oops
almost forgot to post!
revision tip for writers: read your stories out t loud in stupid accents! you’ll notice more about how the language works by speaking it aloud in a way different from your habit! you will feel silly as hell but maybe many strongly improved line edits!
this is not a joke!
Gods, to their eternal chagrin, are comic.
my gloss on it, from yesterdays post:
a wonderful simple sentence holding two ideas at once: the gods are better than us, unable to experience tragedy as we do, but that in that greatness there’s a loss. there’s something to be said for feeling bad. it ain’t nothing to be laughed at
Anne Carson on the gods
In an intro to Euripides, in a parenthetical, Anne Carson says:
Gods, to their eternal chagrin, are comic.
In place of a full post today, I implore you to think on that. Maybe I will say a piece tomorrow.
submissions
i write novellas now. it’s all in attempt, i think, to write more novelistically, to pretend i’m maturing from short stories, though of course that’s not the case. but i write with such compression, in attempt to recreate alienation, getting word counts up is hard, not without getting fragmented and ballooning counts of characters
anyways: submitting novellas for publication feels difficult, begging people to look over things they don’t want. novellas don’t sell is the wisdom (then again: short stories is the same). it feels extra bothersome, or hopeless, or something similiar
still: sent one in today, Scott and Bianca. then i revise American Desert for what’s next. hobbyist writing means, i think, creating fantasies you think will die
Strange Overtones
been listening, all day, to David Byrne’s Strange Overtones. it’s beautiful. i, too, sometimes hear things through walls
but… BUT: i’ve known this song, for the longest time, for a cover or alternate version i can’t place for the life of me. it’s no longer upbeat but rather morose, sentimental, wistful, Ahnoni and the Johnson’s style. it has a sense of loss. and i cannot find it. i dont know who it’s by, i don’t know when it’s from, I can only hum and feel it, or listen to the original and imagine what I know exists there somewhere, or if doesn’t exist now should still somewhere
or maybe it was put-upon painful, a la xiu xiu
i am dreaming