Well, I think I’ve created my Poe. There was some tweaking to do with the eyes, mouth and shape of the jaw, and I didn’t bother with the suit and cravat because that’ll be easier, I’m sure in Photoshop.
I don’t know why my camera (couldn’t scan it in) has to come up with the grey background, but I can fix that too. If you think it’s a lousy Poe, please do help me out here and let me know. I won’t get upset, honest.
Someone just got back from Baltimore, black trappings in their grief and bent from sorrow.
Then, we have a special dinner, an after dinner drink and conversation. The night is quiet, somber as we reflect.
Man has not changed in all these years. What frightens him is yet and still the unknown.
Death, in all its faces, makes us wary of the mirror we see in each other.
Belated birthday wishes, Edgar.
As I read into Alias Grace, Edgar is finetuning his absinthe-glazed grin with the horror of murder and bodies disassembled and beautiful women swathed in bloodsoaked sheets. He likes that I write more in period style, with the wafting of dread and the proper formality as is given to man to enjoy. From his perch up above me he watches, like the black raven of doom he so loved as it anguished his own heart–he anquishes mine.
The twit.
Here we sit at two in the morning, Edgar with his Absinthe, me dying for a goblet of Chartreuse, with an overflowing bowl of candy untouched by rotting corpse fingers or a witch’s green claws. Not a ghost, goblin or gypsy rang the doorbell tonight, not even the popular Nicki Hilton costume showed up at my door. And might I add that with my neighbor’s quick knee surgery, she being dutifully delivered to the hospital door by my husband this morning, I have her Halloween giveouts as well.
So I’m on a sugar high and may need less sleep than even I have been getting lately. I suspect that the neighborhood kids, though few in this rural community, hate my offered fare. Understandably, I suppose, since I dislike sweets and am quite particular about what I myself would choose and pick for Halloween that I’m likely to get stuck with eating myself anyway. Sweet-Tarts, and dark chocolate, and sour gummi-worms, maybe licorice like Good-n-Plenty. Though I did break down and get a bag of foil-wrapped chocolates in the color and shapes of eyeballs and ears and fingers and toes.
So it looks like for the next few days I’ll be bouncing off walls and babbling away at all hours of the night. Should be an interesting time.
Though he and I have not been close this long past year, I think of him and find a whisper of an answer in my writing style and language used of late.
Not straightforward like Marquez, nor influenced as yet by skill in imagery in blunt words rather than a wallpaper of story (though I hope to be!), I find myself retreating into metaphor and vagaries of verse to speak my mind. Perhaps it is when I am most vulnerable, that I begin to mold the wall of stones and stories around me.
Yet all I really have to do is shut the damn pc off.
So the buzz from the office isn’t the hard drive or the fan going on the fritz; it’s Edgar.
Seems he’s a bit perturbed because I haven’t spent much time at the computer and he thinks I’ve stopped writing. I realized I’d never told him about the laptop. I explained how I’ve actually done nothing but spend time on the computer, and while I believed this would appease his lust for written words, it seemed to agitate him. I had to break into the absinthe to calm him down and get him to organize his mutterings into reasonably understandable grievances.
So it turns out he’s mad now because I don’t have him there when I write. If I’m using the laptop, he seems to thinks he should be there too. I tried to explain to him that he’s much more comfortable sitting atop the computer desk leaning on his brick, that the shop is so cold sometimes that the coffeepot is frozen, and that he’d have to squish into the carrying case for the journey to the barn, but he says he’s slept in flophouses and on doorsteps so what’s the big deal?
You know, if it’s not one person bitchin’ at you, it’s another. I was tempted to squish his little cotton-stuffed head, but remembered who I was dealing with and compromised. He can sit with me in the living room when I work and watch tv ("what’s tv?" he asks) and maybe come to the shop with me in the spring.
Cripes, men.
As a writer, I am a blotter. In reading I absorb the ink out of the words, suck it in, place it aside and it marks my own clean sheets of paper.
If I read contemporary literature, I come closer to the edge. If I read Munro, I am matter of fact yet deep into character. I do not dare read Edgar again; I still have "baroque" accent that has held me for forty years.
I don’t know what my style, my voice is. I think maybe that I have none at all. Or the noise of a crowd. Or who happens to be onstage at the mic.
As a writer, I am merely a blotter.
Half dulled interest, cotton-headed thoughts; he has watched and wondered where I am going. Technology unknown, but the ideas were always there, moving backward into crypts, forward into space, wanting, but not having the tools.
Can you imagine what Mr. Poe could do with a computer today?
This, (http://razghul.ice.org/misc/zoom/zoom.htm) is most likely where his mind traveled, in night black, wisps of white, and all those lovely shades of grey.
(Link from Fishbucket, thanks.)
New Media Moment: Tools. The creativity begins with the manufacture of the tools.
I realize I have not been posting anything in this category for a while, and really, it is just because things between Edgar and I have been sort of up and down lately.
I’ve really no complaints, except perhaps about his seemingly sullen silence in the last few weeks, but must admit that I prefer it to the rather delirious and demented diatribes he tends to fall into once he petulantly ponders my prosaic and finds me sadly lacking in his opiumed opinion. He claims I’ve gone post modern (or at least, “made such sad attempt”) without a thought to story, alliteration, mood and elegance.
He nearly had a case of vapors o’er my “gonnas” and my “haftas” and only once this week has smiled despite himself while reading as I typed. That too, it seems is but a thorn I push into his side; ”A quill!” he shouts is what I should be using.
Meanwhile as I type, one eye on the monitor, one on the open Thesaurus and dictionary both, my third upon a frowning Mr. Poe, I note the dictionary page is open to Leitrim through lepton, and spot with but a glance the name “Lenore.” How strange is that, I think, but then he cares more than he shows, or at the very least, a little still. Enough, I suppose to not have forsaken me and my feeble attempts at prose completely. I hope then that this is merely passing mood.
But then again, it is mid-May, and he has not in word nor manner made inquiry of me or let slip subtle hints in rare but valued conversation as to his wishes, nor my plans and so I fear I may be dateless for the senior prom.
(NOTE: If I’m to have Roget’s by my side, I sorely need a full-sized copy. The font herein is, no shit, one-thirty second of an inch high!)
He is laughing. He thinks I don’t hear him, but I do. It is not the warp-speed winds we are having, nor the crows that squat from the cold to look like their large-headed raven cousins. It is him. I know it.
I have been saving all those silly “What ……….are you?” tests because, when answered honestly, they do give at the very least a halfassly accurate indication of our personalities. Although, just as with the psychics I have upon occasion visited, what you put in is what you get out, and much is generically vague.
“What poet are you?” — the latest quiz; well, Edgar knew all along, I suppose.
I don’t seem to have control lately, but I’ve found a friend in Edgar. Patiently he waited, watching me work, helpless and floundering in my efforts. Single-minded focused on one thing only, I am prey and he is predator. He understands the dark and knows the secret passages that lead inside the soul. In his grip I listen to Willie sing Kristofferson, the music couldn’t be more effective for the purpose than if it were blues and bible. The music is heard from within yourself, you close your eyes and sing words that you didn’t know you knew but find yourself singing along while tears roll down to land on the clothes that only superficially cover your heart. “Old Shep” and “Daddy’s Little Girl” used to be the only ones with this power over me. There must be a crack somewhere, for now so many more get through. Sharing CD space with “Help Me Make It Through The Night” and “You Show Me Yours (And I’ll Show You Mine)”, is this, from “Why Me”:
Lord help me, Jesus
I’ve wasted it
So help me Jesus
I know what I am.
Now that I know that
I needed you
So help me Jesus
My soul’s in your hand.
I have to trust them, because as Edgar says, I can’t trust myself right now. The five of us go exploring deep and downward, facing devils and the Father to seek the light that burns to cool and comfort fever.
Woe am I. I forgot Edgar’s birthday today, and luckily ran across a note in I Spy Gemini (Thanks! I would have been in deep trouble with him). Ran out and bought him a pair of flannel pajamas and “The Godfather” on audio CD.
He didn’t seem real happy, but I think that’s just because he’s in one of his darker moods. At 195, he’s got a right to be. (Tho I do love older men!)
Evidently, Edgar is getting through to me, and his influence is showing up in my Writing Voice (back in October I was really looking all over for my Voice and couldn’t find it). I’d seen references in other blogs and sites before about a place where text could be entered and using an algorithm based on common word usage a determination could be made of whether the author was male or female. But the majority of the postings were really of the gender bias nature, so I wasn’t real interested in pursuing it. This morning I found the Gender Genie on Bookblog mentioned, and decided to have a go at it. It’s rather interesting, and I’d like to pursue the concept further to understand both human nature and my own.
As a “female, the researchers imply, I’d be more likely to write sentences like this, which assume that you and I share common knowledge or engage us in a direct relationship. These differing styles have previously been called ‘informational’ and ‘involved’, respectively.” A clearer understanding of the process of word selection is available on Nature.com
Based on several weblog entries and a sampling of both fiction and poetry, when I’m being me, I write like a boy. Here are some of the results:
I’ve been listening more to my male counterparts lately, and so Edgar has had his way with me.
The redesign of Spinning has been geared more towards somber black and blood red, which are proper deep and dark, tortuous creative writing traits–reality, life at its most anguished and intimate. I argued that soul should be white, but Edgar insists that man’s soul, alas, is black, and since he’s dead and I’m not, I must defer to his knowledge.
I did retain the shades of grey that set the background for my black words, however. Edgar agrees that this represents the best manner of fiction after all.
Evidently Edgar feels he’s been patient long enough, and has spouted off in unearthly tones his disapproval of my lack of order and sense of time.
He does not like it at all that I have not really written one creative word while I have several stories dormant inside this beige box upon a spinning disk that I access daily for other things.
Evil little know-it-all mustachioed dead poet. I hate him; he’s right.
