1. I can’t write yet; I haven’t had coffee.
2. Ooh, look at what came in the mail. I better try it on!
3. I really need to take a shower before I get actual dressed for the day. If I write for an hour, I’ll let myself have another coffee.
4. First I just need to read everything that’s been posted on the Previously TV Chernobyl message board.
5. Okay, I’ve made a list of the three stories and three essays I want to finish this summer. Does that count as working?
6. Oops–it’s ten to the hour; I have to walk in circles around my living room to get my 250 steps so that Fitbit doesn’t yell at me.
7. There’s my harp in the living room. Practicing is also on my to do list, so maybe I should do that first. Surely writing will be easier once I gain a bit of momentum.
8. Oh, the Duolingo app. That’s also on my to do list. Better stop everything and do that now so the owl doesn’t yell at me.
9. I wonder if I’ll write better once I’m clean. Maybe showering comes next.
10. There’s a lot of dust in the entryway by the bathroom. Maybe I’ll write better once my apartment is clean.
11. I need to focus. Should I set my task for the day at 500 words, or one hour of dedicated work?
12. I’m good at checking off tasks without actually making progress. Maybe I should focus on results rather than process.
13. Maybe these aren’t the right three essays and three stories to finish this summer. I better look back at my folders to see if others are better options.
14. Oh yeah, I never finished deleting duplicate photos from my camera uploads…
15. It’s 1 pm. I’ve done nothing. I am adrift in a sea of inertia and failure.
16. Surely writing will be easiest if it’s the only thing left on my to do list.
17. And then I wrote this instead of working on one of my stories.
18. I still really want that coffee.

Posted by Claire & filed under Blog. This post has no comments yet.

Brain Bugs, by Dean Buonomano: I don’t usually have this specific a vision for the structure of a book, but I really think this one – which details some of the ways that [our brains evolving to function generally at their best] can lead to [unintended negative (or simply superfluous) consequences], e.g. optimizing for short term benefits (the way we might have needed to when our survival was much less certain) rather than long-term ones – would have benefited tremendously from a much clearer and more explicit layout. (To be fair, that sentence would have also…) Rather than having to rely on the chapter titles to illuminate the “bug” of each chapter, I would have welcomed a more formal explanation: here is the function and how it would have been useful in the past/how it’s still useful; here is the “bug” and how it relates/what havoc it causes. The book never did this explicitly, but as it progressed the relationship between function and bug seemed to get clearer, and it also got more interesting as he discussed questions of religion and politics and infused more of his own opinions.

Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado: Intense and amazing. Before reading it, I thought the Law and Order short story might be a few too many pages to devote to an episodic conceit, but then…did I really want it to end? I did not. Favorites were “The Resident” and “Eight Bites.” As a side note, I’ll read anything published by Greywolf (same goes for Two Dollar Radio).

The Woman Inside, by E.G. Scott: Meh. When books of this genre (that is, the “hoping to be the next Gone Girl or Girl on a Train” genre) are bad, they’re still relatively propulsive (AKA I finished it, though I’m not the best measuring stick since I have a hard time not finishing things)…but this is certainly no Gone Girl. There were some plot surprises, but I’m pretty easy to trick, and nothing felt particularly original. If the writing itself had held up, I would have been willing to accept a less-than-novel plot, but…now I’m wishing for another book that’s as original as Before I Go to Sleep (which, prior to some googling, I misremembered as Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep (nope) and then Before I Wake (also no)).

Severance, by Ling Ma: I was on the waiting list for this at the library for what felt like forever, and when it arrived it was longer than I expected, on a rainy day when I wanted nothing more than to lie in bed and read. It felt of a piece with what I would call…low grade epidemic novels? There isn’t any danger from the “infected,” not even transmission of the disease, but the world has fundamentally changed. I’m trying to build a list of other low-grade epidemic novels, because I’m sure there are more out there, but so far I’m thinking mostly of The Dreamers. Transmission of the “disease” in that novel is also murky – it’s never figured out, whereas in Severance there’s definitively no person-to-person transmission.

Disappearing Earth, by Julia Philips: Julia is a good friend and I’ve been in a writing group with her for years, so I’ve seen this book since its very first drafts (and am extremely proud to be in the acknowledgements!) She worked with her editor for more than a year to turn the books from a collection of linked short stories into a novel–so while the writing was as stunning as I remembered it, it was my first time really experiencing the plot. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Each chapter is its own bright jewel, but it’s now also an incredible tapestry. Am I mixing metaphors? If so, I don’t care – it’s a beautiful, spangly, jewel-strewn quilt.

Posted by Claire & filed under Blog. This post has no comments yet.

It seems like a fairly safe (if mundane) statement to make that America/the world’s obsession with Marie Kondo and downsizing has to do with both environmental concerns (not that getting rid of personal belongings does any good for the environment directly, but I think the impulse is connected) and a desire for control (in a world – and for Americans, a nation – whose survival seems more and more uncertain by the day). Owning fewer things seems like it should require less mental space, as well: if I own a discrete number of countable objects, they take up less thinking time in aggregate.

For me it goes beyond a straightforward desire for control – it’s a longing for some sort of reset button, a way to return to a fabled baseline that I’ve never actually experienced. I am extremely lucky in where I live and in relatively low rent for NYC, but since I moved into my apartment almost a decade ago it’s never been what I would consider baseline clean. That is, it’s a little bit falling apart everywhere. I can see through the cracks in the floorboards, brick dust sometimes come tumbling off of the walls, there’s not great sound- or smell-proofing so there’s always noise from upstairs and occasionally smells from downstairs (which is currently a nail salon…)–but it’s pretty lovely and reasonable. Still, I have a bourgeoise dream of moving into a place that is, if not new, freshly painted, fully sealed, and so clean that (even if this turns out to be a fever dream of my own capabilities) I can imagine keeping it so clean forever, because all I’ll have to do is maintain!

The only places I’ve lived (since leaving my parents house, that is) that had that clean-slate quality were dorms or grad student housing, and by design all of those places felt temporary. I have this very impractical vision of moving into a new place (one of these magical, hyper clean, free of lead paint places) after preparing by getting rid of anything I own here that I don’t need anymore – digitizing all of the reams of paper I have sitting in a clear plastic bin that weighs down the top shelf of my closet, rifling through my costume box and paring it down to things that maybe actually see the dark of another Halloween, taking photos of the “memories” I’ve saved in file folders marked with years so that I can recycle the ticket stubs, programs, and letters…and then, somehow, doing this same Kondo-esque process to the overwhelming number of files and pictures (most of them, now, of these items I’ve carefully photographed and then discarded) until I have something manageable, a set of photos on my hard drive that’s small enough to actually look through and enjoy from time to time.

If I had few enough objects resting on the floor that I could lift and dust underneath each one

If I had the exact number of pairs of earrings as the number of pairs of earrings I actually wear in real life

If my items were so manageable that I could not only keep them all clean but even keep the cleaning products clean

If for one single minute there could be no things left to do

If I’ve said something like this before, and I’m sure I have, it’s because it’s still tumbling through my mind on a daily basis, but I haven’t quite figured it out yet – not just the solution, but even how to say it, to explain the idea of this mythical baseline in which huge undertakings are no longer required, and all that’s left are the maintenance tasks like folding clean laundry and washing dirty dishes, leaving wide open fields of mental and physical space.

Posted by Claire & filed under Blog. This post has no comments yet.

Today I read this article with one of my students–it focuses on the role of repetition in listening to/enjoying music–and then started to make a list of things that felt analogous to the Diana Deutsch experiment described therein (to summarize, Deutsch recorded a spoken sentence, then looped a phrase “sometimes behave so strangely;” after hearing the loop numerous times, the original sentence (which on first lesson sounded wholly spoken if slightly melodic) now sounds like someone speaking before suddenly switching to singing))

A contrarian once (just now) told me that he thinks we train ourselves away (on a daily, hourly, microsecond-ly basis) from perceiving the fact that we’re essentially singing whenever we speak (that is, everything we say has a pitch) rather than being manipulated (as in the Deutsch experiment) toward hearing singing where it doesn’t exist. (Then he sang and whistled “so strangely” in a delightful but repetitive manner for half an hour.)

When I was in high school, seniors were tasked with writing an “I-Search” as our entire quarter grade for English class – a 15-20 page essay on whatever topic we chose, and with research that was more exploratory and participatory than a typical research paper. Mine was an attempt to “teach myself to hear English without understanding it,” as if it were just a set of phonemes divorced of meaning. I think I made a soundtrack to go along with it, and I definitely had a hard time finishing it: there were a number of sleepless nights that fall because I just couldn’t stop adding to it, and when it was finally time to print it out to turn in, our printer broke and my dad took me to Kinko’s at four in the morning, after which he sputtered, “You have to sleep! You have to go to bed!” (I did hear the meaning and content behind those words, but my dad was the first person I was able to – in real life; the first not-in-real-life voice was Bono’s – hear without understanding…so he was instrumental to the project in several ways!)

Although I’m sure I talked about “repeating a word until it loses all meaning” in the I-Search, I’d actually never heard it termed “semantic satiation” until today. I like it…”I’ve eaten so many consonants; I’m stuffed! No more room at the inn!”

I’ve digressed so much (and this – lampshading your digression – is something that I gently chided my college students for during my first semester of teaching when more than one of them turned in a draft that included the (non)-sentence: “But I digress.” They were not writing blogs, however) that I now need to return to what I promised in the first sentence of this post: things that feel analogous to Deutsch’s experiment in that they alter our perception even as we’re aware of what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. They are! 1. The game (favored by those slightly older than the semantic satiation crowd) in which your friends hold your arms off the ground until they’re practically numb, and then lower them slowly so that they feel like they’re “going through the floor,” and 2. The rubber hand illusion.

Posted by Claire & filed under Blog. This post has no comments yet.

For my birthday, which was yesterday, I gave myself the gift of no longer running for the subway.

I wish I could say I came to this decision 1. based on ideals about either a) leaving early enough not to need to run for the subway or b) some sort of well-developed thoughts about whether saving two minutes is really important, or 2. because of some critical junction of age (no running for oldsters!) and technology (perhaps it isn’t actually useful, in the end, to know exactly when the train is coming)…but really what happened is I tripped on the sidewalk (it may have been damp, it was definitely dark, but I’m fairly certain Occam’s clumsiness was the root cause), tore the knee of my jeans, slightly bruised the heel of my right hand (I just typed “heal of my write hand,” which sounds more optimistic), and absolutely destroyed the heel of my left hand, by which I mean there’s probably still a flap of skin several centimeters deep on a Brooklyn sidewalk four days later.

I would say it was a face-palm of a move, but it was more accurately palm-to-concrete.

Also, although my jeans saved me from going to a wedding next weekend with a skinned knee, my knee does resemble nothing in the world more than a plum.

There was a guy walking down the sidewalk towards me when I took my flying leap, and as I lay there trying to get my bearings, he…kept walking.

Fortunately, as I was holding my palms up to the ethereal lights of the subway (having missed the train that I was running for, but getting another one fairly quickly, which is just one more reason not to run) – checking the level of swelling on my left hand-heel, which looked like it might actually burst and was bleeding all over itself and my other hand – a man across from me pulled out a paper towel and offered it to me while saying kindly, “I noticed you were bleeding.”

Indeed.

My hand was NUMB, and after the initial sheen of blood was gone, the part that had made contact with the ground was still a deep red.

I’ve been impressed by the inverse relationship between [the decrease in how utterly abysmal the heel of my hand looks] vs. [the increase in the sunset-nature of my knee], and originally I planned on including photos with this post, but…I’ve learned over my many years that no one is as interested in gross things as I am (especially bruises. People watch other people pop zits on YouTube; surely bruises are less gross than that??). So I settled for texting two of my friends “Who wants to see something gross” and then minimally taking into account their response (“I’m afraid to say yes”).

And if I’m late over the next week or so, I have two very colorful explanations for why I didn’t take extreme measures to attempt to ensure my timeliness.

Happy birthday to me!

Posted by Claire & filed under Blog. This post has no comments yet.

I’ve made a goal to write 500 words a day and this may be a way of finding a loophole/avoiding the short story I’m working on – but if, as they say, writing is a muscle, consider this flexing. Even if I’m flexing one muscle while lying in bed watching TV with the rest of them.

And in this scenario what I’m watching (unless there’s a gymnastics competition, preferably with either a competent or ludicrous commentator) is almost definitely the Australian teen ballet show Dance Academy, which has been on my Netflix list for years and which I’ve blasted through the first season of (the second and third are NOT on Netflix for inexplicable reasons, but if after reading this you’re DYING to watch, you can find it on YouTube!) It’s every comforting thing you could ever want in a series, down to the voiceovers at the beginning and end of (most) episodes that tell you what the theme and lesson of the week (or of the, um, hour, if you happen to be watching several many in a row) is.

I’m going to pose a few questions which are based on very little data (that is, mostly this show + Center Stage) and on ignoring the elements that don’t further my case. Such as: Why is the protagonist in every performing arts show/book/movie the one with the bad technique/lack of experience? Why never the one who has the drive and experience even though her natural abilities aren’t as strong (that dancer tends to end up in the villain role and also occupies the eating disorder storyline), or the super naturally talented one with the lackadaisical attitude (hello wild best friend to the protagonist, the role that tends to nearly self-sabotage by means of carelessness before coming around in the end). I understand that there’s a storied history of rooting for the underdog, but underdog doesn’t have to translate to “new kid.” Why not mix it up a bit? Maybe throw in a supernaturally talented best friend who haunts the studio.

I’ve found that in dance books for middle grade or YA readers there doesn’t tend to be a love interest, but in my sample size of two data points (Dance Academy and Center Stage), the initial love interest is the older blond choreographer/playboy, and the *true* love interest is the fellow new-ish dancer. Fortunately the constraints of the two-hour format forced Center Stage to avoid a lot of tedious back and forth/love triangles, while Dance Academy’s episodic mode has led to some very tedious intersecting love polygons.

The Dance Academy theme song is very reminiscent of Degrassi: TNG, though there are far fewer characters to introduce. It seems like the budget for series 1 of Dance Academy didn’t provide for minor characters, such that literally all of the lines spoken by the young dancers were spoken by the six main characters, unlike Degrassi’s cast of multitudes.

Thank you for indulging my flexing/attempt at minimizing the feeling that all 500 words a day must be FANTASTIC or they don’t count/excuse to watch more Dance Academy.

Posted by Claire & filed under Blog. This post has no comments yet.

The Circle, by Dave Eggers: I think that in order to accurately gauge whether this is prescient dystopia or heavy-handed…I have to try to imagine reading it back when it came out in 2013. And I think in 2013 it would have seemed dark but clearly exaggerated, while now it seems…pretty close to the actual state of things. So I’ll say it was, indeed, unfortunately prescient, and also thoroughly enjoyable, even though there was one comparison (or three, really) at the end that was a little too on the nose. ETA: the more I learn about Facebook the more accurate The Circle seems, which I understand is likely because Eggers *based* the novel on places like Facebook, but it still gives me the heebie jeebies.

Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi: Engrossing storytelling, but the writing didn’t amaze me, even feeling pedestrian in places. And the end of each chapter felt abrupt, even though I don’t have anything against linked stories/novels in stories generally. I like the overall structure, but I think the book would have benefitted from spending more time with each character. There would also be less need for exposition from the descendant characters, which felt sort of wedged in to let the reader know how each new character related to the previous one.

The Dreamers, by Karen Thompson Walker: I loved The Age of Miracles and I like that this similarly deals with time behaving in unusual ways (though that’s not quite the right way of putting it – it’s more like time being altered by physical processes, like the slowing of the earth’s rotation or a sleeping sickness plague). I did find the writing beautiful in most places and then curiously sentimental in a few, and the ending left me a little lukewarm. I don’t mind when an author has a neat, intriguing premise but an ending that doesn’t quite match it, but I felt like this one petered out more than it had to. I think I feel that way because the sleeping sickness wasn’t the backdrop to a story; it was the story itself, so I was hoping there would be an ending to match. But overall I was absorbed and would recommend.

*I’m finding it hard not to be bland. Maybe I’m subconsciously hovering over my opinions, afraid to let them be seen? Then again, it’s not so hard to believe that three books in a row would engross but not stun me.

The Water Cure, by Sophie Mackintosh: I spoke too soon about the monotony of my responses to books lately, because I loved this. At first I was wary because I’ve grown weary recently of very elliptical books, the coyness and crypticity, the meting out of vague details without really committing to anything. This is emphatically not that way; you have the sense that you know everything that characters know, and likely more. It reminded me strongly of the movie Dogtooth, but when I saw that I came away feeling cheated by never finding out what the parents’ motivations were for keeping their children away from the world. I don’t feel that with The Water Cure, whether it’s a change in me (and that seems likely: it seems all too obvious now why you might want to keep your children away from the world) or something about the book itself.

Trust Exercise, by Susan Choi: I received this galley inside of a tote bag at a party for the Center for Fiction’s new Brooklyn location. The writing and characters felt incredibly remote to me (perhaps by design, but I didn’t like it). When I started it, I kept thinking that the feeling it gave me reminded me of Serial (which I listened to recently for the first time), and I couldn’t figure out why (“high school,” “terrible events,” and “high schoolers that seemed older than I felt in high school” didn’t seem like a particularly strong trifecta of similarity) until I realized it was because the remoteness of the characters made it harder for me to feel immersed or to picture things – as if I were listening to a podcast instead of reading a book. (This hinges more on how I listen to podcasts than it does on potential differences in visualization based on spoken vs. written words.) Then I got to part two…which is hard to write about without spoilers. And that’s where I am now, so maybe I’ll have additional thoughts when I’m finished.

Posted by Claire & filed under Blog. This post has no comments yet.

1. Things I’ve overheard recently in my house:

“No…horribly, I’m still in the dating pool.”

“This is my first time being a butt guy, I think. That makes me a team player.”

I didn’t intentionally juxtapose those sentiments…they were just the only two interesting things I eavesdropped lately. I swear!

2. Thinking further about chores: Another way to slot chores into column A or column B is…well, I wanted this to be a legitimate methodology, but now that I’ve begun the sentence I realize that actually all I’m about to say is “There is just one reason I like making the bed in the mornings but HATE changing the sheets.” (That reason is not all that interesting in the absence of a larger framework (ha! Bedframe-work), but I’ll tell you anyway: making the bed in the morning gives me a lovely, clean, made bed. Changing the sheets gives me the least-made bed of all time for some number of minutes while I a) wash the sheets and put them back on, or b) sit around grumpily before getting new sheets from the closet, because I don’t like wrestling with the corners of the mattress and because the fold-job I’ve done on the fitted sheets in the closet makes me feel incompetent.)

I suppose there aren’t really other chores that capture this dichotomy so neatly, other than the general category of “it has to get messier before it gets clean.” That works to a degree – maybe your bookshelf is presentable but not organized, and in order to make it both presentable AND organized you have to chuck all of the books off the shelf and start fresh – but not categorically. Your floor doesn’t get dustier or less presentable when you start dusting it, and your laundry looks no worse when you’re in the process of washing it than it does in the hamper (sequestered, in both cases!)

3. I had a dream that I had just gotten to college, and in the dream the dorm room looked exactly as I had expected college would look. Somehow, this was the most unsettling element of the experience. Things aren’t supposed to look the way you imagine them before you’ve ever been – any time I’ve tried to picture someone’s house, or room, or a new school, I’ve arrived to find that, no; the entire structure somehow feels, regardless of actual cardinal direction, as if it’s facing a different way than it did in my imagination. But this dream-college didn’t. It perfectly mimicked the interior I had created in my mind (my dream mind; this wasn’t some waking vision of college that I’d long held before attending college – anyway, those visions of how you believe something will look usually dissolve quickly after you see the actual place), and was uncanny for it.

4. I’ve been reading the NYT series on procrastination and am very curious about their terminology – “procrastination” and “precrastination.” The only other pair of terms that I can immediately think of are “probiotic” and “prebiotic.”

Posted by Claire & filed under Blog. This post has no comments yet.

I know I said something in my last post to the effect of “and he doesn’t talk about men’s bodies in the way he comments on women’s…” Okay, I take it back. This guy has something to say about nearly every physical aspect of the men competing at the Stuttgart World Cup:

Their acrobatics (which, obviously, fair game, but the phrasing itself was a little lacking): “And then he dropped back, and it was very ugly in the end.”

“Ohp…what was that?”

“You can see the knees were not adding any beauty to that particular movement”

Their legs: “Oh my, he’s lost some weight, hasn’t he?”

Their tattoos: “He’s a mobile art gallery, isn’t he, my goodness!”

And…their tongues?: “He puts out his tongue with relief.”

“Tongue came out in celebration as well.”

“The tongue comes out in frustration as well.”

This guy needs a new repertoire.

Posted by Claire & filed under Blog. This post has no comments yet.

So there are two “rebroadcast” commentators for gymnastics on The Olympic Channel. One is Olly Hogben, who was just interviewed on Gymcastic and who makes a point to 1) not infantilize female gymnasts; 2) know the names of the skills, the scoring system, etc. He is overall delightful, and manages to say things like “and…there’s an accidental dismount” when a gymnast falls in a way that sounds empathetic rathr than mocking.

Then there’s the other guy.

He sounds like he’s probably also British but significantly older (but what do I know – when I can only hear someone’s voice, I essentially just picture them as a large sentient chin). I won’t fault him for trouble pronouncing names (but I reserve the right to giggle when he repeatedly says “cereal” for Cyril, and I will never understand why, upon realizing he couldn’t pronounce Padarariu, he decide to say it over and over again with slight variations, as if he were chewing on a particularly sticky candy), but the *other* things he says…I haven’t watched the men’s individual all-around competition from the Stuttgart World Cup yet (I was maybe not going to because I know who won and men’s gymnastics is 1/3-1/2 boring depending on who’s doing the parallel bars), but I have heard him do commentary on men’s competitions before, and while he says just as many inaccurate things about the scores, he doesn’t comment on their appearance or gush over them in a proprietary way (actually, I may be wrong about that…I have some lingering memory of him gushing over the men’s bodies in a slightly different proprietary way last time).

It’s just somewhat baffling as he clearly has no idea what will cause a routine to score in the 14s versus the 11s and so was constantly startled by the scores. And though I’m sure he intended no ill-will, he kept saying things like, “Well, she’s taken the second position with that score! But not for long, I’m sure.” I was so disappointed that Spencer at Balance Beam Situation watched the broadcast that had Tim and Nastia commentating, so I can’t even look to his blog for other gems from this guy.

Of course, now I feel I should make a case study of this and watch the men’s competition, especially as I’m sure it will include many of this commentator’s references to “bunny hops.”

One fantastic thing that came from me watching this (in addition to seeing Simone, Mustafina, and the aforementioned Padarariu) is that I found a song I heard at least a decade ago in China and thought I would never hear again. I could hum it for quite a while after I got back, but there weren’t iPhones then and trying to transliterate melodic syllables in another language doesn’t get you very far in a google search (neither, incidentally, does searching for “very popular Chinese song”). At this competition in Stuttgart…it was playing in the background at the arena! And I managed to Shazam it in spite of the commentary running over it, so now I have it forever…although I still have no idea what it’s called because it came up in Shazam in Mandarin (which is logical, but means I cannot tell you what it is).

Speaking of music and melodic syllables…women’s artistic gymnastics has a rule (I want to say this is new-ish, by which I mean post-2008) that although floor music can’t have words or lyrics, it can have vocalization…which has led to some gymnasts doing floor routines while a singer scats wildly in the background, or mumbles, or emotes in a most extreme way without quite saying anything that could be definitely pinpointed as a word. I mean, someone has the Grease song with “wop-bop-a-loo-bop, a wop-bam-boom!” or something along those lines.

Posted by Claire & filed under Blog. This post has no comments yet.