reformation corresponded with the spread of printing.  The difference between Martin Luther's successful Reformation and the Hussites' much more limited success was that Luther was armed with the printing press and knew how to use it with devastating effect. (The Flow of History)

The above is very interesting to note, when your realize the Church is again facing a crisis in thought and communication in the face of the Internet.  As this bishop railed publicly just a day or two ago, about the tone and problems created by the large and visible presence of Catholic bloggers.  (BK: lost that link again?  Can you send?) 

Another phenomenon appeared at that time as well, the figure known as the Printer's Devil, which was associated with the ink-stained skin of printers that people immediately equated to practicing the dark arts.  

To be sure the Internet has great power and one fails to examine its potential negative effects at peril.  But it's interesting to note that "books" and "literacy" once inspired the same category of fears and certainly gives context to current arguments against the Internet and its broad-scale usage amongst our children.  

And as a final note: it seems we have another "printing devil" for the Internet but it goes by, not another name, but a set of initials.  ADD/ADHD.  Susan Greenfield conjures the demon haunting our schools today in order to give her arguments gravitas. From people that I know who work in the school systems, it is astonishing to learn how many kids have to go to the nurses office for medications.  When the number of children needing medications is approaching a statistically signficant crisis, at what point do we realize that its our forms and our systems that might need tinkering with and not the neurochemistry of our children, whose brains very well may be evolving to cope with the demands of the contemporary world?  

I mean, if the brain were on board to ride to the next stop on the evolution train, would it manifest to those unaware of its occurence as pathology? 

Greenfield and her kind are going to have to come up with something better than ADD and ADHD which may very well not be a problem but an asset in our world.  Immediate reaction (as IM'ing, tweeting, and posting) is being cast as an attention defecit problem--but really is there a difference between immediate reaction and collaboration?  The world is becoming increasingly collaborative, and collaborative learning is not something our schools do well in their current structure.  They try to be sure, but the large, centralized, physical plants (what David Mamet described as "virtual warehousing of the young" in his play Oleanna) of state funded public schools simply cannot handle collaborative learning and assimilation with speed and efficiency.  

So the answer is to drug our children?  That's not to say there are not children who legitimately need medication.  But I wonder to what degree it is the system's way of avoiding educating those who are a challenge to it? And that the challenge these children provide is not a challenge the system needs?  And what manifests as ADD now---could it be an issue of processing speed?  I've often been struck by children who have ADHD or ADD and the ability the have to become immersed in an activity and it has been explained to me that one of the "symptoms" of ADD/ADHD is the ability to have heightened concentration for tasks that interest them.  Now which is it, that they can't concentrate or that material fails to capture their attention? Because it is not collaborative but dominating?

I won't make the leap to saying that ADD/ADHD doesn't exist, but I will say that the "epidemic" quality of the phenomenon is a result of a softening of diagnostic criteria and may be endemic to a cultural shift rather than an organic problem.  That this cultural shift is completely negative, pathological, and regressive, (the title of Greenfield's article uses the word "infantalizing") is far too often taken for granted without further examination of the prejudices therein.  

beauty and horror in urine

I've been thinking a lot lately about Faith Philosophy and Art and how this feeds into Aesthetics.  We no longer have a developed sense of Aesthetics in America--or in Europe for that matter.  The increasing pluralism--that is the growing sense of diversity in thought, belief, and political conviction--has destroyed our ability to receive art, interpret it, and cope with it in any real matter.  People of Faith and political conviction, choose art and artists like captains choosing sides on the playground for dodgeball, which is, to say the very least, a bit troublesome.  

I almost didn't do this post because of its explosive quality, in the immediate potential for misinterpreation--but, Jason Goroncy, who I've linked to several times before, made this almost irresistible to me.  I invite you to read what he posted over there to inform your reading of this post.  

The above image is eerie and strangely glowing--it seems reverent at first glance and moving.  Yet, when you realize that what you are looking at is actually the 1987 piece "Piss Christ" by Andreas Serranos, it moves the context of what you are looking at into something that seems, to some, blasphemous.  

I wrote about "Piss Christ" extensively while in college--I took several courses on the Philosophy of Art and in the early 90s and amidst the Newt Gignrich climate of arts funding, "Piss Christ" was like the touchstone of all the potential for controversy in the arts.  As an undergrad I was only an okay researcher--and remember we did not have the Internet then.  But I did a fair amount of reading and heard at least 8 lectures on "Piss Christ".  My ultimate conclusion on "Piss Christ," a piece, if you are not familiar, made from a jar of Serrano's own urine and a plastic gift store crucifix, was that is was repulsive to me, but that I would defend to the death Serranos' right to do it.  That was the key issue of the day, you see, was whether or not someone like Serranos should be allowed to do art like that and ultimately, whether or not the public should pay for it.  The issues are really separate, but the heat of the controversy pushed these two ideas together rather uncomfortably.  I never understood the deeper expression of the piece because that became a troubling side issue--almost irrelevant--because of the pressure on me to come to a political conclusion on the matter.  Either pro-Piss Christ, or anti-Piss Christ.  

Consequently, for all I was taught, and all the periodical research I did on the piece it is only this morning that I realize something crucial about Serranos' piece.  Serranos is a faithful Catholic--and that this is a depiction of deeply Augustinian philosophy: that we are born amidst feces and urine (that is what Augustine said) and that Christ, in all of his splendiferous sacrifice was born into human flesh and bodily fluids, fluids that seeped from him just as surely they seep from us.  Suddenly this piece took on grand and humbling significance for me.  

I was taught by secular and deeply anti-Catholic professors, so it is no surprise that this escaped my notice, since not only did they co-opt this image as fodder for their political agenda, they were likely completely ignorant of the medieval philosophy from which Serranos is working.  But it wasn't until this morning that I realized what I lacked was an authentic voice of Faith that received and understood Serranos' work on its own terms and could interpret this through authentic Theology, rather than irrational reaction to culturally constructed biases against the body and its fluids.  That the piece--which I would actually argue is performance art more than a work of art itself--became an emblem of the Left in the 80's and the 90s automatically muffled the voice of Belief inside the work.  

It may have been my own limitation as a young student, but that this was anything but an angry attack on religion never once occurred to me and I read periodicals on the matter for what would have been considered, as a pre-Internet undergraduate, exhaustively.  It was being lauded as if it was an angry attack on religion, but we come to realize that the intention of the artist was anything BUT that.  There are problems with receiving art only through the intention of the artist, as the artists cannot fully intend all that may be received in his work.  And I should add that my own relationship to Belief at the time was very muddled--and I had a sort of awe for people who allowed themselve to voice anger at organized religion.  You know, late adolescent rebellion.  Yadda yadda. 

Again, I'm not saying whether or not I like this piece ultimately--I think it stands more as a piece of performance art than an actual work of Art.  What I will say my new revelation on this this morning is: 

As a final note--the cultural main-stream has homogenized Christianity into an awkward monolith--what was actually a Catholic point of resistance against Protestantism, was co-opted as a uniformly anti-Christian voice.  That Catholics and Christians had no authentic tool of interpreting it and analyzing it is exactly why the piece was alienated and alienating.  Which is exactly what I have been thinking about in Philosophy, Theology, Art, and Aesthetics--we, as a culture, have arrived at a place where art is both alien and alienating, because we lack a unifying conversation about the Good in art which is not the same thing as the Good in social and political discourse.   At all. 

The Protestant Reformation as anti-Body and pro-Reason--Cartesian Dualism brought to religious expression, actually--took the whole of horror and beauty (read Goroncy on this, to understand) and partitioned them from each other, which, as the Goroncy article pointed out, leaves us with a sterile beauty that is "useless".  So Serranos, here, has made material a splinter of Horror as it dangles in free fall from Beauty.  

Before the Reformation beauty and horror did exist together not unproblematically but certainly not as problematically as it did post-Reformation, as an example I give you this: 

the enchanted 15: writing from the core

I've been kickboxing.  I've gone through intense periods of kickboxing before using this guy's videos.  It is freaking DIFFICULT.  When I start, I alternately struggle to keep up tempo and keep up form.  I'm so weak, I can't do both.  If I keep tempo for the cardio benefit, form suffers.  If I focus on correct form I can't keep tempo.  So, I decide which I will focus on before each workout.  The interesting thing about the body is how interconnected it is.  When you throw a kick or a punch correctly, it is actually being thrust out from the core, which is your abdominal muscles, glutes, and thighs.  After two c-sections, my core is for sh...my core is weak.  But after four weeks of the workout, I'm starting to feel strength there.  I first notice it in standing taller, straighter.  Then when I'm practicing form, I can feel the punch engage first at the core.  And that is an awesome feeling--you can literally feel the power pulled up from your abdominals into your arm and fist.  Though I don't ever use a bag, I know it would have power if my closed hand made contact with something.  So literally, I'm throwing punches from the core as opposed to the shoulder.  Power.  

It occurs to me that writing is the same way.  Sometimes, you have to struggle to keep flow and tempo in the writing, and let the form take care of itself.  And sometimes, you have to focus on form, structure, and means of expression.  What is the core in writing, though?  What is that point of inner engagement that gives power to your words?  I think that your core is experience.  On the eve of that contemporary product the film student, of which Lucas and Spielberg were the first generation, the great film director Elia Kazan famously gave this advice to young people who wanted to direct movies: Don't start making films.  Take a trip across country and experience the country and yourself.  Then start making films.    Before there were LA and NY film schools there was, as Kazan points out, life.  

It is really important to have adventures and mini-adventures--when I read that about Kazan, I was about 24 years old, so I saved up some money, and went on a trip to Europe by myself (much to my parents and boyfriend's horror).  I packed a small bookbag style back pack with a change of clothes and some earthy crunchy soap (the kind you can use to wash dishes, your hair, and your body, and your laundry), a journal and two fountain pens, bought a pair of walking sandals, and hopped on an El Al flight to London.  (Note: walk in walking sandals BEFORE a trip like that--blisters suck when you're trying to develop your artistic sensibilities.)  I traveled England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, through the book-a-bed-ahead system in the hostels.  It was really a remarkable journey.  Contrary to everyone's worst fears about a young girl travelling alone, I met nothing but kindness and generosity in the people in the hostels.  Though, I imagine I had a certain degree of luck and spiritual protection on that trip, and other people may have quite the opposite experience, it seemed to me that most of the people I met respected a young woman travelling alone and kept a courteous distance and offered help and company rather than predatory advances.  

My point is not to recount the many little mini-adventures I had on that journey but to note the impact of developing your core through adventures in life.  Now as a wife and mother, hopping a plane to London is not something within my reach.  But taking my girls on a long walk through a nature preserve is--and developing friendships with people outside of my inner circles is also.  I tend to look at life as if it had design, without worrying about whether or not it "actually" does--and as such, the people, places, and adventures, mini-or otherwise (even an unexpectedly toddler-spilled box of Cheerios can be a mini-adventure), continue to present as an opportunity to develop my core.  

And I can feel that the little adventures, especially the ones that are outside my comfort zone,  are developing my core, so that the punches I throw on the page are achieving greater power.  

What opportunities are their in your life to get out of your comfort zone?  Are there things in your life that seem like inconveniences but could actually be adventures specifically designed for developing your core? 

Remember, writers are always working even when it seems that they are not.  Especially when it seems like they are not.  

subterranean/subcreation: making the lord of the rings

In this post here, I confessed to ignorance of the term "subcreation"--and more than a few people have teased me about my lack of true fangirl status, if I never encountered that term.  And that is true.  I have since seen how ubiquitous this term is amongst true Tolkien fans.  

But the reason for this gap in my knowledge is quite simple, really: I first began my love affair with the world of JRR Tolkien in 1979 on a 24 hour car ride to Canada to visit my mother's family.  I was five years old, I hadn't even begun school yet.  And my mother had brought along a read-along tape and book for me to listen to in the card of the Rankin Bass movie version of The Hobbit.  I'm not sure how many times I listened to the story and looked at the Rankin Bass pictures.  A lot.  A whole lot a lot.  

When I returned home, my uncle, a Tolkien fan, and always refusing to acknowledge that as a child I had a reduced intellectual stature, said, "Don't read that baby stuff, here, take this."  He handed me a plain covered book (I think I remember that it was white with a green border?  I'm going to look for this edition and will post if I can find) and I began reading the original Tolkien.  I'm always thankful to my uncle for ignoring my mother and aunt as they told him I was too young to read it--because that also marked the beginning of my journey into the difficult.  His belief in my ability to read the original and therefore, I could.  

My love of the books never ceased and up until now, I have avoided reading anything ABOUT the Lord of the Rings.  Only The Lord of the Rings itself.  For one thing, as I got older and entered the humanities as a specialist--I recoiled form turning my longest standing fiction pleasure into work.  If I began thinking of the Lord of the Rings, the way I think about, say, Hamlet, I feared it would destroy something pure for me.  An escape into pure pleasure.  

Le sigh.  (@marbenais wrote this the other day, and it made me laugh really hard.)  

But here I am on the precipice of beginning a journey into Tolkien as an object of academic study.  But I'm not as much interested in interpretations of the stories and their creative elements as I am about the process that went into making them.  When I was pregnant with Mena Bug, I began a series of fantasy novels that I've just brought to the next level of development.  It's something I save for moments of relaxation and peace, when I think I can afford a break from writing tier 1 (the dissertation) and writing tier 2 (professional paying or potentially paying work) and lounge around in the subterranean hang out of my fantasy novels and my short stories.  And while I'm there sub-creation has really begun to embed itself in my process and that of course leads to a desire to Know More About It.  

I have to be careful though--a desire to Know More About It can quickly become and All Consuming Obsession and I can't afford to off-load the energy there.  But I've begun to casually mark off territory to read as time and energy permits.  I'll let out a call for intervention here if it becomes a dangerous endeavor.  ;)

That I literally think of my time with my fantasy novels as subterranean should be no surprise given the fact that I feel like I'm hanging out with Tolkien as I write.  

And it also doesn't surprise me that the special world of my books are beginning in a very crypty-and subterranean subworld that exists beneath the flora and fauna of the ancient world above it.  

The above link is an interesting article on the Holey-ness of the Hobbit world and how holes and underground spaces operate in Tolkien's Middle Earth.  It is an article more about reading Middle Earth than making it--so I'm already treading the borders of what it is I've marked out to read.  But I happened across it and my eyes started skating it, and I thought I'd share it with you here since it presented some interesting thoughts.  

A good friend has given me some suggestions for books about the forging of Middle Earth.  If you have any, I'd be glad to hear them.  I'll eventually post my bibliography here.  For now.  Timer has gone off. 

And by the way.  The artist for the above is John Howe.