How was your week? Did you try reading like a writer? I really enjoyed applying the things I learned from The Madness of Crowds by Louise Penny to my short story. This week I’ll be talking about The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentill.
I’m enjoying my coursera.org course “The Modern and the Postmodern” through Wesleyan University. I really like how my study of contradictory abstractions overlaps with philosophy. This week’s section “From Enlightenment to Revolution” talked about Hegel’s dialectic thinking. I’ll talk more about that on Tuesday.
This week’s images were inspired by painters from the Northwest School, that emerged in the late 1930’s, especially the work of Mark Tobey. In Modernism in the Pacific Northwest by Patricia Junker, there’s a photograph of lights on US Navy ships in Elliott Bay during Fleet Week, July 1937, on the opposite page from Tobey’s painting “White Night, 1942. One can see how the overlapping spotlights could be the energy Tobey tries to capture in the painting. I played with creating the overlapping spotlights with light-forming photography and enjoyed the results.
Using drum beats to create poetic lines
This week’s rhythm I’ve been playing with is: one, two, three and, four. It made me think of the cha-cha, but when I looked up some cha-cha videos it turns out the cha-cha is actually next week’s beat: one, two, three, four and.
The first lines that came to mind for one, two, three and, four:
she is always late; she has fifty dates
sweet treat healthy fruit; brown round wrinkled suit
time to go-to bed; Mis-ter sleepy head
time to go-to work; he’s a soda jerk
Here’s some of a draft of a poem idea I wrote the other day:
a triangle from two connected points
the unknown third point
making invisible lines
of connection
to future hurt
to future revelations
the invisible lines
of secrets and lies
one of those fine lines
is the line between love and hate
a triangle of love
betrayed and hidden
where the deceit in truth
is found, where the
haunting blues find soul
where song after song
find life’s conflict
the wandering eye caught
attention grabbed by the new
and in motion
the yearning flesh aching
knowing there’s a good ache
that frees the mind
from form
Let’s see what happens when I try to put it into the rhythm:
the third unknown point
joins in unseen lines
to a future hurt
that your secrets hide
where the haunting blues
find life’s conflict caught
ache in yearning flesh
moves the wand’ring eye
*I really like how the rhythm helped me condense the ideas. I think this is an intriguing opening.
And the Real Work Begins
Today’s the big day! I’m putting the first draft of my novel I wrote in November into a PDF and I’m going to read it through on my tablet as if it’s someone else’s e-book. From now on, as I’m reading like a writer, learning and writing rhythms, and studying contradictory abstractions it is all toward my novel revision.
Experience Writing 