LookingLand

i have been contemplating the wonder that is Edwin Forrest's hair. mostly because, in an era sans mousse and hair gel and various other "product", it is quite the tower of achievement.

also because it's more interesting than anything i have going on personally. don't believe me? take a look for yourself!


anyway, here's the deal. i started out the new year making a big important proclamation to the effect that i would not be making any big important proclamations this year: that i would just stick to my guns, go with the flow, and finish something, even if it was, to my thinking, mediocre.

but oh what a foolish wretched mortal i am. the intensity with which i have been focused on In Pursuance of Said Conspiracy has once again burned me to a crispy soulless husk. i made definite progress with it, but it's clear by the way i have stalled out since last week that i cannot get much farther at the moment. it's just too many details to try to keep track of for my wee, atrophying brain. every time i read the transcripts, i just get dizzy at the thought of trying to adapt them. so much so that i actually considered saying: ah screw it, i won't try to shape anything out of it, i'll just take Poore's transcript and use it entirely (yeah, all 1200 pages of it). immediately upon which one of my few remaining lively synapses sporked itself to death in desperate, horrified protest.

so you can see why Edwin Forrest's hair is so phenomenally interesting. no?

well here's the deal (always a deal, right?): i don't feel like i can quit with everything i have going on right now. Reconstruction updates today (it being monday and all), and i have about two weeks worth of pages left on the buffer before i run out (gah!). i have had a mighty battle this weekend with trying to decide whether to press on with it (at least to finish this one section), but it seems a long way to go ~ and it is. so i haven't made any decisions about it. what may happen is that i switch the style of the artwork midway through (to the annoyance of all). having written the dang thing about 80 times now, i wonder at the wisdom of rewriting it and adapting it into a new medium like this. it may well be the definition of crazy.

i leave you with death in cavalry boots, contemplating the absurdity of it all. my brother drew this last night because he wanted to draw death being contemplative and i said: put boots on him.

so there you have it. i love his knobby knees.

this is just a necessary update on the whole pursuance thing:

the bad thing about saturating your brain with victorian writing is that you inadvertently start emulating it.

Mr. Hanty never settles easily into anything, being by nature vigilant and by experience knowledgeable in the myriad ways that fickle Fortune turns her face from the favored.

yeah, wow. i churned that buttery crumpet out with about a dozen others like pez this afternoon. i can't decide if it's bad writing or just really amusing.

the book is mostly a mess. i've lost confidence in doing it justice. the characters are more alive than ever for me, i feel like i have a solid handle on them, but now they're bopping around in my head, knocking into each other like little shorebirds puttering drunk in the surf.

spent i don't know how much time cutting Poppet's defense from 17 pages down to 11, but it still seems pretty dang long and even though i think i did a pretty brilliant job of preserving its integrity and tightening some of its very victorian rhetorical devices, i just don't know otherwise what to do with it.

i want to hire an artist and dispense with the narrative. the dialogue is all written, it's painting in the rest of the scenes that's making me crazy.

i am trying, so hard, not to get so frustrated that i throw this thing out the window. i want to finish it ~ at least so that it's complete beginning to end, even if that means i have to shove it in a drawer for a few months in order to get some perspective on it. at least then i can come back to it as a whole instead of scattershot as it is now. for having generated such an extensive and elaborate outline for this project, i sure have made an unsightly mess of keeping it all organized.

: o p

p.s. lj seems to having some strange notification lag going on ~ so i'm not ignoring anybody, i promise. if i haven't responded to something it's because i have no idea i was s'pose to.

i've been working to break down (chronologically) the trial transcript for the last two days. two days and at least ten hours of my weekend. i'm on page 123 of 400 (in a tiny-font, two column format that is making my eyes bleed at this point).

needless to say, this isn't going as well as hoped.

it's suddenly (and painfully) clear to me why no one has ever tried to do this before. how do you cram nearly 50 days of testimony (well over 300 hours of endless questions and answers) into something like a coherent, manageable plot?

i confess i am feeling daunted and frustrated (and i haven't even started on the newspaper accounts yet!)

how did i manage to complicate this so much?

farg.

the first time i read this transcript (more years ago than i would like to recall), it was while sitting on the floor in the university library (i never checked books out ~ i just read them there). i don't remember how many hours i spent pouring through it and i know there were whole sections i skipped or skimmed over. but i remember how car-wreck-compelling it was to me even then: the absurdity of some of the witnesses, the absurdity of some of the arguments. at the time i thought Mr. Poppet was out of his mind. his line of defense influenced my whole way of thinking about 19th century law, medicine, war, and justice. and even though i thought he was a perfect boob at the time, his closing argument impelled me to write From Slaughter's Mountain.

ahhhh....it's good to revisit your roots.

now i think i need a break from this stuff because i'm pretty sure it's eating a hole in my brain and i'm not sure my brain can withstand anymore ventilation.

: o p

p.s. to Mr. Poppet: i no longer think you are a boob (in case that's not obvious).



this is my favorite picture of Mr. Poppet
(taken when he was at harvard, i think ~ or yale)
he's probably about 17-18 years old here

p.p.s. another title possibility: The King Villain of Them All

been reading Dickens, just for fun.

(fun being a relative term, i know).

got weirded out realizing (how did i not know this?) that Dickens wrote a Christmas story almost every year throughout his career (and five Christmas novels). i feel there's no point explaining why that disturbs me.

it's bizarre to go back to one's earliest writing influences and see how much they have shaped, poisoned, galvanized one's own work. no wonder my prose is so purple when i'm not watching it. and editorial, and melodramatic.

i mean, i love Dickens, but good Lord ~ it's been nearly twenty years since i've read his books and now i see how sentimental and Victorian it truly is. it's the very antithesis of the kind of writing i've migrated toward since i met ondaatje. no wonder i'm at war with my writing.



this weekend was a wash. didn't do my homework or anything else for that matter. on a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of self-care i'd give it about a 3. not so good.

this morning, a post by cathellisen had me thinking about the revelation that my kennedy center writing experience was ~ sitting with maria irene fornes and listening to her talk on about being such a poseur and in a moment of serendipty i decided to clean away some stuff on my paper rack and found among the papers, my notes from that very workshop. i want to share, later, her analogy of writing as a kite. i tried to capture it here but i need the notes to get it right.

i also realized that ever since i started f-locking this journal, i've found it a bore and a distraction (not you, me). i bore myself so i can't imagine how much i must bore other people.

i said i would post snippets from my NaNo novel and i'll keep that promise and f-lock those particular posts, but the heck with the rest. no more filtering, no more locking. which means no more boring all of you about the particulars of writing. either you're writing about writing or you're writing. people can claim to do both, but something is suffering in the end for it.

: o p