Alison Wilder

Musician, technologist, storyteller

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Quote from “Double Birthday” by Willa Cather

Even in American cities, which seem so much alike, where people seem all to be living the same lives, striving for the same things, thinking the same thoughts, there are still individuals a little out of tune with the times — there are still survivals of a past more loosely woven, there are disconcerting beginnings of a future yet unforeseen.

This is a beautiful, kinda sad but also sweet little story written in 1929, a time that seems to me to be similar in some key ways to 2020. Success was the word of the day, and it meant money, and if you weren’t with it, and especially if you rejected it, you were OUT, friend. (We’re much more evolved today. Success means experiences, you see, the perfect, frictionless life, full of meaning, and beautiful things, and…oh wait. That shit is expensive, right?)

I’m not sure if our main character, Albert (the artist stuck in a time and place that doesn’t value art), turned out to be “the disconcerting beginnings” of the future or not. If he was, I guess that future is already past.

First Nine is One Demo

Just a quick teaser demo of a new song that’s coming from Greg’s and my new collaboration, Nine is One. Much more work to do here, but we’re really psyched about the sound that’s growing!

colloquy – for when you need to elevate your conversations

from col– together + –loquium speaking, from loqui to speak

  1. A talking together; a conversation, dialogue. Also, a written dialogue.
  2. A meeting for conference.
  3. Church blah blah.

All the modern dictionaries mention that it’s specific to elevated speech/conversation. Interesting that “colloquial” is used to mean common speech.

Definition of colloquy in the OED

Related Books

The Room in the Dragon Volant

by J. Sheridan LeFanu

Norman Mailer on Politics and Cigarettes

Politics has its virtues, all too many of them—it would not rank with baseball as a topic of conversation if it did not satisfy a great many things—but one can suspect that its secret appeal is close to nicotine. Smoking cigarettes insulates one from one’s life, one does not feel as much, often happily so, and politics quarantines one from history; most of the people who nourish themselves in the political life are in the game not to make history but to be diverted from the history which is being made.

The nut, the moron, the stylist, and the critic

I liked this bit from Susan Sontag’s journals. Apparently, the LitHub post from whence this came was in violation of something, so it’s gone.

Rules for Being a Writer
from Sontag’s journals, December 3, 1961

The writer must be four people:

  1. The nut, the obsédé
  2. The moron
  3. The stylist
  4. The critic

1 supplies the material; 2 lets it come out; 3 is taste; 4 is intelligence.

A great writer has all 4—but you can still be a good writer with only 1 and 2; they’re most important.

Obsédé means the obsessed person, or the fanatic. So not nut like “poop smearing,” nut like “can’t stop looking at this thing no matter what else happens.” This is aligned with the concept of creativity in Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention:

The first [phase in the creative process] is a period of preparation, becoming immersed…in a set of problematic issues that are interesting and arouse curiosity.

Csikszentmihalyi (what a name!!) makes it clear that, while this sounds benign, truly creative individuals who have made a significant contribution to culture generally are immersed at a level that is unusual. Obsédé.

The second phase of the creative process is a period of incubation, during which ideas churn around below the threshold of consciousness…the third…is insight, sometimes called the “Aha!” moment.

The moron.

The fourth component is evaluation, when the person must decide whether the insight is valuable and worth pursuing.

The critic.

The fifth and last component of the process is elaboration. It is probably the one that takes up the most time and involves the hardest work.

The nut + the stylist.

NB: the featured image, which reads “Theater Square of Susan Sontag,” is from this Flickr account. It turns out that Susan Sontag “actively participated in the creation of the history of Sarajevo and Bosnia.” Who knew?!

Related Books

Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention

by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Books that wish they were movies

I know I’m not the first to notice that lots of recently-authored books seem more like a verbose screenplay written in prose than a novel. This seems to especially be the case with genre books.

I recently finished the first book in an acclaimed new fantasy series, the Draconis Memoria trilogy. The Waking Fire is a super fun read in its way — engaging characters, easy language, light on the politics and heavy on the quests. Every time I read passages like this, though, I was left with a nagging feeling that I’d be better off just…seeing the show.

When it seemed it might never end, Tekela reached out a hand to Lizanne. She sat with knees drawn up and her back against the Thumper’s base, eyes closed tight and trembling arm extended. Lizanne took her hand, holding it tight, watching the girl’s lips move in an unheard prayer, or was it a song? The suspicion was confirmed when at last the final shell came slamming down and a thick wall of silence descended on the trenches, the sudden, almost shocking stillness broken only by Tekela’s song. Lizanne’s estimation of her musical talents deepened upon hearing her voice. She recognised the tune, “The Leaves of Autumn,” the Eutherian lyrics sung with a captivating sweetness at odds with the landscape that greeted their gaze.

– Chp. 31

Can’t you just see the framing of this shot? Hear the over-compressed, breathy vocals? It reads to me like stage direction. It has the feeling of a scene that might provide some insight into the characters, if only I could see them. Or how about this?

Clay crouched, ready to dodge the flames, then stopped as a crack sounded from above and a large piece of the dome’s ceiling fell, tumbling straight down to deliver a glancing but heavy blow to the White before slamming onto the glass floor. Clay watched an intricate matrix of cracks spread through the glass from the point of impact, staring with an unwarranted detachment as his Green-enhanced eyes tracked the complex array of fractures until it has covered the floor from end to end.

 

– Chp. 45, emphasis mine

For the love of pete, Anthony Ryan literally describes the camera’s/Clay’s detached viewpoint in the middle of this fast-paced fight scene.

The book even follows the 90s action movie convention of switching between multiple separate stories/main characters that come together at the end. I’d like to say the connections were pleasing and unexpected, but I would need to use scare quotes, and I refuse to do it. I refuse, damnit.

This is not to say I didn’t enjoy the book — I actually kind of did, although I won’t be continuing to the second book in the trilogy at the moment. I mean, the fantasy-steampunk-spy mash-up is kind of worth the price of admission.

At the end of the day, I like dragons and that kind of shit enough that I kept reading, despite feeling weird that I knew that, even with my mild aphantasia (I find it EXTREMELY difficult to see images in my mind), this book managed to express to me exactly what each and every scene looked like. It did this based on movie tropes and conventions that we all love, but are probably a bit tired of at this point. Color me old-fashioned, but I’m just not into that.

Related Books

The Waking Fire (The Draconis Memoria, #1)

by Anthony Ryan
Read January 2019

I work, therefore I meditate, therefore I work harder.

As workplaces demand that their employees hustle harder in a more precarious world, mindfulness has emerged as a means to manage stress and increase productivity. Since its import to America, it has been oddly well-suited at making the individual citizen responsible for mitigating the suffering and loss that our necrotic social structures have induced. So how peaceful can it really be?

The Rise of the Mindful Museum, Michael Friedrich