Freelance Writing = Glamorous
My first assignment for About.com is to review adult diapers.
I mean, why wouldn’t it be?
Unlike some unlucky 27-year-old at Slate who was subjected to some seriously gnarly humiliation, I don’t have to test them. My job is simply to compile a consumer consensus report based on online reviews I discover from the comfort of my own home.
But still. I nearly had a laughing fit when I found out.
Seems the theme of my 20s is “paying my dues.”
Someone Likes a Thing I Did
Let me preface this by saying that I’m probably posting the following out of vanity. Sometimes it’s simply hard to resist the temptation to use a personal blog as a way to show off one’s achievements. Sue me.
But also, as a writer/maker of things who is well aware of her infinitesimal place in the universe and who regularly comes up against other people’s indifference, sometimes a little reassurance is everything. I’m not saying art is hard. I’m just saying that when you make things, you become dangerously sensitive: you open a valve so you can send out your own truths, and external nastiness inevitably tends to find its way in.
Therefore, to stay sane, sometimes you just have to put your accomplishments up on the fridge for everyone to see.
Anyway, Orchises publisher Roger Lathbury wrote this blurb/statement about my poetry book for the Wells College Press website. I opened the email about it right about 30 seconds after I woke up, and let me tell you, if you ever have the opportunity to start your day off on the receiving end of effusive praise, I highly recommend it.
What Longing Is introduces a fresh, commanding talent. Janis Esch’s poetry is confident and faceted, with ominous glints in growing turbulences, where “heat lightning spark[s] distant clouds.” It is finely paced to sustain the humming tension of its vision, which as it persists reveals the quiet terror of vacancy. “Vultures” in particular has a grandeur and an authority that for an instant makes one stop breathing: how to go further? Given the riches of this short, beautifully produced chapbook, I feel certain that Janis Esch will do so and as she continues will take many of us with her.
It’s a hot, windy summer day, and I’m thrilled to be young and alive.
We often use technology to save time, but increasingly, it either takes the saved time along with it, or makes the saved time less present, intimate and rich. I worry that the closer the world gets to our fingertips, the further it gets from our hearts. It’s not an either/or — being “anti-technology” is perhaps the only thing more foolish than being unquestioningly “pro-technology” — but a question of balance that our lives hang upon.
Most of the time, most people are not crying in public, but everyone is always in need of something that another person can give, be it undivided attention, a kind word or deep empathy. There is no better use of a life than to be attentive to such needs. There are as many ways to do this as there are kinds of loneliness, but all of them require attentiveness, all of them require the hard work of emotional computation and corporeal compassion. All of them require the human processing of the only animal who risks “getting it wrong” and whose dreams provide shelters and vaccines and words to crying strangers.
We live in a world made up more of story than stuff. We are creatures of memory more than reminders, of love more than likes. Being attentive to the needs of others might not be the point of life, but it is the work of life. It can be messy, and painful, and almost impossibly difficult. But it is not something we give. It is what we get in exchange for having to die.
”
(via allisonrae)
You know I keep it classy during band practice.
Q
Anonymous asked:
Wow that little review of yours was pretentious - did you google 'egotistical synonyms' to find the term solipsistic?
A
“Egotistical” and “solipsistic” are completely different things. “Egotistical” is a negative term that implies self-preoccupation; “solipsism” is simply the view that the self is all that can be known to exist.
And unlike mouth-breathers like you, I learn words from books, not internet search engines.
Jackass.
Hastily Written Thoughts on Laura Marling’s New Album
When I first bought Once I Was an Eagle, it fell a little flat with me. It seemed well crafted but its dark, richly textured mysteriousness and coded-ness seemed to verge on pretention.
It was only after I gave it a few more close listens that it really started to resonate. (I’d contend that this album is best absorbed privately, through headphones.)
It eventually occurred to me that Eagle is solipsistic, but not abstruse. Marling’s gaze is squarely directed inward on this one. None of the songs feel like radio-ready singles, and I think it’s safe to say she wasn’t writing for anyone but herself. She keeps her cards so close to her chest that her language is almost always enigmatic. (“You might not think that I care but you don’t know what I know,” she growls darkly in “I Know.”)
At first glance, Marling seems to be exploring the vulnerability at the center of her defensiveness in love. “Pray For Me” reminded me of all the times I’ve felt like throwing in the towel: “I will not love, I want to be alone!” But I have no doubt that my reading of the album’s emotional impetus will change, and claiming to know what’s in Marling’s heart/head seems futile.
Credit where credit’s due: it seems that the album was as much the brainchild of producer Ethan Johns as it was Laura’s, and I think we have him to thank for its sonic and thematic cohesiveness.
In short, I like it, and I think her exploration of the innermost workings of her heart has yielded some fascinating, if esoteric, stuff. But sometimes I do miss the Laura who sighed girlishly, “And I’m clearing all the crap out of my room, trying desperately to figure out what it is that makes me blue / And I wrote an epic letter to you! / And it’s 22 pages front and back but it’s too good to be used / And I tried to be a girl who likes to be used / But I’m too good for that! There’s a mind under this hat!” Maybe she’ll return to easily accessible work someday, but until then, we mere mortals can only sit and wonder at her meaning.
