Itinerantdaughter's Blog

So I have no money left, have applied for a million jobs in the past month with no responses, and am saddled with a non-paying assignment to review the work of a very established and prolific poet whose work I’ve never really read before and I fear is over my head.  FML!  White Girl Problems!  All other funny blogs!  And now I’m watching Jesus Camp, so I must be a glutton for punishment.  Here’s one person who can always make me giggle:

A stroke of genius.  I decide to be Degas for a day.  Edgar Degas.  Why Degas? says a pesky at the back of my head.  Well, why not Degas?  Pourquoi pas Degas?  Maybe the prismatic bars of color on my ceiling have inspired me.  Maybe the creamy white light spreading on my walls has moved me.  Maybe it’s all this cheap French wine I been drinking.  Anyway I don’t have to explain myself.  Yes!  Today, I will be Edgar Degas! –– Is it Edgar or Edouard?  Okay, so I don’t know much about Degas.  Let’s see.  Dead, French, impressionist painter of, what, jockeys, ballerinas, flowers, that kinda thing.  And okay granted, I’m not French, dead or a painter of any kind.  Not a lotta ground.  And yet, and yet –– are Degas and I not united by our shared humanity?  By our common need for love, coffee, and deodorant? … (We hear the sound of a shower.)  In the shower, it feels strange, lathering an immortal.  What’s even stranger, the immortal is lathering back.  How did I become such a genius?  I, who flunked wood shop in high school!  Was it my traumatic childhood?  There was Uncle Stosh’s unfortunate party trick with the parakeet.  Ouch. Well something must’ve happened.  Because now I’m great.  I’m brilliant.  My name will live forever!  (He considers this for a second.)  Whoo. Wow.  This is too big for even me to contemplate.  I go out into the world with dry cleaning.

~ from “Degas, C’est Moi” by David Ives

Tomorrow I will be Joan Didion!

I need a pseudonym generator –– an engine into which I can type a name and it will give me back one  that evokes the same characterizations but is different enough that a reader won’t be able to recognize the real person behind it.

Option One:

The Taste of Penny

Jeff Parker’s characters stumble awkwardly into situations that reveal the darkest sides of themselves: Encountering a female Chechen suicide bomber on a bus ride in Russia, a man finds himself sexually aroused by the terrorist act he’s sure she’ll commit. A father reluctantly accompanies his draft dodger son to Quebec where he erects an enormous and obscene American flag in his front yard. A character who accidentally swallows a penny during a roadside sobriety test finds himself in a state of existential angst when it stays inside him. The characters in these fifteen voice-driven, comic stories show the trammeled among us, beaten down time and time again, still finding cause in the world for hope.

Option Two:

Rock and Hard Places: Travels to Backstages, Front Lines and Assorted Sideshows

What happens when The Prodigy go to Beirut, Def Leppard visit a cave in Morocco, and U2 visit Sarajevo? This account of seven years travelling the world with rock bands gives some of the answers, following the author “going to odd places, behaving strangely, and then writing about it.”

Option Three:

Fiction Across Borders: Imagining the Lives of Others in Turn-of-the-Millenium Novels

Theorists of Orientalism and postcolonialism argue that novelists betray political and cultural anxieties when characterizing “the Other.” Shameem Black takes a different stance. Turning a fresh eye toward several key contemporary novelists, she reveals how “border-crossing” fiction represents socially diverse groups without resorting to stereotype, idealization, or other forms of imaginative constraint. Focusing on the work of J. M. Coetzee, Amitav Ghosh, Jeffrey Eugenides, Ruth Ozeki, Charles Johnson, Gish Jen, and Rupa Bajwa, Black introduces an interpretative lens that captures the ways in which these authors envision an ethics of representing social difference. They not only offer sympathetic portrayals of the lives of others but also detail the processes of imagining social difference.

Whether depicting the multilingual worlds of South and Southeast Asia, the exportation of American culture abroad, or the racial tension of postapartheid South Africa, these transcultural representations explore social and political hierarchies in constructive ways. Boldly confronting the orthodoxies of recent literary criticism, Fiction Across Borders builds upon such seminal works as Edward Said’s Orientalism and offers a provocative new study of the late twentieth-century novel.

(From me: this one may be out of my league. If I were to get this assignment, I’d feel compelled to educate myself on all the listed writers –– embarrassingly, have not read them all –– and I just don’t have the time right now.)

I do not believe that sex addiction is a real illness.  I do not believe that there are any vitamins in Vitamin Water. I do not believe any one person is the subject of Carly Simon’s song “You’re So Vain.”  I do not believe in “runner’s high,” nor do I believe it is possible to have fun at a bar when sober.  I do not believe in the tenets proposed in He’s Just Not That Into You at all.  I do not believe a dog is a man’s best friend and I do not believe all will be forgiven.

Original below…

“I believe in pink. I believe that laughing is the best calorie burner. I believe in kissing, kissing a lot. I believe in being strong when everything seems to be going wrong. I believe that happy girls are the prettiest girls. I believe that tomorrow is another day and I believe in miracles.”
— Audrey Hepburn

I once fantasized about putting all my unfinished writing into one document and publish it as “Unfinished Masterpieces,” or something similar. There is a genius in what is left undone, in letting the reader or viewer finish it. I remember part of a quote from the brilliant French movie Camille Claudel that expresses that sentiment much better than that. “It’s pure genius before…” Something like that. Michaelangelo repeatedly didn’t finish his sculptures, and these unfinished works are widely considered masterpieces. Not saying I’m Michaelangelo, but really, isn’t completion a myth anyway?

A new way to think about the unfinished:

“I see unrealized projects as the most important unreported stories in the art world. As Henri Bergson showed, actual realization is only one possibility surrounded by many others that merit close attention. There are many amazing unrealized projects out there, forgotten projects, misunderstood projects, lost projects, desk-drawer projects, realizable projects, poetic-utopian dream constructs, unrealizable projects, partially realized projects, censored projects, and so on. It seems urgent to remember certain roads not taken, and—in an active and dynamic, rather than nostalgic or melancholic way—transform some of them into propositions or possibilities for the future.”
-Hans Ulrich Obrist

This man is the quote most important art curator in the world, and an alien end quote, according to partner-in-conceptual-art-crime PS. So often when I’m evaluating texts for literary magazines (which I do, sometimes…I wear many hats) I think to myself, “This writer would have done her/himself such a favor if he/she had just cut it off two sentences earlier, instead of going into the whole, ‘And this incident with my grandparents is why I am afraid of bananas today.'” And so maybe everyone ought to quit while they’re ahead? Maybe you should always stop yourself two