I hate that it's been days since I last updated, but there's not much to be done about it. The only person I'm failing at this point is myself, and while I appreciate that others read this from time to time, I doubt anyone is on the edge of their seat every day anxiously awaiting the time a refresh of the page yields an update on the less than riveting things I've been up to since the previous post.
Anyway, that nonsense aside, I do feel guilty. So here's what I've done, and here's what I've been thinking, and here's what I want to try with the last two weeks of Intermission.
Friday was my daughter's prom, so I spent the better part of the day acting as her and my partner's driver shuttling them to and from hair and makeup appointments, then to a friend's place in service of that event. I got to spend some time with my new book Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer while waiting for them at various places. It's a really interesting read discussing the idea of detaching art from artists when the people responsible for the things we love have done abhorrent things.
One of the things that she does a great job expressing (that my paraphrasing will ultimately cheapen, so please read the book if this intrigues you at all) is the idea that art is created by artists, who have biographies and histories that might conflict with general moral standards you keep for yourself. So how do you reconcile that? Consuming or enjoying art is the merging of biographies -- the art/artists, and your own. Your history may allow you to be more accepting of an artist's unacceptable actions while others might look at them and vow never to consume their art again. A couple of examples given are for people like Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, and Michael Jackson. I'm about a third of the way through it. It's a very good read. Much recommended.
This weekend was pretty low key. Cleaning, shopping, watching movies, thinking thoughts.
What thoughts you might ask? Well, lots. I had some specifically about writing after finishing the last book I read, so let's stick with those.
I've been working on ideas for a novella that I could start writing. Fiction isn't something I give too much consideration to, because I don't really have a lot of great ideas for story telling that aren't “Hurr I'm mentally unhinged!” -- and I feel like I do a better job at that if I'm just honest about the fact that I'm describing myself. Some of the ideas that I've written down are about me, but there's an attempt at conceptualizing a bit of a narrative with them that exists outside of my brain.
Let's take a moment to detour on a thought process of mine for another idea I started considering this morning. One of the working titles I considered for the above ideas is “The Broken”, which is also the name of a song by Coheed and Cambria. Coheed fans may recognize that World of Lines is also a song of theirs, and from the same album no less. So I started thinking about writing things based on an album and its song titles. Not necessarily attempting to tell a cohesive story about the album itself, it would share no connection beyond the titles, but just something to serve as a bit of a prompt. I think I'd pluck some song titles from albums that are wildly impactful on me and go from there. So that's another idea. I want to double my efforts on these over the remaining two weeks.
These always balloon into something far longer than I anticipated. Thanks for reading.
<3 flurp