stars still wonder

We read the most amazing article for my Information Access in the Arts class this week. (Well, okay, one person hated it. So it's a love/hate kind of article, depending on your frame of mind.)

No lie, library science articles tend to be the stuff that puts you to sleep, but this one— this one is a story. A really good story, that you can't stop reading.

The paper is, ostensibly, about cave paintings in Europe. But it is also about the history of art and culture, and how we interpret it, and therefore it is also about telling stories. It's what we do, what makes us human, and we do it every day in a thousand different ways. Even if you have never drawn a picture or written a story in your life, you are a storyteller.

( excerpt )

Mayer, Nancy. "Reclaiming our History: The mysterious birth of art and design." Paper presentation to the AIGA FutureHistory Conference, 2004. [READ IT!]
(This is a freely available PDF, from the Conference website. The file is 3.8 MB, so you may wish to right click and save it if that's too big a file for your browser/connection to handle or if, like me, PDFs tend to crash your browser or if, also like me, you want to keep it forever because it is awesome.)

Seriously, if you have any interest at all in art or storytelling (which is, of course, an art) or languages, READ THIS. ♥

I wandered through the National Gallery of Art this afternoon. The West Wing, that is, where all the good classic stuff is. (East Wing is modern stuff.) And while looking at things like Adriaen van Ostade's The Cottage Courtyard and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot's Forest of Fontainebleau and Meindert Hobbema's The Travelers, I got to wondering why we don't still have nice landscapes and quotidian scenes being painted today. Or, more to the point, why museums don't display those types of paintings from our own time period (since someone, somewhere must still be painting in those styles; you still see some of those sorts of paintings in independent galleries). Those nice landscape and portrait styles were in fashion for centuries and we still admire them in museums. So why is all the modern art shown in museums modernist?

Yes, we've had the Industrial Revolution and we really don't live like that anymore, but there are still nice countrysides full of sheep to be painted or farmers in fields or beautiful buildings and gardens. So I don't see why all the modern sections of museums have only dots and splatters. (Which, okay, some of them are interesting, but for the most part I only breeze through one or two galleries of "modern art", while I pause to pick out all the tiny details in the "classical art". I miss those tiny details. There's so many stories in those details—the way someone is looking at someone else across a crowd, the way a hand strokes a lapdog, the angle of the moonlight over ancient ruins.

Maybe it's just because I am a storyteller; I look for stories everywhere. And they (of the era of "classical art" and before) were storytellers, too. And we're not anymore. They told stories by firelight, in farm fields, beneath the stars. We watch TV and play on our computers—and what are those made up of but tiny dots and splatters of colour? We don't even look at the sky properly anymore. We've lost touch with our storytelling culture. And that makes me incredibly sad.

So naturally I thought of this incredibly sad poem "about suffering" as painted by the Dutch masters:

( 'Musee des Beaux Arts' by W.H. Auden )

Today, it's all about me. Just because. (Also because villainy asked people to quote their favourite bits of writing at her, which made me ponder my writings. "A Barefoot Song" is still my favourite, hands-down. (What does "hands-down" even mean?*)) So there. :)

I have recently made the odd discovery that I do not, in fact, hate my recorded voice. (I've spent the last 24 years of my life so far avoiding answering machines like the plague because I hated how I sounded. Possibly mostly because I am just really bad at leaving messages. For instance, see here.) So I recorded a podfic for propinquitine. It was great fun. :)

So today, feeling rather mopey about my lack of creative skills** in the past, oh, year (*weeps*), I recorded three of my poems that I quite like.

( for your listening pleasure (?) )

Comments are love! ♥

Today's poem is an old one of mine that you probably haven't seen unless you've actually poked through my website:

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

( 'The King Must Die' by Laura Bang! )

I've been trying to write some new poems for a couple months now (since I always have a new poem for Poetry Month), but they just aren't working out. I can see them in my mind, but when I try to write them out they turn out all gross. *despairs*


* OED to the rescue! "orig. in the racing phr. to win hands down, referring to the jockey dropping his hands, and so relaxing his hold on the reins, when victory appears certain." Oh, how I love you, Oxford English Dictionary. ♥♥♥

** Of the non-fanficcish variety, that is. Fanfics are all well and good, and I am quite, quite pleased with some of mine, but I long to write something entirely original again.

Why oh why do Mondays have to suck so much?

Okay, so it's not that bad, it could totally be lots worse. But still. Mondays should be banned. (Seriously. How awesome would it be to have a four-day work/school-week and three-day weekends all the time? I think people would totally be more productive and less stressed.)

My back is hurting today. :( It got steadily worse all day, so I was desperate for some Advil when I got back from work. Then I sat down with my lovely heating pad and my back felt better ... until I got up and moved around a bit and then it started hurting again.

( Probably more than you ever wanted to know about my back woes. )

Also, I'm annoyed with the relabeling I have to do at work. As I've said before, it's fairly interesting since I get to peek at the negatives, which are mostly of Byzantine art and archaeology stuff. But I have to do the actual relabeling by hand. Which was all fine and dandy until I decided that I have really got to start writing again.

I write by hand. Pen and paper, baby. I'm old school like that. I know typing is faster and easier to rearrange and stuff, but that's not how I work. I'm much more comfortable with pen and paper. Me and my stories and characters, we've got a pen and paper system. (When my stories and characters are on speaking terms with me, that is.) (Crazy writer? Yeah...)

But now when I have some free time and want to write something, my hand is already all tired from labeling negatives. *sigh* Whatever. I'll manage somehow. Just don't mess with my left hand, 'cause it'll be really strong from all this writing. Or something.

I need to stop talking crazy now....

I have lots to update on (including my Hollywood adventure), but that will come later. For now, I have a poem! :)

( 'Stormdance' by Laura Bang! )

I actually wrote this last week before the rain came, but I have a policy of leaving fresh writings alone for a day or more to mull themselves over before I peer at them again. Right now it is pouring and earlier there was even a lone flash of lightning and growl of thunder, so it's the perfect day to be posting this.

Comments are love. ♥

My stepdad left on Monday morning to go visit his family in San Jose, so I am in charge of cooking this week. I decided to be daring and try more complicated dinners than spaghetti, and so far I have made three very yummy dinners. I feel very accomplished knowing that I can fend for myself without having to subsist on spaghetti and frozen dinners. I rock. :P

On Tuesday night, I went to the theatre with Jennie and saw six one-acts from David Ives' All in the Timing. They were interesting. Er, interesting in a good way. I had fun. :) I think my favorite one was "Words Words Words", which is about three monkeys attempting to write Hamlet. Fun stuff.

Oh, I also got a jury duty summons a while back, so this week I have been calling to see whether or not I have to go. Thus far, I have called twice and been told to call back. I have to say I will be rather disappointed if my first post-college job is jury duty. -_-; (Yes, still no job for Laura.... Stupid Chaucer's. T_T)

Other than that, I am attempting to eat less/better and exercise more. I need to lose weight. :(

I am also itching to do some writing, so I'm trying to do some research for that.

Um... I guess that's it. Ciao! :)

I actually have a few moments to spare between events! Wow. *takes deep breaths* Conferences are very tiring. But it's also been a really great experience so far. I've mostly been hanging out in the Children's Lit workshops, since that's what I write, at least as far as stories go. But I also went to a fiction workshop, a poetry workshop, and a "style" workshop. So there's two workshops each day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, and then in the later afternoon there's a panel discussion, and then in the evening they have an author speak and answer questions. So it's a 12 or 13 hour day. Which is quite tiring. There are breaks in between the workshops and discussions and such, but it's still a lot of running around and concentrating. The only thing I have to complain about is that I'm somewhat of a 'tweener, in that I don't quite have an age group to fit into here. Most of the people here are older (30s and up), and then there are four high school students who got scholarships from a writing contest. I feel like the high school students would be a better bet for me to hang out with, but they get special treatment because they're young and on scholarships, so they have conference leaders taking care of them and stuff.

Anyway, I'm really proud of myself because I've read two things in different workshops. It's so hard for me to share my stuff, but I told myself I had to do it because they're not going to bite me and I know I really need the criticism. So I read my poem "Ravishing Beauty" in the poetry workshop and I read the opening for one of my fairy tale novels in the Children's Lit workshop, and I got some really great feedback on both of those. So yay! I'm so happy that I made myself do those readings ~ it's such a great feeling when other people like your writing besides yourself. :D

Oh, and on Sunday evening I skipped out of the conference early (I didn't really want to hear the author of Who Moved My Cheese? anyway...) to go see Howl's Moving Castle, which is awesome. It's completely different from the book, but Miyazaki made the story his own and (of course) did an amazing job. (So it's a much much much better "based on a book" movie than Ella Enchanted, which destroyed the book's plot for no good reason.) Howl is hot, Sophie was cool, and Calcifer was adorable. XD And the animation, of course, was beautiful. *sigh* Why don't they make movies like that anymore? I miss the hand-drawn animation, it's so much prettier. CG was okay for Shrek, but now they're making everything CG and I don't like it. ;__;

Other than that, I have not been eaten by mountain lions yet, so yay! Actually, I haven't even seen any, but we have been warned that they are in the vicinity... And with that, I'm off to do more conference-y stuff, so ciao!

P.S.: Happy early birthday to Kris! Have an awesome day tomorrow! ^_^

( 'The Motive for Metaphor' by Wallace Stevens )

okay. we read this poem in my Spanish class today. (yeah, it's not Spanish in any way, shape, or form, but it related to what we were talking about.) anyway. the point of the poem (that we came up with in class) is the inadequacy of language, how all language is really metaphor. something like that. :S the "you" being addressed by the poetic voice seems to be language (or vice-versa: the "you" being addressed by language is the poet... ?) particularly in the third stanza, the line "Of things that would never be quite expressed" ... language only approximates thoughts and can never reproduce them exactly.

so the question we posed in class was, why bother? why poetry? why doesn't Stevens just say, "language is inadequate", why does he use a poem instead?

my personal answer is that, for me, poetry itself is part of the metaphor of language. thoughts that cannot be expressed adequately in normal speech or prose, somehow seem to work better in poetry. i write my best poetry when i don't overthink the metaphor, when i just let the metaphor run round inside my head and find its own way down to my pen without trying to guide or force it. "Barefoot Song" just flew onto the page and i barely thought about it at all. i wrote "Two Dreamers" because the last line came into my head and i knew what the rest of the poem had to be like. it required some thought, but not forceful thought.

so now i pose the same questions to you: if you are a writer, why do you bother? do you even agree that language and thought do not translate perfectly into one another?

pretty please share your thoughts...