"There’s a problem: feathers, iron, bargain buildings, weights and pulleys."
The sky out there could crush you. Fuck you, Autumn.
Someone asked a couple of days (or more) if I listen to the National. I do. I discovered them shortly after finishing The Drowning Girl back in 2011. In fact, I wanted to include a quote from their song "Anyone's Ghost" as an epigraph, and the band was cool with it, but the record company wanted some exorbitant fee, so it didn't happen.
Yesterday was a better day, and sometimes that's the best I can hope for.
Speaking of The Drowning Girl, I have a second Perrault painting-in-progress from Matthew Jaffe. This time, "Night in the Forest":
The Centipede Press edition is coming together.
---
I'm pounding at the front door of Cherry Bomb. Yesterday I wrote...I don't know. I bunch of words. Doesn't much matter because I tossed them all out. Later, not writing, I might have figured out the beginning. The last thing I want to be doing just now is writing this book.
Now that I have something sort of CEM-like for Pink Delicious, I need to get to work on that as well. Which I especially don't want to be doing. It's not truly a copyedited ms. It's a print-out of the MS Word document I was emailed, with all the marginal/tracked/whatever stuff that should be in red printed in B&W. Marks with a red pencil? Easy to see. These "marks"? Much less so. For Cherry Bomb, I'm going to offer to pay for the cost of producing a genuine CEM. I'm not trying to be difficult. But I want a copyedited ms. I can work with. A hard copy someone has marked up by hand. Yesterday, my editor informed me those sorts of CEMs don't exist anymore, that everything the copyeditors do is done in track changes now.
And I replied that I would quit publishing, if that were an option. But that's been true for at least a decade. This is just the latest round of "shit can always get worse." It all becomes ever less physical, less real, the process of making books and reading books, become ever less tactile, more and more consigned to tablets and "readers" and most people seriously don't seem to mind.
Civilization, culture, art...it was all inherently ephemeral to begin with. This digital age is rendering culture so insubstantial and transitory that I'm afraid I'd be overly generous to call it fleeting.
---
The roughs for the final installment of Alabaster: Boxcar Tales just hit my email. Weird.
---
In the chaos and monotony, I've been seeking comfort in old, familiar films. Night before last, To Have or Have Not (1944) and Woman of the Year (1942). Last night, The Philadelphia Story (1940). The forties are easy on my eyes and my mind. Also, The Philadelphia Story is very likely the best of Shakespeare's comedies that Shakespeare didn't write.
Don't Fall On Me,
Aunt Beast
Someone asked a couple of days (or more) if I listen to the National. I do. I discovered them shortly after finishing The Drowning Girl back in 2011. In fact, I wanted to include a quote from their song "Anyone's Ghost" as an epigraph, and the band was cool with it, but the record company wanted some exorbitant fee, so it didn't happen.
Yesterday was a better day, and sometimes that's the best I can hope for.
Speaking of The Drowning Girl, I have a second Perrault painting-in-progress from Matthew Jaffe. This time, "Night in the Forest":
The Centipede Press edition is coming together.
---
I'm pounding at the front door of Cherry Bomb. Yesterday I wrote...I don't know. I bunch of words. Doesn't much matter because I tossed them all out. Later, not writing, I might have figured out the beginning. The last thing I want to be doing just now is writing this book.
Now that I have something sort of CEM-like for Pink Delicious, I need to get to work on that as well. Which I especially don't want to be doing. It's not truly a copyedited ms. It's a print-out of the MS Word document I was emailed, with all the marginal/tracked/whatever stuff that should be in red printed in B&W. Marks with a red pencil? Easy to see. These "marks"? Much less so. For Cherry Bomb, I'm going to offer to pay for the cost of producing a genuine CEM. I'm not trying to be difficult. But I want a copyedited ms. I can work with. A hard copy someone has marked up by hand. Yesterday, my editor informed me those sorts of CEMs don't exist anymore, that everything the copyeditors do is done in track changes now.
And I replied that I would quit publishing, if that were an option. But that's been true for at least a decade. This is just the latest round of "shit can always get worse." It all becomes ever less physical, less real, the process of making books and reading books, become ever less tactile, more and more consigned to tablets and "readers" and most people seriously don't seem to mind.
Civilization, culture, art...it was all inherently ephemeral to begin with. This digital age is rendering culture so insubstantial and transitory that I'm afraid I'd be overly generous to call it fleeting.
---
The roughs for the final installment of Alabaster: Boxcar Tales just hit my email. Weird.
---
In the chaos and monotony, I've been seeking comfort in old, familiar films. Night before last, To Have or Have Not (1944) and Woman of the Year (1942). Last night, The Philadelphia Story (1940). The forties are easy on my eyes and my mind. Also, The Philadelphia Story is very likely the best of Shakespeare's comedies that Shakespeare didn't write.
Don't Fall On Me,
Aunt Beast