Semi-Hiatusing

Dateline: Flipnotics

Well, back at my desk I find I have relatively little new to say, old chums, except that I'd like to get out of here again. You know, I work in the same place I live -- in the same room I sleep -- and it surprises me, or not, to discover, after half a century, that being inside for too long drives me flukin STIR-CRAZY. Has this been the problem all along?

I have an absolute need for breezes, just as I do for solitude and for daily exposure to good prose.

In addition, within 24 hours of the heat coming on I start getting congested and unless I get out of there fast I cough all winter.

There are several places I'd like to drive or fly in the near future.

Meanwhile,I have belatedly discovered the secret method of leaving the house: open the door!

I do, however, have a lot of paying work in December to keep me sitting but not awakened, so I'm thinking I probably won't post very much this coming month. I type too much already.

Obviosophobia

"No one in our family can ever say anything obvious."
--John Althouse Cohen, age 8, c. 1989

Is it obvious to lay off blogging for a little while? It hasn't been planned, it's just way the days have unfolded for the past couple of weeks.

I can assure you, though, that beginning about October 22 I'll have some interesting experiences to report. On that day I fly to Rwanda for a two-week mission of peace and reconciliation.They have internet cafes there, so I hope to do some posting.

In the meantime, something every once in a while.

UPDATE: A writer friend once told me I have "a genius for the obvious." I don't know how it was intended, but I took it as a compliment.

I have a feeling I won't be posting till later in the week. It's entirely a matter of workload. I spend all day at the computer or looking at print, and banging away at a keyboard for money. When it gets excessive I have to find something else to look at.

Hey, people, I've got two new freelance projects starting tomorrow, so I'm going to take a couple of days off from blogging. I'll try to be back here by Thursday, maybe Friday.

Well if Ann can say in a recent post, "Sorry, I'm too tired to provide any commentary," I feel let off the hook from not blogging in a while. I'd rather give you a blank page for a half-week or so than something I don't care about. See you soon!

Update on Old Friends

Back in the old days of 2004-2007, I happily made the acquaintance of some very good serious writers who were blogging as well as writing longer, more ambitious works. Two of them were Matt Bell and Josh Maday, young guys from Saginaw, Michigan, whose blog, Dancing on Fly Ash, offered readers a new 100-word story every day. It was an impressive exercise in fortitude, and a surprising percentage of the stories were gems. They crystallized moments of anxiety, fear, or unsettling comedy in the lives of people who were sometimes apparently like the people across the street and sometimes apparently other.

I've checked them out recently and both are still writing prolifically and well. Matt and Josh separately have been widely published in online fiction magazines and have won or been shortlisted or nominated for a number of prizes, including the Pushcart Prize for the best literature from small presses. Both have websites/blogs that are excellent portals for readers who'd like to find out what's hip in contemporary American fiction -- a subject I know little about, being innocently stuck in the premodern age. I feel like I'm taking a course in Contemporary Am Lit, when I click to Josh's or Matt's pages -- and in the good sense. On those sites you'll find reviews, excerpts, and interviews from the current literary scene, an arena filed with gifted, energetic writers you (and I) never heard of before.

On both Matt and Josh's sites you can find links to their published works and their colleagues'. Of particular interest are Matt's long story based on a 1940s news story, The Collectors, about two grown brothers in Manhattan whose obsessive hoarding -- disposophobia -- is a metaphor for the Beckettian despair at the core of many lives. On Josh's blog, Disseminating Josh Maday, you can find links to Kindle and pdf versions of Dancing on Fly Ash: One Hundred Word Stories, a best-of volume. These works deserve lots of readers.

That's one more reason I'm glad I'm back.

Blue Makes You More Creative

Hence my template.

“It may be nothing more than an association with big skies and the open seas, but beholding the colour blue makes you more creative. Juliet Zhu at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, compared the effects of red and blue on people's behaviour. While red tended to sharpen the memories of her undergraduate volunteers, blue helped to unlock their imaginations. For example, when they were given toy parts in either blue or red, the toys that the volunteers constructed in blue were rated as much more creative than those made with red.”
-- New Scientist May 6, 2009. Subscription required for full article.

UPDATE:

For those who don't subscribe to New Scientist, here are the eight ways "to have brilliant ideas," as the cover puts it:

1. Embrace your inner grouch [i.e., dissatisfaction breeds innovation]
2, Let your mind wander
3. Play the piano [or other ambidextrous activities, to encourage communication between both sides of your brain. I'm ambidextrous]
4. Colour your world blue
5. Two's creative company [i.e., collaborate with others]
6. Live abroad [i.e., necessity of adapting to another culture stimulates problem-solving thought and flexibility]
7. Be more playful [see "wild and outrageous"]
8. Raise a glass [Their little joke. "Drinking alcohol does not make you more creative, it just makes you feel that you are."]

In ther words, New Scientist is trying to act like Psychology Today.

Wild. Outrageous.

I was emailing with my blogging mentor the other evening, and she said:

“It's virtually impossible to get a lot of traffic with the kind ofthing you do. It's very good, but it's not what people consume obsessively. Be more wild and outrageous.... No one wakes up in the morning and asks: What's the latest finely tuned observation.”

Well, I do! So I write it to find out.

In my opinion, what this country needs is some finely tuned observations. What have we gotten from wild and outrageous? Billionaire bankers ruining the economy with their wild, outrageous new derivative securities. Draft-dodger politicians wildly and outrageously invading countries that pose no threat to us. In the age of wild and outrageous, all that matters is explosions: it’s not interesting unless something's blowing up. Which did you read today, the article about the new commanding general in Afghanistan or the one about the soldier in Iraq who shot five of his buddies?

My reply to my mentor:

“Getting a lot of traffic isn't my game. I'm not unworldly enough to think I'll get it with this kind of post. I just have this online journal and write what I want. Wild and outrageous I wouldn't know, unless it happens by accident. It would probably have something to do with popular culture or current events, and that doesn't interest me.”

I wonder: could I ever be wild and outrageous? My first answer is, No, that’s not me. But I’ve learned that there is no immutable “not me,” and that changing is mostly a matter of deciding. Maybe someday I’ll decide to be wild and outrageous. It would be new -- the first time.

Wild and outrageous people are like children, getting the same laugh from telling the same joke a thousand times. Some wild outrageous people are fun and some of them have been geniuses. I like to be around them in order to observe, take notes, and make wisecracks. I don’t think I’d want their inner lives, for the most part. If they stood still for five minutes to think about it, they’d want mine.

Geniuses aside, “wild and outrageous” makes me visualize a group of white thirty-year-olds getting drunk and jumping up and down to bad music, flinging their arms and whooping in order to pretend they have soul. People who boast how “crazy” they and their friends are; whose refrigerator doors are cluttered with photos of people making manic faces, the same exact wild and outrageous faces in millions of photos across the nation’s refrigerator doors. They’re like a movie whose ads call it “hilarious” but which turns out to be moderately amusing in some spots and witlessly vulgar in others.

Aw, who am I kidding? Don't you wish you could do this: