SPACE BASKET

How did you get here, Googlers of the world? Some recent search phrases that have (mis)led lost souls to ye olde Practice Space:

hockey player names that sound like food

are beagles supposed to eat Cool Whip

1950s housewife fetish

is my head an antenna

leaving a message listening practice (this one was from Berlin)

what could i get at walmart to practice deep throat

vibrating sounds gay

space basket

homoerotic wrestling stories

devotionals for deer hunters

pedal bumping girls

8 yr old using buoyancy in a sentence

stomach small girls video flet vacuum

are capricorn girls admirable

THERE WE ALL DWELL

Quote of the day comes from an interview with David Shields in the Tin House Summer Reading issue (which really lives up to its promise, by the way--I've been reading it on the porch in the afternoon with cold drinks, and at night in bed with the fans breezing, engrossed):

"The great book...takes us down into the deepest levels of human insecurity, and there we find that we all dwell."

An elderly Steinway baby grand filled a third of the little cabin I was holed up in at MacDowell. When I was feeling stuck I sat down and hammered out some elementary chords to sing this lonesome song, which is the song for chapter seven, which takes place in Bemidji.

The Replacements, "Here Comes A Regular" (alternate version)

LIZ PHAIR GOES ALL JOAQUIN PHOENIX

Has she lost her mind?

HERITAGE VS HISTORY

I'm reading a fascinating new book called North Country: The Making of Minnesota by Mary Lethert Wingerd (just out from the University of Minnesota Press.) It's about (per the flap copy) "the complex origins of the state--origins that have often been ignored in favor of legend and a far more benign narrative of immigration, settlement, and cultural exchange." Specifically, it's about the dynamics between Native people and Europeans in the 200 years pre-statehood, up until the brutal U.S.-Dakota War in 1862, which she dubs Minnesota's Civil War. 

Early on, Wingerd writes:

But heritage does not suffice as history. As scholar David Lowenthal points out, heritage is crafted to affirm what we wish to be true about ourselves, whereas history strives (albeit imperfectly) to discover the truth about the past. History, of course, is far more complex and problematic than heritage. History must come to terms with injustice and tragedy as well as achievement, asking hard questions that heritage, steeped in nostalgia, tends to obscure.

This is something I'm thinking about on the Fourth of July, an ambivalent holiday for me. Fireworks, pretty. Barbecued veggie burgers, fine. Day off, delightful. But the explosions send poor Emmett under the table trembling, and, when I'm inside soothing him and unable to see them, the sounds make me think of what it would be like to live in a place where explosions do go off outside your door, and how terrifying that would be. (Much sympathy to the PTSD veterans.) After all, they are mimicking war. And, to take it back to Wingerd's words, the Fourth is such a holiday of heritage, not history: a day when people celebrate what we wish to be true about America, what we want to believe about the nation and its origins. There's a wilfull innocence to the American independence narrative, almost teenaged in its naive the-students-take-over-the-school triumph (but now look who's the principal), and this must be the genesis of American love affair with the idea of the rebel. James Dean, teen movies, the cowboy, the so-called Minutemen at the border (a shame their fame usurps these ones), the rock-star figure, the Tea Party, figures that are almost exclusively white and male--they're all born from this.

And I too love the rebel figure, albeit in other forms than above. I just wish the collective American imagination could encompass all the people who protested and fought for freedom and the liberty to live their lives within these borders we made up, who were imprisoned, enslaved, cheated, banished to reservations, and killed for doing so. In America. 

On a pettier tack, the other thing that gets me on the Fourth of July is that I can't stand the American flag, on a purely aesthetic level. For me: irredeemable. It makes me think of tacky straw hats and marching-band music. As a kid I used to look at the FLAG entry in our old World Book Encyclopedia and gaze with envy upon the bold, interesting flags of places like Aruba, Bhutan, South Korea, Swaziland. (The CIA factbook has them all on one page--almost all the Caribbean nations have really cool ones.) 

Emmett Johnson: scared of fireworks.

IF YOU WANT TO TAKE A CHANCE I'LL LEAD YOU AWAY

The song "Beautiful Things" by Quasi brings me pure pleasure. I listen to it every day. In Oberlin, I would listen to it on headphones while I walked the dogs down leafy streets in the bright morning, through neighborhoods both ramshackle and grand. Here in the woods I wake up with the light and it is the first thing I want to put on. I bike down the sunny dirt road from the library to my studio and it goes through my head the whole time as I wind around potholes and the breeze lifts my hair, which is maybe the best way I can describe what this song feels like.

It's the rare song that is truly genuinely happy without sounding cartoonish or twee or saccharine. It's a cover of song by the 3-D's, and from Score!: 20 Years of Merge Records: THE COVERS--which came out last summer, technically, but I'm declaring it my anthem for summer 2010.

Quasi, "Beautiful Things"

ANALOG TIME

I had this thing last night where I felt a little mopey and left the party at 9:30 to come back and ostensibly work. People were playing Scrabble and pool and ping-pong and lounging around the big old leather couches drinking wine, but I felt conversed-out and unsure. Maybe I said I was going to work just to justify going home. 

So I sat down at my desk and turned on the lamp and listlessly added and subtracted a sentence here and there, just to have done at least something before I went to bed to read. I was transcribing things from my notebook, and it felt like transcription. And stitching these pieces in there felt like labor: requisite transition, requisite image, requisite zoom-out shot of analytical prose.

I sighed and glanced at the clock. 10:22? I'd done more than I thought. That gave me a little puff of energy so I thought I'd just go ahead and do one more thing. The next time I remembered to check, it was 11:30 and I had three new pages.

Time is the thing I had been wrangling all day--well, in fact, the main thing I keep having to wrangle with, writing long-form for the first time. What is a novel but a massive undertaking in time measurement and management? And I didn't expect to find it at that hour, but my favorite thing in writing is exactly that feeling of losing time altogether. It's maybe one of the only actual unequivocably pleasurable parts of writing, being so present in the work that the world falls away.

Whereas when that happens on the internet, it's total despair. I tell you, life without the internet--here in my remote outpost, I only use it once or twice a day, at the library--is life with a totally different experience of time. The day seems so much longer, in the best way. If you're in a chronically wifi-ed environment, without the luxury of premillennial levels of disconnection, download MacFreedom and you'll see what I mean.

You know what else moves shockingly fast? A fox. 

The Magnetic Fields, "When the Open Road is Closing In"

UNRULY HERD

I wrote for six and a half hours yesterday. On ONE scene in chapter six. I wrote so hard I got mad. I got up from my desk at 5:15 to take a shower and spun around and walked right out of the bathroom and sat back down, I could not do anything until the damn scene was concluded.

By the time I collapsed into my seat at dinner I felt like a border collie that had been herding sheep all day. Exhausted from corralling all these wayward bleating misshapen things, ready to flop onto the floor panting and lie there for hours, also satisfied that I had at last fully done the work I feel wired to do.

A quote Wallace Stegner kept me going: Hard writing makes easy reading.
God let's hope.

 

By the end of the day, put me in a bucket, I'm done.

But that's still hours away. Half the chapter-six sheep are still out wandering, and the fence keeps moving. Back to work.

New Bad Things, "Josh Has A Crush on a Femme from Reed"

CHAPTER THREE

...got seriously appended with some essential back story yesterday. Turns out it wasn't so finished after all. 

Jónsi, "Hengilas"

SOUNDTRACKING

I'm holed up in the woods writing and I won't say much more about that because a) I have to get back to it and b) you shouldn't talk too much about what you're writing or you won't want to write it. When people ask me what this novel is about, I have figured out the easiest thing to say is "people making bad decisions for good reasons," or "family." 

Generally I write exclusively to the epic sweeps and dulcet murmuring of Sigur Ros, though Amiina and Múm work for me too--the magic combo of Icelandic + verbally minimal/incomprehensible leads me right to that clearing in my tangled brain, ever since that very first listen of Ágætis Byrjun. 

But making soundtracks and theme songs for characters and stories is irresistible. A tool of both procrastination and characterization, equally fundamental parts of the process.

Today I restructured chapter two and here is its song.

Judee Sill, "The Kiss" 

ONE-SENTENCE MUSIC REVIEWS WHILE DRIVING TO CLEVELAND TODAY

The New Pornographers, Challengers
ME: They are the indie rock Muppets.

Vampire Weekend, Contra
COMPANION, with slight frown: This is a little bit too Lion King for me.