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the failure blog

all of my ideas about blogging, it turns out, have to do with failure.  i keep thinking up topics that are failure-heavy: failed coptic binding, failed teaching experiments, failed writing, failed violin practice, and of course, bookstore failures.

This doesn’t —- or shouldn’t —- have the itchy schadenfreude or self-pitying tinge of failblog; rather, it should be a celebration of trying and failing and trying again, and knowing that failure is a part of trying, a part of succeeding, and a thing often more full of learning and excitement than success is.  Maybe Beckett put it best:

“Ever tried.  Ever failed.  No matter.  Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better.”

First up: adhesive failure.

While working on the broadside for Genine’s reading last friday (which you can check out here: unplumbedpress.com), I hit up against the fact that adhering one piece of paper with a center fold to another piece of paper with a center fold, and expecting both pieces to remain perfectly flat and in sync whether folded or unfolded… this is a pipe dream. a fantasy (unless the inner paper has a ton of give; very little sizing, perhaps). at least with the paper we were using (beckett concept sandpaper in 70# text, which was beautiful, but not terribly cooperative, and gainsborough cover, which was also beautiful, but very rigid).

On to the adhesive fails.  Glue sticks are nice, but soon gave in to the repeated strain of folding and unfolding (the broadsides fell apart).

I tried PVA —- and of course, if you use PVA (or any wet glue), you have to dry the adhered thing under weight.  Under weight!  If you dry it under weight and open… the thing doesn’t want to close.  the inner paper buckles.  If you dry it under weight and closed… it doesn’t want to open.

Man. What a doozy.

Now, at this point we were kind of pressed for time, and I started to be really against the idea of wet glue, period.  The whole drying under weight thing? it seemed to me like a fool’s errand.  The kind that would leave us with no fancy broadside folios to give away at the reading, and lots of glue on our hands (and clothes, and the zen center’s beautiful dining tables, and my dining table, and…).  Enter the adhesive of champions: double-stick tape.

That’s right.  Double-stick tape.  The photo/archival kind.  We went with the Tombo kind in the cute little applicator.  Why?  Don’t know.  ‘Cause it was cute, I guess.  We use up nine of those suckers, in the end.

Still there was that same problem, though.  If we adhered it flat, it didn’t want to close without wrinkling the inner paper, and if we did a tricky kind of closed-book gluing, it didn’t want to open all the way.

What did we do? Like good little buddhists*, we took the Middle Path.  hyuck, hyuck.  We split the difference.  I adhered them while holding them open at a 45 degree angle, and left a little pocket of non-tapedness at the “spine.” 

It still doesn’t open flat.  So it’s still kind of a failure on the adhesive front.  But it mostly opens.  And, thank god, nothing wrinkled or buckled or otherwise sabotaged the smooth speckly beauty of the Beckett Concept.

Confidential to Mohawk: XOXOXOXOX.

*For the record, I’m not a buddhist.  Genine is, though.  As far as I know

intellectual sonic ephemera

These are quotes from the Q&A after Azar Nafisi’s keynote address about Al-Mutanabbi Street at Corcoran, in conjunction with the exhibition of the Al-Mutanabbi Street Broadside Project.  I’m transcribing her talk right now for the anthology that’s coming out next year of essays and poetry responding to the bombing of Al-Mutanabbi Street—-it’s a remarkable talk, really, and I’m enjoying taking out all the verbal artifacts to formalize and polish it up to be published, but I can’t help but feel as if something is being lost by doing so. I don’t know what the permissions are surrounding the lecture or distributing the mp3, but…

here are some things likely that won’t make it into the printed version…

(this was the first of four total questions):

male student: How many of the images next door were done by women? [he means the broadsides, one of which was printed by me, actually!]

Casey Smith (organizer of the conference, which is on science and the book arts): Quite a lot, I think.  Quite a lot.  Right now there is undergoing right now a letterpress revival that is led by women.  So if you are a letterpress printer and you are over forty, you are most likely a man, but if you are a letterpress printer and you are under forty, you are almost certainly a woman.

…

(this was the third and most important, I think, question)

female student: Hi, thank you very much.  Towards the beginning of your talk, when you were talking um, about people who were glued to the television in this 24-hour news cycle, you drew a distinction between provoking curiosity and affirmation.  And I found your talk to be very affirming!  And I think most people in this room found it very affirming And you end it with this kind of political call out—“Who’s going to bail out imagination and curiosity?”  And I think that’s a beautiful question, but how do we actually create curiosity for people who aren’t like me, and who aren’t in this room? So that we don’t just, you know, continually—and I know this is an age-old question, but—affirm ourselves, and actually move outside of that.

Azar Nafisi: And, well, that is why I think that, well, you know, you know, every sort of—- I don’t want to call it a movement, I thought I left activism behind when I left Iran, but you know, it starts small and you don’t know when to stop.  But one of the amazing things for me, over the past six or seven years, I have traveled this country, the smallest cities, red and blue, you know, and sometimes a thousand people come.  And they are there because they are curious, because… or the National Mall, you know, ever time they have ah, I think that’s a good time for a demonstration, the National Book Festival every year, you know, the amount, the number of people who come.  So, I think we need to maybe this time use the Internet for …for positive reasons, and try and create, and create a discussion, and I think that, um, wherever you are, especially at the universities, I think students should start asking questions.  Everybody is defining this generation.  The generation should define itself, and they should really, we should have conversations at this university, and around this town, asking the question of what do we want, you know?  And not some politician up there responding to us, you know, of ourselves…I’m very bad at organizing anything, but I’m sure that if you have any suggestions please contact me at me, through my meager website or on facebook, or email.  

birthday break!

“Toot a toozler! Twant a Zong! Sing a made-up birthday song!

Yip and yell from here to Boise.

It’s your [my] birthday!

Let’s get noisy!”

Thinks you can think will return on Tuesday!  Hold your breath for: the snuvs and their gloves, schlopp, schlopp, beautiful schlopp, etc… …

well i don’t really blog

but i have to say that the light right now in the mid-afternoon rain is really good.

it’s been a long time since i was as sad as i once was but it’s been a short time, days maybe, weeks barely, since i had one of those brief, intense migraines of sadness and went a little bit blind, or light-sensitive, and had to close my eyes until the brain pain ebbed.  and that short time has been a longer time than it’s been, for a long time, in between sadness migraines.  it’s possible that this has something to do with liquids, fluidity, superfluity, something to do with blood between the legs and maybe also  something to do with the rain coming finally, making it winter (seasonally affective in reverse?  sad in the summer, happy in the winter?).

so i’m lucky.

mostly here to share this technique: the basketball of guilt.

gather it up (the guilt, or the things causing it, or the sadness if you’re very good at the technique).  hold it to your chest, like a basketball.  do you remember being taught how to throw a basketball when you were little?  your bent arms make two triangles, one on either side, with the basketball in the middle.  then you are kind of doing a pushup, and you shoot the basketball away from your tiny kid body.  so you take your basketball of guilt, or sadness, and you shoot it away from your body like that.  swoosh!

things i dig right now (and not so much)

i dig la ventana, a zine out of SF State, many bits of it anyway, and the energy that young youth radicals pour into all the stuff they do, and how starry eyed they are! (how quicly that turns into bitterness I am not so fond of). i think i dig litquake, and can’t wait for it to start. i dig teaching —- less of the starry eyed youth enthusiasm there, more of the caginess coupled with overly-personal sonnets and limericks and haikus (good god, how is it that these assignments make my students “hate poetry” while they make me love it more than ever before?) i dig soup, and having a couch, i dig knitting pomatomous socks out of mind’s eye AMAZING merino/tencel hand dyed sock yarn (colorway: rose iris. so gorgeous) that my last employers gave me as a graduation present. I dig spinning up some gorgeous wool (thewoolydaisy.blogspot.com) on an old family wheel that a friend gave me as a graduation present. I dig it when wool turns into yarn and yarn turns into clothes, and, relatedly, i dig it when things get organized and rooms get cleaner and I dig getting cheap shit on craigslist. and i dig the fact that i walk by craigslist world headquarters every morning. oh, and i dig the tv show Life. actually cop/procedural shows of all kinds. shut up. I’m a dirty tv-watching anti-intellectual traitor. get at me. I DO NOT dig AT&T, their lying, cheating, and incomprehensible billing. scummy monsters. (nor do i dig the capitalist system and the way our infrastructure is run in this country. hellooooo? why does it all work so badly? and why is it so inaccessible? and designed to screw people?) i dig the way This American Life explains the economy to me (esp in “Giant Pool of Money” and “Enforcers”)… colloquial, straightforward, incredulous gallows humor. You bet. i dig drinking coffee i brewed single-drip by hand out of mugs my mama made every morning while i scarf bagel or saltines or whatever starch i can. carbs in the morning, protien in the afternoon. i dig raw broccoli a lot! i dig the cheesecake my roommate makes. DARN that is some good ass cheesecake! i dig santa cruz, or at least i dig people who live there in a beautiful high-ceilinged ex-garage with its concrete/hardwood floor and their salvaged haunted bed. there’s a lot to dig, even when the sky is falling.

we must

we must, 100 times, 1000 times, we must must must have reverence for stories. people’s “true” stories, their lies… it is all the same, they are all worth something, they are all sacred.  one must trust and have love for every story.

but not one’s own. ;)

new yorker fiction podcast; (yes i am tool) it gives me isaac babel’s short story but more importantly, the anecdote about how he would pay women for the privelege of looking into their purses.  “kind of a pick up line,” yes, but what better way, no?

there must be a way to approach stories with the adrenaline they deserve and not become jaded.  I was inspired to this by talking about samizdat in school, but there must be a peaceable way of going about it. i’ll give you more when i’ve got more. in the meantime, go create some community!  read somebody’s story.  (in their eyes or body if you have to.)

updates from the alternametropolis

(I apartment-hunt and I literary-mag-hunt.  some confused observations)

1. only yellow apartments in foggy environs will be considered. all other submissions will be recycled unopened.  (actually, we read all unsolicited apartments. go figure).

2. I am intrigued by these guys: bateau and I want to order a copy but I don’t want to pay bank!  when I am famous I will open a paypal account and people will donate money to it and i will use that money to buy literary journals. so that I can make money and get literary journals by having my stories accepted.  ;)

3. I DO NOT LIKE ANTS.  Ants, beware.  come into my new home and you will be ruhlessly slaughtered with no mercy.

4. Since coming to SF, I have run into 4+ people who, for one reason or another, I did not expect to run into.  I said hi to 2 of them.  both times it was awkward.

5. overheard: “I think I might be a politician.  What do you think?”  “Pretty fiery.”  “I don’t think you’d like me; I’m not good at being moderate enough.”

6. I am going through a list of litmags alphabetically.  so far I am only at bateau.  this is not a good situation!

7. on recycled notebooks I’m making: currently finishing “the liminal book” which is made from muni/bart transfers and unused rental applications.  someday I hope to make “the book of rejection.”  yup.  it will be made entirely of rejection letters.

8. can you tell my storylines are disintegrating?  yeah.  I’m also running out of space in all my notebooks and finishing more knitting projects than i would have thought possible.

narrative problems part II

in which our protagonista tries to get a grip.

[nota bene: If you were paying attention in Chs 1-4, class, you will recall that littlewidget was flipping about the non-narrativity of life in general, her need for an organizational system, and the tendency of GTD and other organizational systems to make life feel even less narrative and therefore more scary. therefore she decided to come up with a narrative organizational system]

Chapter Five:

I’m still not sure how this system will work in realtime; I clearly haven’t even alpha-tested, let alone beta-tested it. But conceptually, here’s how it breaks down:

We don’t actually do things willy-nilly (most of us). It may seem as though tasks and projects are random and discrete, but they’re usually not. Instead, they are part of continuing storylines. Storylines, in my experience, tend to break down into two basic categories: 1. becoming a certain kind of person/thing, or 2. fixing a problem (a big problem. something dear to the heart. little and/or situational problems, such as interpersonal drama or transportation, tend to be sub-parts of larger narratives). Projects are subsections of large storylines, and tasks can be subsections of projects, or just sub-parts of storylines, depending on their nature.

(nb: I actually don’t like to break my storylines down into projects. It gets confusing and stressful. So I’ve just got storylines and the details that go into them. but you can subdivide into projects if you want).

Chapter Six:

Instead of sitting down and thinking about all the stuff you have to do, take a minute to identify some storylines. Who do you want to be? Or, if you prefer, what do you want to do? (Personally, I think of it in terms of identity. For instance, I want to craft, so I want to be a crafter. But I can see how a person might want to think of himself as wanting to blog, rather than wanting to be a blogger.) What are the problems that concern you right now? (might be the environment. Might be your mental health. whatever.)

Okay, now you can open your mind to the tasks and projects. They mostly fall neatly into one or another storyline, though some of them (like finding housing, feeding the cats, etc.) will fall into the meta-storyline of being alive. You might notice that you have some tasks leftover. Take a look at them. They might reveal a subplot you didn’t realize was there. Or maybe they aren’t really tasks that fit into your narrative at all. If the latter is the case, go ahead and ELIMINATE THEM.  Be ruthless. Edit with abandon.

Chapter Seven:

So here’s a mini example. Here’s what I would have done before: made a list of a bunch of stuff I wanted to get from my parents’ house, once I find an apartment and am ready to move into it. Here’s what that list might have looked like:

spinning wheel, lino block carving tools/ink &roller, papermaking supplies? bicycle, typewriter, books, books to sell on amazon.com, clothes, pots&pans, california flag & other decorations, spare laptop battery, digital camera, dishware made by mom.

so these obviously organize themselves into distinct subplots.

the pots&pans, the california flag & other decorations, and the bicycle are meta: they have to do with wanting to be a person with food and transportation.

the spare laptop battery is from me wanting to be a person who can be on the internet/on her computer anywhere and freely.

I want to be a crafter/am committed to handmade/locally made art and useful objects: hence the spinning wheel, papermaking supplies, lino block stuff (which has to do with wanting to make my own business cards, since self-promotion is present in all my subplots), and the dishware my mom made (she is a potter).

the digital camera works on a few levels: it has to do with crafting, and my need to set up an etsy shop, but it is also about brightkite.com and wanting to archive stuff, which fits in with the laptop battery.

the typewriter is partly nostalgia, but is basically to do with wanting to be a writer and believing in taking things slow. the books go along with that too. being a writer, learning from other writers, being thoughtful (philosophy books). etc.

Chapter Eight:

not a huge fan of lists. Lists are scary. so I’m not actually going to make lists anymore, except perhaps of the meta-stuff (I think I’ll probably need some kind of system to keep on top of rent, student loan payments, utilities, etc). I’m instead going to take note of my subplots. Currently the main ones look something like this: writing and narrative pursuits, craft/environmentalism/anticonsumerism/handmade, music and public art, adventerousness, and sociability: forging strong, honest connections with people and maintaining/building upon the connections I already have.

Notably, the internet fits in to all of these categories, in pretty obvious ways! :D and obviously the categories overlap a lot. like in the case of the Postcard Project. And I feel very good about that. It’s never felt good to have too many unconnected subplots, in life or literature.

Epilogue:

TA DA. I would like to do a post later on how to make this system more… um… systematized. you might note its notable lack of structure right now, meh heh heh. I’ve heard from a few friends that they pretty much already do this… if you do, and do it more systematically, PLEASE comment!

but until next time, over and out.

narrative problems

these are a lot of semi-disparate thoughts but I’m going to try to concatenate them as well as possible:

Chapter One:

In thinking about GTD (Getting Things Done): a lot of y’all folks that I hang out with use this system.  I am somewhat in awe of how effective you are; I’m not sure what the correlation/causation relation is with effectiveness and GTD, but I’m pretty sure that in some way they’re linked.  I can’t do GTD; I don’t want to do GTD (except maybe for tasks I don’t care about at all).  Why?  arrkay and I talked about this a bit, and it ties in with Chapter Two of this blog post: GTD is highly non-narrative, and non-narrativity causes littlewidget some serious kernel panic.  ;)

Chapter Two:

Okay, I recognize that life is non-narrative.  Things in real life don’t really arc or resolve ever; they barely ever even move forward.  If you’re lucky, your life doesn’t slide slowly and disturbingly backward; if you’re very lucky and you work very hard, you might be able to drag things forward somewhat.  But certainly nothing develops in a traditionally plotlike way.  I know this, but I don’t particularly like it.  Part of what’s so upsetting about being in a liminal state is being in a state with no narrative at all, not even a treading-water type narrative.  Everything is disruption, everything feels at random.  Things are broken down into action items; things get accomplished, but not as a part of a larger whole (except perhaps a whole still in potentia).  Most of the time I struggle to make things in my life as narrative as possible.  I don’t mean this in the soap-opera way; I just mean that I try to maintain plot threads and encourage them to develop; also, if I’m going to introduce a subplot, I like it to stick around for a while.

Chapter Three:

GTD (and most organizational systems) break down the larger narrative structure (such as it is) of life until it no longer resembles a story but instead a set of elements which can be put together in one or another different ways (this I call the tinkertoy effect).  Using organizational systems like this makes me feel pretty off-kilter.  A good story, after all, should feel both surprising and inevitable: the tinkertoy effect turns my world all topsy-turvey not because it reveals the end of the story (I’m the author, after all), but by vivisecting its elements in such a way that they stop looking inevitable at all.  It frightens me.

Chapter Four:

I need an organizational system.  My life is kinda in shambles.  There are a lot of things to get done.  But being off-kilter, in my experience, actually contributes to the shambles!  And if  non-narrative organizational systems like GTD make me feel so off-kilter, they can’t really help me with the shambles (which might at this point, post car-crash*, be described actually as “shimbles”) that is (are?) my life at the mo’.  So! obviously, I need to develop a narrative organizational system.

To Be Continued.  In the next installment: GTD for the storyteller.

*I crashed my car today. It sucked. total shimbles.