Good morning. Hello. How are you? #571
A lot of writing about writing: college writing, short sentences writing, writing about eggs. Plus a vote on book covers!
Good morning! Hello. How are you today? Did you have a good weekend? I am good. That Wordle was really hard. That Station Eleven show gave me nightmares. It is too stressful! I am stressed out! There is lots of snow on the ground. I’m listening to Sol Invictus, since I just sold one of their CDs. Was vaguely worried thay, too, were secret racists along with Death in June, but Tony Wakeford seems to be fairly unequivicol on the matter, so I guess I will indulge and check out this 2018 album, Necropolis. I don’t especially like it, though, so, you know. I guess this will not be an ongoing dilemma.
So! Covers! I am all done with the GMHHAY book edit. It’s in PDF form, ready for the printers. Yay me! But I need to finish the cover. I took all your votes, and narrowed the cover photo down to four photos. Here they are. Let me know your votes. Again, ignore the type for now. I tried to make all the type the same this time so you wouldn’t be distracted by it:
The other remaining question: Should I keep the period and question mark in the title? I feel like yes? But Lisa told me I should get rid of it. I know titles don’t usually have punctuation, but…I just feel like it’s so much a part of things. I’m not sure. What do you think?
Anyway, had a nice weekend in the snow. It was the perfect show shoveling snow. Janet got to do most of the driveway in the morning before I could get out there, since I was watching Jane. But she left enough for me that I could get my snow shovelling yah yahs out. It really is great fun. Also tromped over to the compost bins and dumped and turned the compost, which I do not remember doing in the snow last year but who knows who can remember anything from a year ago.
There’s a new edition of the Vital Times in my eggs this week and that is very exciting and that’s the sort of thing that gets my jollies off these days. I can just imagine, like, a year after the pandemic’s gone and I’m still so scarred that I’m still staying at home all the time and someone invites me to a wedding or something and I’m like “I really can’t, there might be a new edition of the Vital Times this week and I really don’t want to miss that.”
I got all my chores done, but honestly, there really weren’t that many. I cleaned the stove, that was gross. I went through some old keepsake boxes looking for old rave fliers for a project I’m working on with some friends, and I found a few, but not the ones I specifically remember, so they seem to be in some other boxes. I did find an amazing trove of all of my college papers, though, that was really exciting. I spent a few hours photographing them and converting them into PDFs and adding them to my “all writing folder.” I gotta say, some of them were pretty good! I hadn’t re-read my economics “thesis” on Georges Bataille in years, and it really held up. I really don’t know why they had me writing 20+ page papers as an undergrad, but they did. I think it might have been a 500-level class? Anyway, it was good! I forgot about the part exploring potlatch theory into the future, past the Marshall Plan and Cold War, I liked that part. I suspect now, Bataille would point to Crypto as evidence of the accursed share. I whiffed a paper on the Economic influences of Medieval, Gothic and Romanesque art, the grad student who graded it was not having it and gave me a B-, which is generally my memory of college: Bs. But most of the rest of the papers I have grades on are As. There’s great papers about 23 Envelope, Beardsley’s Salome, and Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare, that are all As. An Edvard Munch did not fare as well. B. There’s some fairly competent political analysis about electoral systems and state power. The electoral systems paper reads ahead of its time, before we all got obsessed with ranked choice ballots, but that’s just because my prof was ahead of his time on that stuff. There’s a book review about a book on the UN I got a B- on that I am still a little bitter about. “Not enough external opinion” in a paper asking for my analysis. Harrumph.
Then there are the writing exercises. This is funny. I took a semester off from BU and went to UAF in Fairbanks because I was in love with a girl. But UAF didn’t have a lot of classes I needed to take, so I ended up taking a writing class, which of course I loved, and fell in love with my professor, and got all As, and even then it was so obvious that I was better at writing than, like, economics n shit, but what are you gonna do. There’s a middling paper on feminism that starts off great, really ahead of its time, really nails wage gaps and structural sexism beyond wage gaps, and things like that, but then gets hung up on the terminology of feminism that is really very unfortunate, but I guess at least I sorted all that out in 1991. There are verious writing exercises, memory exercises, evocative descriptions and the like. There’s a fairly hilarious short story about the end of the world that I had completely forgotten about that was still fairly entertaining to read. I mean, definitely could use a couple more revisions, but it was not bad! I might just publish it tomorrow LOL.
It was interesting doing that this weekend, because I am currently reading this book, Several Short Sentences about Writing that’s making me feel like a fraud. I don’t like it at all, it’s completely antithetical to the way I write, it belittles flow, it obsesses over sentence length, it eschews spontenaeity in writing. The whole book just makes me feel like an alien. It’s like okay cool, you totally wasted that twenty years learnign to get your thoughts to paper as exacltly and quickly as possible. No one needs it, doesn’t matter if you got really good at it.
I mean, look. Yes, I know. I write too many words, I don’t edit enough, I don’t often have a point to my writing. These GMHHAY’s are all over the place on their topics, and it is legitimately self-sabotaging to put some insightful analysis of a proposed new Federal Law snuggled between some random shit about egg cracking methods and TV shows and expect it to have any influence on the world whatsoever. And I know that you often get bored reading these entries. And that you skim. And that’s okay. See! We have a deal. I write too much, you skim, I bold things so you can skim to the parts that are interesting to you, you get mildly entertained from time-to-time, and I get massive therapeutic benefit from it. We are symbiotic! It is fine! Who are you, Verlyn Klinkenborg, to tell me otherwise? And why is your book so mean?
On the other hand, maybe he’s just writing to complete n00bs and I’m already there. My sentences are generally short enough. I don’t slave myself to outlines. I like revising. I know you can’t “rely on inspiration” and have to do the work. I know the difference between revision and copy editing. I’m doing it RIGHT NOW! Not that you can tell.
It’s like when you read a set of instructions and you legitimately can’t tell if you have way more expertise than the instructions are assuming, or way less. I don’t have the confidence to read this book and think well that’s just your opinion maaaan, yet it basically tells me that I’ve been doing everything wrong for decades, and I do not like that one bit.
I don’t know, I don’t know.
Anyway.
While belittling me, Verlyn Klinkenborg made me think I needed to brush up on my grammar, so I started watching all these grammar videos on Youtube and it was just… too much. I don’t want to diagram a sentence ever. I know how clauses work even if I can’t identify them. Maybe I’ll keep at it, but it was so dispiriting.
Oh, one thing, though: longtime readers will remember that I was under the impression nouns like “rice,” where you can’t count individual items, were called non-participles, but they weren’t, but no one was sure what they were called. Anyway, this one woman on Youtube called them…countable and non-countable nouns. Great name. Real evocative.
I busted out the linen houscoat robe again this weekend. It’s cold out, I’m losing weight, I am constantly cold, even when I wear a long-sleeve shirt. I was using an old wool cardigan, but it’s wool and it itches, then I remembered I had this problem last year and bought a linen housecoat and it’s so great. I posted an Instagram story of it, a selfie, a fashion selfie, like I’m nineteen and it was great and I got lots of nice compliments and everything felt good in the world for, like, an hour, and that was great, I am lonely sometimes, thank you. It was like the way the internet was supposed to work before it got sick.
(I used to bitch about Substack’s handling of .heic images, but I should be impressed that it handles them at all since the entire Adobe suite is still fucking terrible at handling .heic images.)
I leave you with a fantastic interview with Mimi Parker from Low. Mimi does not do a lot of interviews, and this one was powerful and intense. I may have cried a little bit while listening to it.
Let’s do a mix, justa mix. This mix is awesome. It’s got a lot of great guitar music until about 2/3 of the way through and then it gets synthy. It is mostly new stuff, at least new to me, except the Low song and the Beatles song. Oh and the Gloria Rcord. But it’s awesome! These are all great songs. And it’s almost uniformly upbeat, so, you know, you can bop around to it. A bit.
All right let’s do this Monday thing, this Monday nonsense. I’m not happy about it, but I’ll deal.
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