November 30, 2007
Tattle-tale
Having finished my pressing deadlines for the day (though not my day's work by any means), I just spent like half an hour mechanically going through and flagging miscategorized posts on Craigslist. I feel weird and a little gross now, like I'm the snitchy kid who lives to get the other kids in trouble. But, you know, you shouldn't be selling Tahoe homes on the SF forum. It's just wrong.
Posted by didofoot at 12:09 PM | Comments (0)
November 29, 2007
[Flies out using jetpack.]
Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I bet Joyce couldn't have written the way that he wrote if he'd had to constantly battle Microsoft Word's idea of what constitutes a proper sentence.
I have managed to make it stop red-lining the words it thinks I've misspelled. (You know, those esoteric things like proper names, or the word "blog.") But the wavy green line under sentence fragments or long -- not even run-on, just long -- sentences are proving trickier to eliminate.
When you are working to eliminate your inner critic, there's nothing like a big prissy computer program coming along and spoiling things with its stupid green pen.
This round to you, Microsoft. But the game is far from over.
Posted by didofoot at 02:22 PM | Comments (3)
November 27, 2007
Chat
me: hi!
Gene: hello
Gene: how are you?
me: ok. I have a gummy foot.
Gene: ??
me: I dunno, my toenail is kind of gummy
me: not like I stepped in gum
me: more like I am turning into gum
Gene: hm
me: maybe I shouldn't hold my foot when I chat with you.
Gene: yes
me: so how's Europe?
Posted by didofoot at 03:57 PM | Comments (0)
November 16, 2007
"The opposite of love was always disappearance."
Gene left for Europe today, alas.
Well...actually, it's 9:30 in the morning as I type this and he is still here, packing. But in my heart I have already said goodbye; I'm unwilling to go through all that sad leave-taking again, so as far as I'm concerned, he's already gone. This is creating small problems for him, or so he claims; I, being alone in the apartment, have no problems.
"Can you turn on the printer?"
"Do you have any little toothpaste?"
"I think you're sitting on my passport, there."
"If you keep chaining yourself to the door, it makes it hard for me to leave."
La la la. These are not sentences I can hear.
Posted by didofoot at 09:35 AM | Comments (0)
November 15, 2007
The move
Gene spent a lot of last night moving the CementHorizon email over to Gmail. This is a good move for a lot of reasons, but I admit it caused some problems in our house this morning.
Gene: So how are you doing with the email split?
Me: Huh?
Gene: Because your old email is at the old site, but the new email is coming in through Gmail?
Me: Oh...that's why I'm not getting any email.
Gene: This was all in the instructions I sent out.
Me: ...Yeah...I read those.
Gene: Uh huh.
Me: Hey, I can't log in to the new email!
Gene: You have to use the password I sent in the instructions.
Me: Oh...
Gene: You didn't read them at all, did you?
Me: I did, I did! And then I...accidentally deleted them.
Gene: Well, you can just --
Me: And purged my trash.
Gene: [Speechless for a minute.] Why?
Me: To make the move easier for you?
Gene: This is a microcosm of what I can expect from everyone, isn't it.
Me: [hangs head]
Gene: Sigh.
Posted by didofoot at 01:40 PM | Comments (1)
November 14, 2007
"High in a tower she sits by the hour, maintaining her hair..."
I'm halfway through my National Novel Writing Month project and I am pretty miserable about it. Naturally, I share this with you.
I read a lot of reconstituted fairy tales and thought it might be fun to do a re-telling of Rapunzel. 32 pages in, I'm realizing that the reason no one ever rewrites the Rapunzel story is that she spends many years trapped in a tower and nothing happens to her.
Well, they do say to write what you know, I think to myself, staring out my apartment windows at the big old world going by outside.
So there's my crappy plot to deal with. On top of that, the initial ease of prose flow in the first week made me all cocky and I stopped writing for three days, not realizing that by the time I caught up with myself I'd be reduced to describing every piece of fabric in this goddamn boring tower room where nothing ever happens to her. So now I am roughly 5000 words behind my quota.
On top of all this, I have written just about every cliche I know into this story, every sentence clatters and clonks like I'm shaking a box full of blocks, and my character is supposed to be a tomboy but turns out to be a big boring bookworm with nothing to say for herself, just like me.
On the plus side, I gather this is how I'm supposed to feel halfway through the month, so. Yay for me.
Posted by didofoot at 03:31 PM | Comments (11)
November 13, 2007
The Private Life of Helen of Troy and other stories
I just finished another John Erskine book. As always, wonderful.
I found my first Erskine at last year's library sale. The name caught my eye because of my best friend Anais Nin, who had her first big extramarital affair with Erskine. It was $1, so I figured the Nin connection was reason enough to buy it.
It turns out, Erskine is a marvelous writer. (Much better than Anais, but then many of her contemporaries were.) His novels are retellings of old legends: a few novels about Camelot figures, a few from the Trojan War, and so on. They're mostly long conversations between characters, which sounds boring but isn't.
My favorite is The Private Life of Helen of Troy, which deals with Helen's life after returning home from the war with her first husband. She's a wise, strange woman who befuddles everyone who comes near her, first with her beauty and then with her intellect and finally with her unique take on the world. Plus she throws out fun little epigrams, like "What we want very much always seems destined," and "Murder is easier to forgive than beauty."
Erskine's works are a little pretentious and a little dated, sure, but a delight to read because of the way his characters have of laughing kindly at each other. There's some Lawrence-esque stuff in here that I could do without -- women who enjoy sex are wise and witty and warm and wonderful; women who don't enjoy it are pinched and petty and prissy and perverse -- but if you can chalk it up to the prejudices of his era (and ours, and ours) you can easily slide past all that, right down into the good stuff.
I can't think who Erskine is like. You might check him out if you like Oscar Wilde. He isn't a lot like Wilde, but there's something there that brings Wilde to mind. I suppose it's the epigrams.
Posted by didofoot at 09:58 AM | Comments (0)
