Parsifal's Horse

Family History

2011-04-06T14:26:00.000-07:00

My ancestry has everything in the world to do with my personal and creative interests and I've been researching my family's origins in the U.K. and Europe. I know I have ancestors from the area of Aberdeen and Fife, Scotland, my Leslie family on my maternal grandmother's side. My Brooks family is Anglo-Norman, originally from Broc in the Loire region of France, and an ancestor named Ralph Broc went to Essex County outside of London after William the Conqueror took England. The Broc family had supported him in his bid and were given some lands as a reward. Over time the name Anglicised to Brooks. I know I have Irish, German and Dutch ancestry but I don't know anything about exactly what town or region those people came from. My Swedish ancestors were named Sickles, and came from somewhere in southern Sweden, but that is all I know about that branch of the family. I want to visit the places I know I have family connections to. I found some really lovely pictures online of Broc, Essex and Aberdeenshire and put them up in my workspace, along with a copy of the bookcover design my friend Osvaldo Valle is working on for The Flower of Knighthood. I can already tell they are inspiring me. I can't travel anywhere abroad this year because I have a lot of family stuff to wrap up, but I hope to go back to France or the U.K. in 2012.

Flowering of Film

2011-04-06T13:36:00.001-07:00

My roommate Brent is starting an effects shop/media production company, and he has talked to me in the past about doing something someday with The Flower of Knighthood. We carpooled this morning, and he was asking me if I have any ideas of how it would be adapted for film. That's a hard question for me, because I am not a screenwriter or filmmaker and if it ever was made into a show, the only things I'd insist on would be that the filmmaker retain some of the book's poetic element and stay true to its spiritual message, including the message of equality between the sexes as a reflection of the relationship between the male and female aspects of the divine nature, and the message of the cultural interaction of the old pagan religion in Europe with Christianity and the validity of each. There's no point in making the book into a film if you don't keep those, they are the absolute heart of it. Other than that, I think it would be up to the filmmaker, because it's my book, but it would be his or her film. I think a book takes on a life of its own once it's adapted into another form and I would not want to interfere with the filmmaker's creative process. I absorbed ancient European goddess mythology and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in order to write the book, and a director/screenwriter would need to absorb and process me in their own way. Brent has some interesting creative ideas, mostly visual ways to carry the audience into the story. I'd love it if someone would make a film of my book, and I respect Brent's creative ingenuity. I'm printing him a copy of the manuscript right now so he can read the whole thing at his leisure. We'll keep talking and see what happens.

Indie Pub Addendum

2011-04-05T17:38:00.000-07:00

OK, I went ahead and opened an account at CreateSpace, too, figured why not. I'll play around with all of them to see which format I like best. I did that with WordPress and Blogger to decide which I preferred, and Blogger won hands down, as you can see. I also dug around a bit and got the name of the submissions editor at the U.K. publishing house that I want to approach. I'll start writing a letter to her in the next few days. I got rejected from a publisher recently, but I expected it. I met them at a conference and took a chance approaching them. They are a very small house, and they don't usually publish anything like my books, but there is a small area of overlap in subject matter, so one of the owners agreed to look at my first book. I submitted it over a year ago, and just heard back last week that they don't have a place for it, but after this long I was surprised to hear from them at all. I just looked at my manuscript file to see how much work I need to do to both submit it to the U.K. house and also to get it ready to upload if I do decide to e-pub, and I discovered I have two versions, one 151 pages long, the other 152 pages. I printed both to compare them. Both are versions of a master file, and I can't remember the difference. I need a clean copy to do some manual edits anyway, so that's one more thing crossed off the to do list.

Indie Publishing

2011-04-05T15:36:00.000-07:00

I just set up an account for myself on Blurb, a new on-demand print publishing company. I heard good things about them, so I chose them to experiment with to see what my books will look like. I also signed up with Smashwords to publish on-demand e-books, also as an experiment, and with Lulu, one of the most established on-demand print houses. I still plan to contact a publisher in the U.K. that I think might like my work, but in the meantime I want to learn more about the process of indie publishing. I will probably sign up with Createspace, too, just to get the Amazon exposure, but Blurb actually had a promotion offer right now for 20% off all future orders I place with them, so it seemed like the time to try it, and I've meant to sign up with Lulu for months and have just been dragging my feet. I also wanted to grab the account name 'Fleurdamour' as many places as possible while it's still available, since that is my preferred name online. Blurb: http://www.blurb.com/ Smashwords: http://www.smashwords.com/ Lulu: http://www.lulu.com/ CreateSpace: http://www.createspace.com/

Back in the Saddle

2011-03-28T16:17:00.000-07:00

I fell off this Horse so thoroughly the past few months that I had to request a password reset from Blogger - my account had gone into inactive mode because it's been so long since I logged in (October of last year). I honestly haven't had much to say. I've had some misfortune in family and health, and I had to take some time to get past being overwhelmed by it. My sister died in late December, on the same date when my father passed away long ago, and I've been very sad about it. I also have had to pursue obtaining a legal guardianship of my mother, because she's in a nursing home and incapacitated. My sister took care of a lot of things for her, and now it's my turn to do so. I'm just beginning to come out of that wreckage a bit and getting back to writing and editing, which is always my emotional salvation. My sister wrote, too, but never published anything, and it was a huge reality check for me to find some of her notebooks when I was packing up her apartment. They were buried uncompleted in a box. I have been stalled out to some degree the past couple of years for reasons of the economy and some personal things, but I need and want to achieve forward momentum again. I feel very sorry for her that she never managed to get her voice heard in the greater world. I also feel some guilt for not being able to help her more with that objective, but I'm trying to do the same with my own writing, so I know how hard it is to do it for yourself, let alone to try and help someone else. It's a cliche, but life is short and fragile, and I know that I've wasted time that I could have spent more productively in creative pursuits. Like most people, I was guilty in extreme youth of thinking I had all the time in the world, but none of us do. I'd say the biggest part of my holdup the past two years was what I've detailed in earlier posts - I bought a laptop that turned out to be a horrific lemon and spent a year trying to get it to work. You can witness the devastating effect that had on me from the trajectory of my posts here; they drop off to a trickle during that period and have never recovered. It's important to me to get past that. I love my sister, and I miss her, and I want to include her in my writing somehow. I think it might make her happy if I can make her a character in one of my King Arthur books. It won't make up for those poor unfinished projects, testament to the fleeting nature of life, but at least it will be something. Life happens, and death happens, and art is the best way for me to deal with both of them.

Teacher Research

2010-10-16T18:43:00.000-07:00

Out of curiosity for a possible career path in the future, I've been researching what it would take to become a college professor. I'd be most interested in either an English or Medieval Studies path, although I've also thought about getting an MFA and teaching creative writing. I'm remembering why I didn't pursue an advanced degree and teaching in the first place - I was burnt out after getting my undergrad degree, and wanted to work on creative endeavors at the time rather than any further academic ones. I also wanted to make money, and couldn't face grad school immediately for that reason.The last thing I wanted in my early twenties was more debt. I'm not sorry I pursued what I did, but I do rather wish I'd been able to go back to school before now. After reading what I would still need to achieve in order to teach at a university, I'm not sure if I have it in me. I'd need to get a Master's and a PhD, and master at least one other language. I've studied three, French, Italian and Latin, but I would need to pick one and intensify my application to it. I'd need at least 5 more years of school and would graduate with a lot of debt. It might be worth it - I love learning, and I can think of worse ways to spend my time than submersing myself in studying the Middle Ages, but I also know how demanding my creative writing is. That's the main reason I never did seriously consider grad school before now - it took all of my spare energy to finish my two books, and I'm still editing them. I've got four more started that I deeply want to finish, and I was afraid that attending school would pull me away from them, which it probably would for a few years unless I could work it so that one of them counts as class product. I've also had a lot of other problems to solve, like helping my family after my mother's stroke, and dealing with 9/11 and Katrina. If I'd wanted to teach, I think I probably should have gone back to school at least ten years ago. I'm going to keep researching it and pondering it, but I'm also just going to go ahead and keep studying on my own, too. I've given myself a curriculum of material that will keep me busy for a while and that's suited to providing structure and inspiration for my books as well as a possible foundation for formal study. I figure if I never go back to school formally, at least I will have studied what I loved, and if I do pursue another degree, I'll be in a lot better shape to approach it. I definitely plan to at least take some courses in digital media, like enhanced e-book production and more electronic music studies. I think I really am fundamentally more of an artist than an academic, which is what I've always come back to in the past, but I want to make sure I explore every avenue in life that holds even the slightest interest for me.

From Bad Seed to Summer Isle

2010-10-15T14:25:00.000-07:00

I haven't updated in a long time because I kept having terrible problems with my Apple laptop, and lost a lot of motivation while I was dealing with that. It kept having one kernel panic after another, complete with crashing, freezing and screaming, and nothing would fix it. Finally this month, after having reinstalled the OS twice and replaced the RAM, the hard drive and a video card that was a main component of the motherboard, the Apple Genius bar threw in the towel and gave me a brand new machine, in the current model. I was a little surprised they voluntarily did that, but I'm very grateful. Enough is enough. I was about to ask them to, anyway, it's been such a nightmare. My Apple was a lemon. I didn't lose any work except for a few photos because I have never trusted that machine and never used it for much. Hopefully, now I can move on. I've lost so much time to it that I've actually been mired in despair lately, but I soldiered on meanwhile in other areas and hopefully I can make up for some of the lost time. I named the first Apple laptop, the one with so many issues, Adam, thinking that naming it after Adam Kadmon, the primordial man closest to the divine image, would be lucky, but maybe the archetypal energy of the Fall was too much for it. I've chosen to give this one a positive, goddess-oriented name also associated with apples: Avalon.

I'm also no longer writing for the Mid-City Press. I did seven or eight articles for them, including some reporting to bring public attention to the funding problems at the Los Angeles community arts centers. I'm proud of my work there, but I decided that ultimately we weren't a good fit for each other and I resigned. I'm very glad to have had the experience, and leaving actually helped free me up to move on with my other projects. I've given up on pursuing arts journalism in the future as anything but a possible sideline, and I'm okay with that. It never was lucrative at the best of times and it's just nearly impossible to find decently paying jobs in it at this point, and I've got bigger fish to fry. When I first moved out to L.A. in 2006, I was still contemplating studying journalism formally via UCLA extension to supplement the education and experience I already have, but it's just not worth it anymore. I'd do much better to allocate my education dollars to learning e-book publishing, LogicPro, and saving some towards possible future endeavors in medieval studies. I'm still working on book edits for The Flower of Knighthood and Parsifal and those are actually going pretty well. I've taken a short break lately to read some books, Foucault's Pendulum and the Illuminatus! Trilogy. If I can get organized enough, I'd like to write an essay at some point comparing and contrasting those two books. They have amazing similarities of themes and structure - both incorporate outrageous conspiracy theories and use the kabbalistic Tree of Life for their structure, and both have a computer that plays a central role symbolizing consciousness. I requested a hold at the public library on another book by Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, and I'm looking forward to it.

Please Help the William Grant Still Arts Center

2010-05-05T13:30:00.000-07:00

Per my last post, the William Grant Still Arts Center in West Adams, Los Angeles, is having funding problems due to the city financial crisis. If you are interested in helping, please go to the Facebook page for their supporters below to get updates and info about their upcoming fundraiser on May 8. The Center is fantastic and offers free and low-cost public arts programs for kids. It fills a gap left from programs that have already been cut in the public schools, and to lose it would be to lose a treasure of Los Angeles culture.

http://www.facebook.com/people/William-Grant-Still-ArtsCenter/1211918846

Mid-City Press

2010-05-05T13:26:00.001-07:00

I did land the position as Mid-City Press arts columnist, and just turned in my third piece, a review of the Earth Day show at Eco-Logical Art Gallery. Here is the link - it came out today and made the front page, scroll down for the text:

http://www.midcitypress.com/

And here is my second piece, published a few days ago, about trying to save the William Grant Still Art Center from closing its doors due to funding problems:

http://www.midcitypress.com/?p=381

My first column came down already, but it was about the St. Elmo Village arts community in PicFair, a neighborhood in central LA that used to be the Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks compound. I am loving this writing assignment, I get to meet everyone creative for a ten-mile radius. It's very inspiring.

BP and the Beeb

2010-05-05T10:55:00.000-07:00

I have been reading my beloved BBC, purveyor of Doctor Who and Monty Python, a lot lately for their coverage of the Gulf oil disaster. I read them to get a perspective on news events from outside of America. I wanted to see how they would handle news that a British company is dumping oil into the Gulf at a heart-stopping rate. Here's the link for today's piece:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8662573.stm

And here is their archive from the past two weeks:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/search/news/bp

I am somewhat biased on this issue because I lived in New Orleans briefly, and in Corpus Christi, TX when I was very little so this situation is really freaking me out. I'm heartbroken for the people who make their living from the Gulf, and worried about the animals and the long-term consequences to that complex ecosystem. I'm also a dyed in the wool Anglophile. A lot of my family is British and my folks even lived in Essex County outside of London for three years early in their marriage. I once tried to get hired at the BBC so maybe I could live in England myself someday. I'm glad they are covering it objectively.

Will the Editing Never Cease?

2010-02-16T13:09:00.000-08:00

I am re-re-editing my first book. Even one of my roommates got exasperated with me when I told her I was at it again, wondering if I would ever finish it, but I got a fresh burst of creativity and found a lot of places where I could make it stronger. It's been long enough now since I looked at it that I lost some of my attachment to turns of phrase that can upon reflection be improved. I am readying it for e-publication, and I figured it's been this long, why not make a last push and make it as perfect as I possibly can? I'll know when I am done. Again, I learned so much writing the second one that I have found new avenues of self-expression that I can bring to prior work. It just seems slightly underdeveloped to me now, and I know how to fix that. What's a few more months in the course of a lifetime?

Back in the Saddle

2010-02-16T13:07:00.000-08:00

My new hard drive seems to be working fine, knock on wood. I was relieved enough to go out and buy backup drives for the Mac and for my little cheapy PC netbook and laptops. I am now budgeted for May to drop some cash on Logic Pro for the Mac so I can get my music composition off the ground again. It's agonizingly slow to get all of the stuff I need for my projects, but it's an investment that is worth it.

Mid-City Press

2010-02-16T12:57:00.001-08:00

I just sent an inquiry to a new community newspaper that is starting in my neighborhood. The editor and founder spoke at the local neighborhood council meeting last week and said she is looking for writers. I told her about my fine art and entertainment background and offered to write about local arts organizations and cultural institutions. I live in an artists' comunity in Mid-City, which is located roughly between between Mid-Wilshire and the Miracle Mile on the west and Koreatown on the east, and is bordered by the 10 freeway on the south and Pico Blvd. on the north. There are some very interesting things going on in the area, from St. Elmo's Village, a longstanding artspace for mainly African American work, to Mid City Arts, a graffiti and urban art collective. There is also the Eco-Logical Art Gallery, just outside of the official Mid-City map, but right down the street from me. One of our neighbors shows his work there and they have some really interesting shows.

Here is the newspaper's website - it looks to be in beta-testing stage still, not finished, but there is some info about the mission and content.

http://www.midcitypress.com/

I definitely approve of their aim to fill some of the vacuum in local coverage left by cuts at the LA Times and other more established media. It's brave to start a newspaper right now, and I hope they make a go of it.

Medieval Studies

2010-02-16T12:52:00.000-08:00

I did not make it to the medieval studies conference last week in Arizona. I almost went, but then decided I would rather spend the money on computer things to advance my own projects. There is a Celtic studies conference coming up at the end of the year, at UCLA. I will go to that one - it involves no travel other than driving across town, and it's completely free. I am kind of sorry about missing this recent one - the topic was Man and the Natural World during the Middle Ages, which sounded fascinating, and I would like to visit Scottsdale again (I once went when I was six years old and liked it). I've just only got so much time, money and energy, and I have to allocate all of those resources as I go.

Medieval Europe Lives Again In the American Desert

2009-12-31T22:02:00.000-08:00

I am going to try to go to this conference in February:

http://www.acmrs.org/conferences/2010/conferences.html

I had no idea that Arizona was a hotbed of medieval studies. Maybe the dry climate is good for preserving manuscripts? I found out about this conference through the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at UCLA. I also want to go to one of their upcoming events, a lecture from a manuscript specialist at the Getty Museum:

19th History of the Book Lecture
“Searching for the Origins of Secular Imagery in Thirteenth-Century France”
Friday, January 29, 2010

The mid-thirteenth century in northern France saw an explosion in the production of books in the vernacular. Most art historians have seen the illumination of romances and histories of the period as a rather thoughtless adaptation of sacred painting models. In this lecture, however, Dr. Elizabeth Morrison (Curator, Department of Manuscripts, J. Paul Getty Museum) explores how artists adapted and ultimately broke away from their religiously inspired beginnings in order to create new formats and compositions more suited to their needs and the needs of a new breed of manuscript- the illuminated secular book.

From here:

http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/programs/calendar.html#1-29

It's part of this series:

http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/programs/history_book.html

It's good to live in a large town where you have access to resources like this. I'd be even happier if I lived somewhere like London, but I always try to use every place I live to its fullest.

Rotten to the Core

2009-12-31T21:56:00.001-08:00

Well, I thought that my Apple computer was fixed when the Genius tech removed a faulty RAM module before Christmas, but when I took it back into the store to have the replacement installed, it crashed again. They ran a diagnostic, and based on that, they just gave up and replaced my hard drive. The model I had was no longer available, so they gave me a free upgrade to a more powerful drive and sent me home. All of this happened right before the holiday break, so I have not had a chance to fire it up again and re-do all of my settings and make sure it's back on the right track, but I plan to do that this weekend. I have to say, it's really been getting me down. I invested a lot in this computer, and it's a been a huge holdup for me this past year. I hope this solved the problem. The Apple techs were very kind, and have been awesome about addressing my concerns, it's just been awful to have so many things go wrong with what is supposed to be such a good machine.

Book By Its Cover

2009-12-01T15:22:00.001-08:00

This year has seemed to be one of delay and disruption. I shared below how my computer has been giving me fits, and so has the economy. There have also been some personal things that have required quite a bit of processing on my part to come to terms with. I've taken some of the slow time to get mundane parts of my life in order, but I feel like the hour is approaching for me to move forward with my creative projects again. My first book is about ready to go as an e-book, but I've had a holdup with the cover artwork, because my artist friend who is doing it for me has recently had a quite serious illness. I am hoping he recovers soon because he's been through a lot the last few years and truly does not deserve this. I think his state has come mostly from stress due to unpleasant stuff he has had to deal with, which amounts to being unfairly punished for being unfairly punished. I can relate to that, it's certainly happened to me in the past, but I feel very sorry for him because he's sick enough to have taken disability time off from his day job and I know he feels physically awful. I am sharing this because I write this blog to share my experiences with developing my writing, and this kind of thing is part of the process. Reality is something that must be dealt with.

More Scribd

2009-12-01T11:13:00.000-08:00

I've gotten about one thousand hits on Scribd since I posted a sample of The Flower of Knighthood there, so I'd say it's definitely a success. I want to write some essays and put them up there as well to generate more traffic.

Poisoned Apple

2009-12-01T10:40:00.000-08:00

I wrote on here back in February how I finally was able to buy an Apple computer after months of saving. Alas, I have been having problems with it ever since, issues which escalated recently. It's been giving me one kernel panic after another, a state where the operating system is not communicating with the requested application and the machine freezes and shuts down. I took it to the Apple Genius Bar twice over the summer, and they could not find anything wrong with it because, as often happens, it not do exactly its same breakdown for them as it did for me at home. I then went online and researched the failure and its possible causes, and went so far as to erase the OS and reinstall it from scratch. I thought that had fixed the bad seed, but this weekend it failed more spectacularly than ever, so I took it in again. It finally did its screaming, seizing collapse in full glory for the tech, who realized it must have a faulty RAM module. He removed half its brain (one chip) to check, and it instantly worked better. It's still under warranty, so he ordered a replacement at no charge and told me it should be here in a week or so. It's operational even with one good chip, and it's working better than it has in months. I am very pleased, because I thought my Apple was a lemon and feared that I would have to return it. I was so happy to get it, and it's been so frustrating to me to have it be such a problem when it was supposed to solve problems. I've been stalled out on developing my music because of it and the drain on me from trying to fix it has slowed me down on my editing and writing, too, but hopefully now it can live up to its promise. I think my Apple has been expressing a metaphysical problem as well as a technical one - I've also written some about crossing Da'ath, the Abyss, in the Tree of Life over the last few months, and in the very center of the primal waste stands the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, with a serpent coiled around its base. Maybe I had to get past the poison of the snake in order to be able to apply the wisdom of the Apple. The doorway to the Qliphoth, the reverse Tree of Life, is in the Abyss as well, and makes its influence known through brokenness and corruption, often of a psychological nature. My RAM module, clearly a symbol of thought and memory, was corrupt, but through serious effort towards systems integrity it is in the process of being repaired. It's like a redemption of the Fall enacted in cyberspace, which is not a bad metaphor for the archetypal realm from which this process of spiritual initiation originates.

The Holy Grail

2009-12-01T10:28:00.000-08:00

"How at the Castle of Corbin a Maiden Bare in the Sangreal and Foretold the Achievements of Galahad" by Arthur Rackham. From Alfred Pollard's The Romance of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table (1917).

Shadowlands

2009-10-12T12:46:00.001-07:00

I have been watching a great many movies lately. I've been somewhat tired, and kind of took the summer off to catch up with myself. I live near a library and on the weekends I've been checking out mostly older films on VHS. There's not much competition for them, so I've gotten some really good titles. Last night I continued my C.S Lewis multimedia kick, watching Shadowlands, the 1993 film starring Anthony Hopkins as Lewis and Debra Winger as Joy Gresham, nee Davidman, the American poet who became his wife. Gresham was a great admirer of Lewis' work, and in turn she inspired his books Surprised by Joy and A Grief Observed. If you are not familiar with their story, you can infer some of its arc from those two titles. A native New Yorker, Gresham corresponded with Lewis from America when she was still married to alcoholic writer William Lindsay Gresham. Unhappy in that marriage, she took her two sons, David and Douglas (only Douglas is mentioned in the film) to London and went to Oxford to meet Lewis. The two became friends, and when she finally left her husband and settled in England, she approached Lewis with an unusual request - she asked if he would marry her in a platonic civil union so she could remain in the country. He obliged and they lived separate lives until she was stricken with bone cancer. Lewis realized that his own lectures characterizing pain as a call from God to spiritual awakening had come to life, and that he loved Joy. The feeling was mutual, and they married again with an Episcopal priest presiding at her hospital bed. Gresham eventually died in 1960 after a long struggle with the disease, but by all accounts her marriage to Lewis was a happy one. It's been remarked upon how surprising the couple's eventual romance and marriage was, but Lewis was an unconventional man in many ways. He wrote science-fiction and childrens' stories, and also penned populist theology such as The Screwtape Letters, all of which were considered somewhat suspect for a man of his academic accomplishments (don of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at both Oxford and Cambridge). There is a scene early in the film in a local pub where his professor friends are ribbing him about his Narnia books, trying to find Freudian overtones to the wardrobe and fur coats, but Lewis stands up and enacts the scene of pushing through to a new world and describes it as simply "magical." His point is not understood, as the other men are highly invested in intellectualism and rationalism and can't make the imaginative leap to follow him in the snowy footsteps of a faun. Gresham was different. Herself a poet with an imaginative sensibility, she was a prodigy of intellect. She attended Hunter College at the age of fourteen and was published in the prestigious Poetry Magazine by the time she attained her majority. Her family were Russian Jews from the Bronx, although Gresham herself converted to Christianity at least partly on the basis of Lewis' theological writings. She was outspoken and intelligent and I think Lewis liked her simply because she was an equal in her own right who could keep up with him. I have to say I admire him for marrying a strong woman. It cements my positive image of his character that he could hold his own enough to choose a wife who could challenge him.

There is also a strange kind of symmetry to each of the major relationships with women that Lewis had in his lifetime. Lewis's mother died of cancer when he was a boy, which devastated him. In the film, he says his world ended, which is a very fair statement to describe what happened to him in real life. His father did not deal well with the event, and the boys were shipped off to boarding school. It's no wonder they spent most of their lives in company with each other - each was pretty much the other one's only emotional support after their mother passed away. Lewis' brother Warnie had his own struggles with alcoholism, and the men shared a house together for years, exactly as depicted in the film. What isn't covered in the movie is the earlier relationship Lewis had with the mother of a friend. Paddy Moore was a co-cadet with Lewis in WWI and the two agreed that if either died, the survivor would help the other's family. Moore was killed in action, and Lewis, though only eighteen years old, made good on his word. Mrs. Moore was forty-five when they became acquainted, and they lived together until the 1940's when ill health forced her into care. He never elaborated on whether their relationship had a romantic dimension, but he loved her deeply and referred to their interaction as complex. She filled many aspects of the maternal role for him, but also looked up to him as a man, and a stand-up one who had been willing to set aside some of his own needs to help her. As to Gresham, she was already a mother of two sons when Lewis met her, and that had to be appealing to him, echoing the dynamic of his own family with himself and Warnie as the earlier template. He disavows Freudian implications in the film, but the psychological subtext is undeniable. As someone who lost a parent in childhood, I can testify through personal experience that one finds oneself seeking ways to compensate for that loss through later relationships. There is no harm in that, emotional needs exist to be fulfilled, and Lewis' relationship with Gresham seems to have been very fulfilling for him. I read A Grief Observed and while I found it hard to take in some ways due to its personal nature and the dark emotions it describes, it's very clear from the text that Lewis deeply loved his wife and missed her terribly after she was gone. He wrote the book anonymously, but finally had to come out publicly as its author when many of his own friends kept recommending it to him as a tool to deal with his feelings, surely an irony for a private man. He took good care of Joy's sons after she died and named them as his heirs, with all rights to his works - just imagine inheriting Narnia.

I do have to say that I had a few issues with the film. I had wanted to see it because I like Lewis so much, and I am glad that I did, but I thought there were some major gaps in the story which made it somewhat jarring for me. The absence of Joy's son David is one of the main ones. The fact that she had two sons was for me of paramount symbolic importance, since Lewis was also one of a pair of brothers. Perhaps David did not want to be in the film. I have not found any explanation for his absence in any of the related material online, but he was written into an earlier stage version of Shadowlands, so it does seem odd to me that he was taken out of the more high-profile film project. I also felt that the screenplay did not quite do justice to the story. There were several instances where the action was inadequately explained. In one scene at Oxford after their marriage of convenience and just before her cancer diagnosis, Lewis and Gresham are in his college rooms, and she suddenly verbally attacks him for arranging a closed-off life for himself where he always holds the upper hand. She stops one sentence short of calling him abusive, and storms out. He is left utterly confused, with a teakettle whistling in the background that I felt was emblematic of their heated emotions and especially so of her venting. Only one or two scenes later, he is shown calling her, and she falls with a snapped femur on the way to catch the phone, setting the stage for the revelation of her advanced cancer. There isn't adequate explanation, for me at least, of why he even called her. She had been downright rude, almost to the point of being psychologically dysfunctional, and he himself said in hurt surprise, "I thought we were friends." There isn't enough build-up to that scene, and there isn't enough follow-through, either. It is supposed to be one in a continuum of vignettes that shows how Lewis shut down emotionally after his mother's death and never opened himself up to pain again, even though he somewhat hypocritically prescribed its tonic to others in his talks on religion. I felt that that plot point was handled awkardly, however, with this scene as the most egregious example. Her accusation comes out of nowhere, and goes nowhere. As soon as she is sick, it's just forgotten. In a film about two writers, I found several similar lacking elements in the screenwriting. It isn't quite balanced, spending too much time in some places and not enough in others. And as odd as David's absence is, there is a young student of Lewis' that seems to have wandered into the movie for little reason. He's struggling with his classes, and with Britain's class divisions, a poor boy who falls asleep in school and doesn't complete his lessons because he stays up all night reading preferred volumes he has stolen from the local bookseller. He's contrarian, refusing Lewis' help and eventually drops out during his third year but later becomes a teacher. I think he is supposed to be another maverick who bucks Lewis's control, but I found his character grating and superfluous. I am not sure if he was based on someone from real life or was merely added for dramatic tension, but I considered him a distraction whose sacrifice would have strenghened the film. One strong-willed and obstreperous foil is enough, even for C.S. Lewis. Shadowlands was directed by Sir Richard Attenborough, and it is lovely to look at. Oxford is a naturally photogenic setting and the period look of the early 1950's is masterfully achieved. The film proceeds at a stately pace, but there simply isn't enough explanation and development in its content for my taste. Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger are both well-cast for their roles, they certainly look right and perform admirably, but I never felt any chemistry between them, a serious failing for a film based on romance. As fulfilling as this relationship was in real life, I simply found the movie unsatisfying. Other people have loved it and raved about it to me, but I think I just prefer the real-life story to the Hollywood version. As the takeaway of that, here is a very cute picture of the pair hanging out at his house in Oxford - they do look really happy, don't they?: http://www.aslanbooks.com/images/CSJoylewis.jpg

Mindwalk With Me

2009-09-29T13:13:00.000-07:00

I just watched the movie Mindwalk, released in 1990 on VHS. It's never been reissued on DVD to my knowledge and I finally tracked it down on EBay at a price I was willing to pay. It's kind of a cult hit, especially among Mensa types, and copies can go for as much as $100, but I found one for $20 and snapped it up. I've been wanting to see it for a while, especially since I went to Mont St. Michel last summer - except for one brief scene at the beginning, the entire film was shot on location there. It's a deceptively simple film, almost more like a play, featuring a rambling conversation between a female Norwegian physicist (Liv Ullmann), an expat American poet/actor/playwright living in Paris (John Heard) and an American Senator and recently defeated presidential candidate (Sam Waterston). I was amazed at how timely the topics were, with the dialogue including commentary on global warming, international economic issues and sustainability, all of which have grown even more critical since the film was made almost two decades ago. The movie opens with Waterston calling Heard in the aftermath of the election and asking if he can visit the poet, his speechwriter in past years, in France, with the ulterior motive of recruiting him to rejoin the politician's staff. The men drive up to the cathedral and meet the physicist there, their mutual introduction setting off a two-hour discourse of ideas. Ullman's scientist is the voice of conscience and holistic consciousness and speaks passionately about the importance of ecology and ethics in human affairs. Waterston and Heard listen to her with a growing respect throughout a walk that weaves from the high gothic cathedral of St. Michael to the beach above the mudflats of the Bay of Normandy which surround the holy isle. The central premise of the film, whose script is based on the book The Turning Point by Fritjof Capra, is that Cartesian rationalism had its place in its era as a philosophical catalyst which made possible a new perceptual model of the world, and that that model served to bring humanity into the modern age. However, as the physicist articulates, that model has now worn out and needs to be replaced by a newer one, because its mechanistic approach is too reductive for the complexity of organic life and the pressing demands of the present day, a time when technological knowledge has outrun wisdom. The scientist maintains that man must make another perceptual paradigm shift in order to accomplish the imagining of the needed model. She's struggling with that on a personal level as well as an abstract one - she is in a crisis of faith and is on a perhaps-permanent Sabbatical from her work, because an X-Ray laser that she invented for medical applications was corrupted into a component in the Star Wars missile defense system. To paraphrase her words, that "blew her mind," and she retreated to the simplicity of the isolated medieval monastery to settle her thoughts and achieve some clarity about her future direction. She and the two men are all in some degree of midlife crisis. Each seems to feel like a failure in one way or another. The poet is published, but not well-known or financially successful (he says he sold 12,000 copies of his poetry book, which impressed me, but, hey, it's a movie) and the Senator, having lost his bid for America's highest public office, is retrenching and figuring out his priorities. The discussions which occur directly between him as the voice of pragmatism and the physicist as that of higher human aspiration are especially effective. She criticizes politicians for their one-track worldview, but he lays out the reality of Washington as a place where you have to pick your battles if you hope to get anything done at all. She admits that she lives in an ivory tower, and he invites her down into the brawl by offering her a job as an advisor to his office. Their interaction, especially the scenes where she tries to explain quantum physics and the subatomic world to him, is like an allegorical meeting of the sacred and the profane. As allegory reached its height of refinement and popularity in the literature of the Middle Ages, using the conceit in the medieval setting of Mont St. Michel is a stroke of genius, a construct which carries a powerful psychological punch. The character of the poet is the foil to the other two and a conduit for their energy. He's a holy fool figure, also a popular medieval construct, who provides reflection and comic relief, drawing off some the tension of their polarized dynamic and defusing it. The politician represents power - he is in a position to hire the other two, and he makes policy for the government that can affect the course of global events. He's a personification of the world, the male realm of privilege and prestige, but there are limits to his power, as his electoral defeat shows, and as demonstrated by his befuddlement in the face of the feminine force of nature who communicates to him the strangeness of the quantum field. To his credit, he at least tries to understand her, perhaps a hopeful sign for a favorable outcome in the real world over the long term. For another medieval comparison, all of the characters remind me of the colorful people in The Canterbury Tales. They drop in, tell their stories, and go on about their business. They are on a pilgrimage of sorts, and we see only the part of their life's journey concerning our tale. The midlife crisis motif in the film is a highly creative symbol for the state of modern man - outgrown of the primitive stage that marked his childhood, the bright and shiny reason he thought would solve his adult problems has fallen short, and he must find a way to reinvent himself and forge a better future for his race. The film ends as suddenly and ambiguously as it began, with no firm decisions made, but with much thought provoked. The last line alludes to the title of the originating book - as he and the poet walk back to the car, the Senator muses to himself that he may have reached some kind of seminal "turning point." I have also been reading a book by C.S. Lewis that synchronistically resonates for me in context with this film. It's called The Discarded Image, and it concerns exactly that medieval model of the world which Descartes' rationalism and Newton's modern science replaced. That model is of especial interest to me, because it's the foundation of the ascent mysticism that I've devoted myself to studying lately (please see my earlier posts on the topic - it's coalescing as the absolute core of my own work and I've gone on about it quite a bit). It placed the Earth at a remove from the rest of the cosmos in a way that is actually kind of bewildering. Lewis described it as making man almost suburban in his geographic relation to the universe. This medieval natural order sets the earth and its environs in the solar system within a series of concentric circles drawn by the orbits of the near astronomical objects. The transit of the moon marks the boundary between the realm of matter delineated by our world and that of spirit, termed the Empyrean and composed of a substance called aether which is quite different from the gross matter of the lower reaches. Aether can best be conceptualized as something approaching primordial light, and its regions are those where God and His angels dwell. The hierarchical structure of these realms is an inversion of how the universe appears to us from our perch on the rocky earth. We seem to be at the crux with the heavens whirling around us, but in actuality we are the ones rotating around the Empyrean, the true cosmic axis (another kind of turning point). One metaphor Lewis gives for this is that of a wheel: if God is at the hub, the point around which the created cosmos spins, then man is at the far rim of the wheel, the edge which whirls the most furiously. We suppose ourselves to be the center of the universe, but that is but our self-involved perspective - we are really very far from the true center, God, and are spinning madly and dizzily in the outer darkness. We brought that on ourselves according to this model, because we have Fallen: our own actions served to cast us centrifugally away from the Source, and it's our job to climb back if we can, hence the ascent. In this worldview, we are almost powerless in the face of the spiritual forces that run the cosmos, our only real tools being faith and free will. The Cartesian view is nearly the exact opposite. Because it posits life as mechanical, man can hope to master it. The systems theory propounded in Mindwalk offers a different path from either of these by providing man with a way to work with the universe to mutual benefit. Man can use his inherent connection to all of life, a fact described beautifully by the scientist in her discussions of quantum physics, to create a sustainable means for himself to prosper while having as little negative impact as possible on the rest of the interrelated web. This could be called the organic path, as opposed to the older spiritual or mechanical one, and it involves co-existence and stewardship rather than domination or abject submission. As a model for man's future, I think it holds great promise, and I believe at least some of humanity has already woken up to it. The symbol of Mont St. Michel is actually a perfect illustration of the kind of interaction man could best have with his world. It was a barren rock in the bay until a priest had a vision from St. Michael to build a church there; hence it signifies the civilizing influence man can have on the raw environment, motivated by spirit and aimed toward mastering matter. The cathedral is a marvel of engineering that utilizes the rock itself for its building materials. The island sits balanced between the four elements - earth, sky, air and water - like an archetypal example of an alchemical ideal. It has been employed before as the image of the Holy Jerusalem, a perfect city and mankind's true home. I myself used its first sighting by the Grail Knight in my book Parsifal to foreshadow the eventual restoration of God's order upon the earth. What better icon to represent man's striving toward unity than a city built by divine directive and seamlessly integrated with its environment? Mont St. Michel is elemental and civilized, sacred and profane - commercial shops line its lower streets but the ascending approach to the cathedral is spiritually colored indeed. The hues of its stained glass reflect the blue and gold light of the bay and the sky and the warm green and brown of the earth. It's built on an island, not tethered to the mainland, so it belongs to everyone and to no one. It stands on rock, but floods with water and sand constantly washes around its very foundations. It's lasted hundreds of years and seems both solid and eternal, but to God it's a city built upon a single grain of dust. It's homely and transcendent and I've never been happier anywhere in my life. Doesn't that sound like heaven on earth? The meeting point of the book and film is the mechanistic model of Newton and Descartes (for my own holy fool moment of levity, perhaps we could call it The Descartes Image?). The book outlines the model which preceded it, the medieval spheres of matter and spirit divided symbolically into the realms found below the moon and above it; the film hints at the model which must inevitably follow it, hopefully a unification of all such duality into cosmic oneness. Man is not the master of life, but he doesn't have to be its helpless victim, either, and he has been assigned a dynamic role to play in Creation. It's our responsibility to figure out how to live that role to its highest and fullest potential. It would be very interesting to look down from the aethereal heights five hundred years from now and see what model finally came to define our age: a stubborn clinging to rationalism that ignores all other modes of thought or a flowering of conciousness that ushers in a new Renaissance. I'll leave you with a final image of the glory of Mont St. Michel to hopefully stir you towards your own perceptual shift: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mont_Saint_Michel_bordercropped.jpg More info on Mindwalk: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindwalk http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100151/ More info on The Discarded Image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Discarded_Image http://www.amazon.com/review/R1FF231EYZBIGQ More info on Fritjof Capra and The Turning Point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritjof_Capra More info on Mont St. Michel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_St_Michel

Magic Books

2009-07-29T17:36:00.000-07:00

I’ve been Twittering about The Magician’s Book by Laura Miller, a kind of biography and literary analysis of C.S. Lewis combined with some personal essay about Miller’s feelings about his work, especially the Narnia series of books. She did a really excellent job of researching Lewis, especially the influence of his childhood on his later life, his intellectual background and his relationships with the Inklings, a group of literary and intellectual men at Oxford which included his friend J.R.R. Tolkien. Miller accessed resources at Wheaton College in Chicago and traveled to England and Ireland to look for clues in Lewis’s environment to the origins of his Narnia stories. She was transported by them as a child, grew estranged from them as an adolescent when she realized their Christian sub-context, and returned to them as an adult literary critic (she was one of the co-founders of Salon, the online journal). I enjoyed most of her book, to the degree where I had a hard time putting it down and eagerly looked forward to my reading time each day as I worked my way through it, often stopping to conduct my own internet research when some detail piqued my curiosity. I am a fan of Lewis, with many of the same feelings from childhood about him that Miller shared, but without the shocked betrayal that she felt at the discovery of his Christian agenda. I apparently had a better church experience as a child than she did - I was raised with a record of sporadic attendance at a mild-mannered Protestant church of the Scottish Methodist persuasion. I never had a problem with Christianity until I got much older and realized that I don’t agree with a lot of how it is conducted; I don’t believe in proselytizing or mission work other than charity-oriented projects because I feel that religion should rely on attraction rather than coercion, and I also don’t feel that any one religion is superior to any other or is the only true path or answer. Many religions including Christianity say that they are the only way, but that stems from tribalism and the need to validate the faiths and to attract followers to them. Religions are cultural reflections and therefore none is greater or lesser than any other. They all have universal constants and they each have something to teach us, the same way every individual does. Taken together rather than viewed hirarchically or exclusively, they are even richer, because they form a tapestry of geographic, social and temporal influence that is fascinating to observe. I have extensively studied religions of all kinds and as an adult have attended congregations as diverse as Orthodox Jewish, Sufi Muslim, Presbyterian, Tibetan Buddhist, and Hare Krishna, so my philosophy is not just something that I learned from books - I have put my money where my mouth is. I have attended a number of Anglican churches, the denomination of Christianity that Lewis subscribed to, and have found my experience doing so to be very helpful toward an understanding of something of his perspective. I was already very familiar with the Biblical stories that form the foundation of the Narnia ones, so when I made the conceptual leap around the age of nine that enlightened me as to their subtext, I wasn’t surprised or outraged by the discovery. It made sense to me that if Aslan was God in Narnia, then Aslan could be Jesus, too. The mention of Aslan’s father as the Emperor-Over-the-Sea cemented my understanding. I’ve always been pretty comfortable with God, and was very much so as a child. I liked going to church, maybe because we didn’t do it all the time so it never became a chore. It felt more like visiting a friend, and getting to sing and listen to stories, all of which are favorite pastimes of children. The church we went to was very pretty, built from bricks of pink granite, a native stone of Texas, with stained glass, and when I went to other churches, such as my grandmother’s in Dallas, it was usually for Christmas or Easter, festive occasions that almost felt like a party, with special music and decorations. Therefore, finding the God I already knew from church in a new guise as an animal in a favorite fantasy book presented no problem for me. It actually kind of made the stories better, and it was fun to think of God, the usually disembodied presence, as a big golden lion that would sometimes let little girls ride on his back. Miller had a very different experience. She was raised Catholic, and while she takes pains to explain that it was not as strict a Catholic upbringing as some, she still found it dreary and confining. She felt outraged and cheated when she learned of the Narnian/Christian connection by reading about it in another book. She felt that Lewis had played a trick on her and had constructed a trap that seemed at first to lead to a new freedom but then led right back to the same old tradition she did not care for. She almost sounds like some pagans I know who, centuries later, bitterly resent the fetter that the coming of the “new religion” put upon the old beliefs in Europe, but I think she is actually psychologically closer to modern agnosticism or atheism (she never states her religious convictions directly, so I am conjecturing that). I remember that a roommate I had in New York City had some highly disparaging things to say about Narnia and complained that the stories were like something from a Christian bookstore and not something fun or new at all. He had pretty much rejected religion altogether, I think more as a reflexive fashion statement than as a well-considered philosophy. I just chalked it up to his youth and the rebellion that usually accompanies that, but it seems that many people feel that same way, believing that the Christian content somehow cheapens the Chronicles. Christianity as an organized system has in fact often thrown its weight around in the West, so I’m not necessarily surprised by that reaction, but I also don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The Church gave us the Inquisition and tacky strip mall bookstores, but it also bequeathed us the glories of Gothic architecture and facilitated the preservation of learning in the chaos after the fall of Rome, so it deserves a thorough weighing of its drawbacks and merits rather than a kneejerk appraisal based on personal resentments. Lewis was not only a practicing Christian, but a published theologian and a Medieval scholar. I am a Medievalist, too, partly through his inspiration though not yet of his caliber, and I understand something of the mindset of that era and of those who study it. The Church was an enormous influence on the art and writing of the period, and at the same time, as Miller also very creditably points out, the Middle Ages were teeming with other cultural and religious influences as well, everything from pagan stories to classical mythology to Islam. Medievals did not have any trouble holding multiple and sometimes conflicting conceptions in their heads simultaneously, and the Chronicles present a personal palimpsest of Lewis’s mind that shows something very similar. I am also a Jungian by temperament, so that kind of overlapping of various strata of symbols is very familiar to me. Lewis’s portrayal of God as a lion makes perfect sense in his own context, as far as I am concerned. That is a solar archetype from alchemy, often seen in Medieval literature, and one with which as a professor of that field he was certainly familiar.

I stated on Twitter that I feel Miller is much more of a materialist than I am, and that that is why we parted ways on our perceptions of the Narnia books and their God content. She helped found an internet publication and thrives in the New York publishing world, a place that is very literal and material. I consider myself a mystic and I have chosen to study religion, art, and archetypal psychology. I worked in that same publishing world for a few years, and while it was a very good learning experience, I ultimately found that it was not a good fit for me. I am happier in the realm of poetry and academics than that of consumer magazines. I also have a lot more in common with Lewis than I think Miller does. The final conceptual difference I had with her came in the concluding pages of her book. She stated that she did not care for The Last Battle, the apocalyptic book that ended the Chronicles and indeed the world of Narnia. She said many of the people whom she interviewed felt the same way, including the fantasy writer Neil Gaiman who loves Lewis and Narnia but who also felt that the final book was a letdown and the weakest of the series. Miller said that the destruction of Narnia made her sad, that it felt gratuitous, and that it made no sense to her that the Pevensies and their friends end up in a Narnia that makes the original one look like only a pale reflection. She loved the material Narnia so much that she did not want the replacement “further up and further in” that took its place. I don’t share this assessment. We were privileged as readers to be present at the creation of Narnia and so I think that it is a fitting conclusion that we are also to be witnesses to its destruction. As an adult contemplating the possible purposes of that, I can only conclude that Narnia is an artistic representation of a compressed cosmic cycle which Lewis designed and presented to make us comfortable with the concept of the death of worlds that will one day come to our own, whether through global warming, an Apocalypse, a Kali Yuga or simply the eventual death of our sun, and the promise of the renewal that will follow. The Last Battle closes one circle and opens a new one, in a dance like the eternal return. Narnia did not die; it did not go anywhere at all. It always was and always will be, like the proto-universes in the Wood Between the Worlds, the transitional space teeming with life that Miller discusses at great length. It is very strange to me that Lewis provided Miller with a restored Paradise itself, and she wanted no truck with it, I think because she truly did not understand what he was getting at. My takeaway opinion is that she thinks like a critic and does not have the mystic’s understanding of God, at least that of the emanationist philosophical branch that generated the Platonic concepts and a whole field of related systems with which as a Medievalist Lewis was very familiar. That construct holds that God is the center, the ultimate truth and that all things emanate from Him into material creation. The closer one moves toward Him, the more “real” things become because they are that much closer to their Source. That isn’t a consolation prize for the “lost” Narnia, it’s the real deal. It doesn’t degrade or replace the earlier Narnia, which served its purposes well as a lovely poem of its Creator. The simple fact is that the “real” Narnia IS ITSELF the Creator, part and parcel of Him. I personally loved The Last Battle and it felt just right to me as an ending to the tales I had loved so much. I still remember tearing up when it described the land beyond death as a state of dwelling in eternal happiness with those one loves the most, including God. If everything comes from God, then to reunite with Him is naturally to reenter the land one loves: the New Jerusalem, the Summer Country. It is the incorruptible place beyond entropy and the aether of eternity where our immortal soul already dwells - so what's not to like? I guess I always was a baby mystic, and I don’t suppose every kid would find these concepts so easy, but Lewis gave us credit that we would comprehend them sooner or later, or he would not have incorporated such rarefied concepts into books for children. The walled garden in The Magician’s Nephew and the model of the archetypal Narnia located further up and further in are integral to the ascent mysticism I’ve become so embroiled in lately, the true stream of knowledge linking Creation to its Creator in a song that calls us home. This is the water I swim in, and now you can see one of its earliest sources for me, the imaginal world of Narnia. The concept that Miller most irrefutably and elegantly put forward was that of Narnia as a compendium of every literary reference that Lewis himself ever loved. The books contain elements from Shakespeare, Spenser, the Bible, Plato, Phantastes, the Metamorphoses, etc., a catalog of their author’s voracious reading. Herself a true book lover, Miller posited Narnia as a land of literature, and, despite our other differences, on that point we can agree and mutually enjoy our time spent there.

More info on The Magician's Book:

http://www.magiciansbook.com/

Scribd Update

2009-07-23T13:45:00.000-07:00

Well, I'd say the decision to start posting on Scribd is a successful one. I put my writing sample up less than twenty four hours ago and it's already had 434 hits, and 29 downloads (a few of those are me editing the page, but only about a dozen or so, the rest are other people). It's also on Scribd's homepage where they have a section called "What people are reading now..." and it has persisted there since I uploaded it. I am sure that that is what is driving all the traffic. I'm highly encouraged by this and it's motivating me to hurry up and get the book uploaded there, too. I put a link on Scribd to where you can buy the PDF and no one has done so, but I think when I get it up as an e-book and paperback, they will. I'm just happy people are reading it.

Scribd

2009-07-22T15:25:00.000-07:00

I just posted a sample of The Flower of Knighthood to Scribd a few minutes ago, Twittered about it, and it's already gotten more than twenty hits.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/17590423/Sample-The-Flower-of-Knighthood-by-Susan-Brooks-Read-in-Fullscreen

Here is my profile page, too, named Fleurdamour:

http://www.scribd.com/Fleurdamour

This bears a lot more investigation - if this site gets this much traffic, it's an awesome place to put stuff.

Ascent Literature

2009-07-16T09:31:00.000-07:00

I've recently read two books from the '90's that are amazing - Snow Crash and The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. They were bestsellers in the field of alternative sci-fi when they were published, so I've discovered them very tardily, but better late than never. My roommate Brent Heyning pushed Snow Crash on me because it was one of his influences for his Lightning Temple project that I've been peripherally involved in lately. http://www.lightningtemple.org/ I personally feel that information comes to each of us when it is supposed to no matter when it was released, which is why these books surfaced for me lately. They both contain archetypal material related to the ascent mysticism that I've been studying and that is at the conceptual base of the Lightning Temple. Each book expresses it somewhat differently - both of them are very technologically-oriented, but The Diamond Age seems more organically so to me whereas Snow Crash is more hard-wired. The Diamond Age was actually at the vanguard of the steampunk/NeoVictorian movement in the Goth subculture, and it was ahead of its time in that regard (another of my housemates at the artists' community, scientist (and something of an alchemist) Ryan Wartena, considers himself a NeoVictorian). Stephenson is highly intelligent and imaginative and I'm finding him quite inspiring to read. Snow Crash takes place mostly in Los Angeles, and utilizes Sumerian mythology, virtual reality and social commentary on authoritarian structures and consumer culture to tell interlacing stories about a mixed-race hacker, a rogue teenage skateboard courier, a psychotic Aleut, an equally psychotic telecommunications mogul, the Mafia and the Pentecostal church. Snow crash itself is a virus that affects both humans and machines, disrupting biological and binary codes. The Diamond Age is set in China, with sojourns to London, Seattle and the bottom of the sea. Its equally complex plotline combines East/West conflict, interactive content, nanotechnology, theater, struggles of class and ethnicity and fairy tales to tell the story of a street urchin who is set on the path to becoming an educated lady when an experimental piece of technology comes into her possession via an intellectual property pirating operation. Stephenson's works are set in a future time when technology has solved some of mankind's problems and created more. Both of these books tap into the archetypal substratum containing the ascent material, also in divergent but complementary ways. The Diamond Age utilizes the same structure of the ascent found in St. Theresa of Avila's The Interior Castle, the model of seven concentric rings containing within them the levels of personal development that bring one to the realization of God in the center of the Self. It also includes Chinese alchemy, with its concept of the ascent as a celestial ladder. Snow Crash contains elements of the sephirotic Tree of Life from Kabbalah, the older aspects of the contruct that derive from the proto-Semitic cultural pool. Another facet that it also utilizes is that of the Pentecost, the descent from heaven of pillars of flame (axis mundi symbols) that stimulate the areas of the brain which process language, opening them to the pre-Babel singular tongue. The tower of Babel was a ziggurat, also an ascent structure, an artificial mountain that symbolizes mankind's upward path toward divine realization. Stephenson has since written a number of books and I enjoyed these two so much that I'm looking forward to exploring the others as they come to me.

More info on Neal Stephenson:

http://www.nealstephenson.com/

The Green Man Mounts a Campaign of Civil Disobedience

2009-07-08T18:14:00.000-07:00

I posted this to Twitter, but it's so funny it bears repeating here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/jul/08/human-shrub-colchester

Self-Referential Blogging Link

2009-07-06T16:55:00.000-07:00

I found this article very interesting, regarding the impact of blogging on media in general:

http://www.salon.com/books/excerpt/2009/07/06/scott_rosenberg/

I blog because I feel like writing about what I want to write about with no one to edit me. I get feedback in the form of comments, but that's just fine, and very different from running up against the wall of a publishing gatekeeper. I want to earn my own readers and I want to hear from them when something I write makes them think. Blogs are self-expression in a very high form, augmented by the opportunity to open a dialogue with others. I love writing here, when I have the energy to do it (see post below). I don't want to read every blog on earth, but the more there are, the merrier. Vive l'internet, I say, in all its chaotic glory.

It's July Already?

2009-07-06T16:41:00.001-07:00

I want to apologize to anyone who’s been following this blog and wonders what might have been going on with me lately. I haven’t posted here or to my music-related one in two months, the longest I’ve ever gone silent since I started both of them in 2008. I’ve kind of gone off the map in general the last few weeks for a variety of reasons. I’ve mostly just been exhausted, and it’s been building for several months. I derailed a little last fall when I almost had to move, and then when the economy sank so badly around Christmastime, I lost a lot of momentum that’s proven hard to get back. I’ve had some personal things to work through lately, too, mostly related to some care situations with elderly relatives. I’ve worked those out for the most part, which is rewarding, but it took a lot out of me to do so. My freelance writing work has dried up considerably and I honestly haven't seen much point in pursuing it in this downturn, so I’ve been concentrating on other daytime employment, and that’s been especially busy and draining recently. What energy I’ve had left I’ve been using for book edits, which are creeping along ever so slowly, but at least there is some forward motion. Pretty much everything else has come to a full stop. I haven’t answered any friend requests on Facebook or follow notices on Twitter, it took me several weeks to finish a challenging library book (which isn’t like me at all), I'm backed up on chores, and I haven’t balanced my checkbook in over a month, a dangerously long time for me because I tend to get a little careless with spending money if I don’t pay close attention to it. I’m not math-oriented, it doesn’t come naturally to me, so I have to apply discipline to my personal finances, and the fact that I’ve been unable to do so is a sure sign of burnout. I’ve earned a timeout, and I’ve been taking it. I had a huge pile of mending stacked up, and I used the last few weekends just to pile it up on the couch and work on it while I watched one DVD after another. I also read some books for the kind of pure enjoyment having nothing consciously to do with my research, something I haven’t indulged myself in for a very long time. I do enjoy all of my reading, but there’s a difference between theology and entertainment – I read The DaVinci Code, and then Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, and I’m just starting another book by him, The Diamond Age. I also went on a thrift store spending spree lately, starting around Memorial Day, which I think is finally trickling to a halt. God knows I never need any more clothes, I’ve thrifted for years and have plenty to wear, but I find clothing, especially of the vintage variety, very creatively stimulating, and I apparently needed an influx of new material, pardon my pun. This one got kick-started by visits to Vegas and Chicago, and by my discovery of a particular Goodwill in Los Angeles that has blown my mind. I can’t believe what kinds of things I have found there. It’s both good and bad that I discovered this store, because I’ve gotten some of the most incredible items I’ve ever owned in my life for pennies there, but they also seem to pretty much always have remarkable things that suit me, which is kind of dangerous considering that it’s not that far from my house and easy for me to frequent on a regular basis. I suppose, like my checkbook, this is another opportunity to practice self-discipline. Seriously, I’ve gotten an ankle-length skirt from the disco era that’s amazing, a black satin skirt like something from a film noir (both of those were $4.99 each), a gorgeous fake fur coat in perfect condition for $9.99, a black velvet clutch purse from around 1980 for $5.00, one of the most flattering vintage dresses I’ve ever had in my life for $7.99, etc. - the list goes on like that for a while. I’ve completely updated my wardrobe for about $100 spent wisely there, and another $100 or so scattered across Chicago and the Vegas Strip. I found a fantastic pair of $10 sunglasses and a $4 retro California t-shirt that helped things out, too. I think I just needed a reboot and defrag, which the shopping and passive film viewing at home provided. I need to put in some time organizing my new clothing purchases into my available closet space (I got rid of some old stuff to make room for them) and to catch up on some filing and of course the checkbook audit. I have barely touched my new laptop, that’s how bad it’s been. I just needed to have a little fun. I realized that even though I haven’t been doing all that much in terms of outside activities, if I’m this tired and fried, I need to do even less, so I’ve been ratcheting down my calendar accordingly and I plan to keep carving out some time for self-refreshment over the rest of the summer. My friend is supposed to have the finished painting for my bookcover to me this week. Waiting for that has been another stumbling block, but once I have it in my hand, I think that will motivate me considerably, too.

The Center of the Universe

2009-04-23T15:42:00.000-07:00

I just wrote a long and very strange post to my music blog Fleur D'Amour, and don't want to repeat it here, but anyone interested in my axis mundi research should read it.

http://fleurdamourmusic.blogspot.com/2009/04/center-of-universe.html

Maybe I SHOULD Accept Ads for this Blog

2009-04-21T15:15:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting Wall Street Journal article about the explosion of blogging as an actual profession. No wonder old media is in trouble - I knew there were LOTS of blogs, but had no idea this many people were being financially supported by them: "In America today, there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers. " Whoa. That's a lot of bloggers. And that is a lot of ad money being drained from traditional sources.

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB124026415808636575-lMyQjAxMDI5NDIwMTIyNjE0Wj.html

Apple Workshop

2009-04-20T13:16:00.000-07:00

I took the most basic Apple intro class this weekend at their closest store, and while most of it was as boring as you might think, it did also have some helpful material. I learned a lot about keyboard shortcuts and basic maintenance, so it was worth attending.

I've got intro to Logic Pro and intro to iWork coming up later this week. I'll book more of these workshops in the next month or so to help me get more acquainted with all of the programs. I've used Mac before, but never as my primary machine, and I want to get the most out of it.

Here is a link to the free classes at Apple if anyone is interested in taking some:

http://www.apple.com/retail/workshops/

The Path is Levelling Out

2009-04-15T17:37:00.000-07:00

I have been struggling a little with my book edits, because, as I Twittered recently, this rough draft is heavily overgrown and needs a lot of weeding. It's not exactly a first draft, because I did some streamlining as I went, especially as I typed the manuscript, but it needs a lot of work still and it's been progressing very slowly. However, I suddenly remembered the other day that I did a lot more editing during the writing process in the second half of the book. I hit my stride at one point, and I recall that it became much more refined after that. That is the point at which I had an a-ha! moment that made a profound shift in my writing approach which I then went back and retroactively applied to my first book. The bottom line is that this should get easier very soon.

Opus Magnum

2009-04-15T17:35:00.001-07:00

My housemate Evonne told me about this alchemy conference in the fall in Los Angeles and I plan to attend:

http://www.alchemyconference.com/

She heard about it from someone who came to her Lightning Temple meeting and who attends an alchemical mystery school - how cool is that?

Apple of Knowledge

2009-04-15T17:33:00.000-07:00

I registered for some free classes at the Apple store: a general intro class, one on iWork and another on LogicPro, which I don't own yet but plan to buy soon. They also have sessions on iWeb, Aperture, Final Cut Pro, etc., and I plan to take all of them. Free is good. If I need more training, they also have more advanced one-on-one sessions that I think are reasonably priced.

She's Buying a Stairway to Heaven

2009-04-01T16:36:00.000-07:00

Here is more info on the Levenda book, per my post below.

http://www.amazon.com/Stairway-Heaven-Alchemists-Kabbalists-Transformation/dp/0826428509/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1238628866&sr=8-4

I stumbled on it at the Jung Institute bookstore and it's been immeasurably valuable to me.

Lighting Temple

2009-04-01T13:44:00.000-07:00

My housemate Amoration (Evonne Heyning) and her husband Brent are working on a big project for a portable interactive performance space called the Lightning Temple. It's multidisciplinary, involving alternative energy, music, holistic elements, you name it. It's also based on merkabah mysticism, a practice in esoteric Judaism that activates the lightbody vehicle of human consciousness as a mechanism for the mystical experience of ascending a celestial ladder and coming before the throne of God. They have been having meetings with a variety of talented folks for months to plan this thing, which they hope to build shortly and take around for bookings on the festival circuit this summer. I recently came across a new book, Stairway to Heaven by Peter Levenda, which covers this form of mysticism and outlines parallels in spiritual practices as diverse as tantra, Voudun, Chinese alchemy and nineteenth century European Hermetic societies. The process is based around an activation of the chakra system by coordinating it with its cosmic analogue in the heavens, symbolized by either the seven planetary bodies of the ancient world or more commonly by the stars of the northern sky, the Big Dipper and the Pole Star, which comprise the axis mundi that I talk about all the time. This is right on target with my own work in Parsifal, about which I can't really say more without giving away important plot points, but suffice it to say, the emergence of this shared archetypal pattern in the art of my housemates and in the book I've been working on feverishly since I moved in has really got me going. It's also explained a lot about my own interests in mysticism - the Levenda book is very well-written and researched, and shows a clear connection between various esoteric things I have been interested in for a long time.

EvoAmo told me today that she has a session coming up on April 21st to discuss the merkabah and the spiritual aspects of this project, and asked me to give a brief presentation on the material covered by this book. I am so there. The book has been pivotal for me and has probably saved me years in independent research around these topics. Levenda has an esoteric pedigree going all the way back to the Magickal Childe in NYC in the late seventies and his work in this volume has impressed me immensely. I think it will help crystallize the project for everyone involved to know that there is a higher dimension to what they are doing than just making some cool art toy. It's really very deep, and I am excited to see what is going to come of it.

Writer's Grant Analysis

2009-04-01T10:39:00.001-07:00

I applied for a writer's grant and did not win, and I think I would find it helpful to write a bit of analysis about it. There were seven hundred and fifty applicants and only one winner, with five more non-cash-prize honorable mention finalists, so the odds against each applicant were very high, but I learned a lot through this process and I want to do a breakdown around it.

The grant was from A Room of Her Own, an organization that supports women writers with this and other grants and with writer's retreats and workshops.

http://www.aroho.org/

Their charter is based on giving a very large ($50,000) grant every two years to a writer who is already showing a high level of commitment to her craft. It is also derived from Virginia Woolf’s thesis that a woman needs personal space and resources in order to live out her full creative potential, which is why the award is so large – it really creates a space of independence to get that much money in a relatively short period of time. The funds are parceled out over a period of two years, and are to be used for any purpose that furthers the recipient’s writing. This year’s winner, Barbara Johnson of New Orleans, plans to use the cash to support the process of writing her first novel. Other people have used the award to pay for an MFA in writing, which the current winner did not need because she already earned one from the University of New Orleans. If I had won, I planned to use the money to self-publish and promote the two Arthurian books I have already created and to clear a little space to move forward with the remainder of the volumes in that series and with other projects in process. (I am going to do all of that anyway, but $50,000 of free money would have sped things up considerably.)

I read Ms. Johnson’s application, and I looked at her biographical info and that of the finalists and I found it to be very revealing of the mindset of this particular awards committee. When I was filling out the grant application, I came across a question that made me think, “I’m probably not going to get this grant.” The question asked what community benefit one’s writing would have if awarded the grant. I live in an artist’s community, and I interact with my neighborhood and the greater Los Angeles creative community, I social-network online, and I’ve done volunteer work for various organizations. However, I am not involved in any substantial way with any community arts organization, partly because I have not lived in L.A. that long and partly because as soon as I got here, I started writing my second book and holed up in my house for over a year to complete it. It was so demanding that I did not have any time or energy for anything else, and the editing process has proven to be no less demanding. It’s been a pretty clear choice to me my whole adult life that I have to either do my art and not much else, or not do my art, which is unacceptable, so I’ve cut out a lot of other interaction. The public aspect of my creative career has certainly suffered for that, but it was a sacrifice necessary in order to actually make the art. I haven’t pursued finding avenues for publishing my shorter poems for the same reason – I felt the books were an investment of my time that could pay much larger dividends in the future so I put the bulk of my focus on them. I’ve also had almost insupportable disruptions in my life from 9-11 in NYC and Katrina in NOLA, and I had to ruthlessly refuse a lot of activities requests in order to get back on track with my writing after both of those massively destabilizing interruptions. I honestly haven’t been in a position to help anyone else much, because I’ve had to apply all of my effort to getting somewhere for myself. I answered that question on the application by outlining how my work is feminist in nature and possesses a strong component of historical relevance and religious and cultural cross-pollination derived from its origins in medieval source material. I said I would like to bring those values to a dialogue with the wider community, and that I would happily give free readings and workshops in places like libraries and other public institutions in order to further that. When I reviewed the background qualifications of the winner and finalists,

http://www.aroho.org/GOF/Barbara_Johnson.php

it was clear that they all have extensive community outreach experience and they have all been far more public with their writing work, garnering prizes and gaining advanced degrees. The winner herself and two of the runners-up already have writing MFA’s, which does show a high degree of commitment to one’s art. I have foregone that level of education to date simply because I was writing the books, and felt that committing to them was my best course of action rather than seeking public validation of work not yet completed. I also wanted to form them in the crucible of my own sensibility rather than expose my creative process to the possible subjective influence of critical feedback from a professor or thesis committee. The process of writing my books is highly spiritual in nature, very much like the milieu of a monk or scribe sitting in isolation in his cell in order to refine his own expression on the page. They are an act of private devotion, and bringing them out for public scrutiny before they were ready was not at all something I wanted to risk. The very first person I showed my first book to at the medieval conference I went to in France tried to edit it to her own taste, so you can see why I wanted a clear field of non-interference to work with. I think there are two potent lessons in this for me: one, the organization behind this grant simply had their own set of priorities for candidate criteria, which is perfectly fair, they just did not happen to match my profile of career and life experience; and two, I do need to go more public with my writing. Journalism is one thing, but the books are something else entirely, and I really do want to get them out to the world and start interacting around them. For what it’s worth, too, if taste was a factor in the determination, I can see that mine diverges greatly from that of this organization. The winning writer, Ms. Johnson, writes poetically, but her style is very American and modern. My literary touchstones are old sometimes to the point of antiquity and are mostly European. I need to find a grants organization whose objectives are more closely aligned with the work I am producing and I think I’ll get better results.

I read back over my grant application, and I would not do anything differently with it. I was very honest about my writing and my life situation, and I spelled out exactly what I hope to accomplish. I outlined specific goals and the steps I would take to reach them, and in the part of the application that inquired what I would ask for from AROHO, I said I could use their help creating a business plan, which I thought was a very reasonable request to make of people who make a living supporting the creation of books. I wrote very passionately about my art and what it means to me, and I especially responded to one of the questions that asked applicants to discuss one of several Virginia Woolf quotes regarding writing that were provided by the committee. I love Woolf, and wrote a paper in college about her book Orlando. We share the same birthday and she’s been a big influence on me. I chose the quote, "Poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father." In the essay, I gave my mother due credit for teaching me to read and taking me to the library when I was little, and I wrote a lot about how women have been marginalized educationally and culturally throughout history, and of what a profound impact Woolf’s words had on bringing attention to that. She self-published via the Hogarth Press which she founded with her husband Leonard Woolf, and I wrote about the admirable avant-garde nature of that undertaking, too, and how I’d like to emulate it. In answer to a question about what writing means to me, I described my trip to France, and how overwhelmingly happy it made me to visit Mont St. Michel, a place I had written about in my Parsifal book. Here is a passage from that essay:

Seeing in person what I had seen only in books and on the internet was incredible - I had imagined my hero Parsifal, the knight of the Holy Grail, exploring those same lands and the great cathedral, and I felt like I had stepped into a fairytale, a fairytale that I had written. It was like the wonder of the stories I loved when I was a child curled up in a chair with a pretty book, but I was living the book instead of reading it. That is what writing means to me – it is no less than a divine gift that allows me my highest expression in the duration of time that encompasses my earthly existence. I was given the gift of writing the story of my own life and thereby co-creating with the great Creator my tiny corner of the world He made, and aside from life itself, I can’t think of a greater gift than that. That’s why the first cave paintings, also in France, hold such a sense of wonder and awe – they convey the whole cosmos and they make of a cave a cathedral. The Gothic churches are in turn an articulation of their builders’ awe at the immense groves of trees of Old Europe, the soaring trunks that suggested columns and the interplay of light in the leaves that solidified into the glory of stained glass. Thus is distilled the core of spiritual interaction between man, environment, and Maker: the arts are the closest that man can get to being God and making a world in his own image.

I'll stand behind that any day of the week.

My housemate, Evonne Heyning, runs a small non-profit to support artistic aims and is an old hand at grants. She is also a master social networker in new media, and when in my postmortem of this application I asked her for her advice on the grants process, she had an absolutely brilliant idea. She responded, “Why don't you use the space we have available at the artist’s community where we live to hold literary and poetry readings and workshops, and do more community outreach that way?” I can create a salon that comes to me, rather than having to search out venues, and I can put the resource of free space that we have in the service of the greater community. The Los Angeles literary community is not as widespread as in many other cities, due to the overwhelming presence of other kinds of media, but that is a perfect motivation to create another event for it. There are a lot of fine writers who deserve exposure, and an underground, grass-roots event is right up my alley. I may not have won this award, but I’ve now got more grants experience for myself, and a great idea of how to win friends and influence literary people.

Transatlantic Love

2009-03-31T21:35:00.000-07:00

I got some traffic to my Etsy shop thanks to a mention on a U.K. college girl's style blog. Sweet. And I made two sales from it. She apparently did a search for "floral blazer" after seeing one on Topshop's site, and found two from the 1980's that I had for sale.

www.thrillsandfrills.com

A Selection from Parsifal

2009-03-30T16:49:00.000-07:00

I've been working so hard on edits for Parsifal that I decided to post a small section of what I've done. Here is the very first section of the book, still somewhat in progress (I can't vouch for perfect grammar yet), but you can see where it is headed.

A selection from Parsifal (or, The Holy Boy)

BOOK I:
The Forest and the Court

Once upon an olden time
In the forest’s leafy clime,
Dwelled therein a little boy
Who was his mother’s pride and joy.
‘Twere only just the two of them.
His father had been battle-claimed.
No siblings had the single child
And in the woods he grew up wild.
He was a wose, a greensward one
Born of the elements. The sun
Shone down upon him every day.
‘Twas no schoolhouse for that one, nay.
The boy was taught by stars and rain;
Educated by their plane
Was his mind. No geometry
Had molded him. Philosophy
Was a thought he'd never kenned.
He was taught by the west wind
And the woodland animals.
The lad’s brief life was very full
Of instinct. Living close to earth,
The forest thus defined the worth
Of his young world, its boundaries
Marked by the edge of the trees.
His mother had retreated there
When her dear husband fell to her
Defense. She held their growing babe
Still inside her, and there she gave
His birth to him. Her fear was strong.
To her love had her heart belonged
And she had grieved so passionately
She swore that his son would not see
Another man, so never fight,
And thus she would not lose his light.
All of his realm then was the small
Perimeter. He knew it all,
Every rock and every bird,
Whose singing he had always heard.
They made the music that he knew
And as the boy toward tallness grew
He mimicked them. He knew it not,
But his own voice was sweet, its note
Among the finest of all strain.
‘Twas tenor, with a pure and plain
True feeling that did powerfully
Transport, it so mellifluously
Expressed the essence of the one
Who sang, his natural emotion.
Parsifal was his name given
And he lived as if in the garden
Of mankind’s earliest existence,
A paradise of innocence.
He moved onward unconsciously
Toward his own maturity,
Knowing not what a man was
Save for a solitary guise,
A picture that his mother had
Of her dead husband. She had made
A painting of him, very small.
He’d been for her her one and all.
She had known him all her life
And wanted no more than to wife
The man her childhood love became.
He’d been a knight of figure handsome:
Black-haired was he, fair of skin,
And his eyes had been very green.
Such words described also the son.
When the grieving widow-woman
Looked at her child, she could see
A likeness, showing so exactly
Him she had loved that she swore
To e’er keep the boy there with her.
At his birth, she’d been very young
And so knew not that such was wrong.
She meant well, for she wanted him
Need never to encounter grim
And gruesome battle. ‘Twas a girl
And wanted peace in her own world.
Her name was Herzeleide, which meant
The sorrow of abandonment,
Which she knew well, for she had lived
That fate, and living still, she grieved.
She had lost her own dear love
And could not bear to ever leave
Her little son, so far away
Did she go then and there she stayed,
And kept him closely to her side,
Her sole treasure fiercely guarded.
Besides sharing with him speech,
The best resource she sought to teach
To him was her knowledge of God,
For holy things had ever awed
And acted on her. She was good
And taught her little one to read
Her Bible and her other book
Of prayers for every day. She took
The pair of volumes as she fled
Her household when her husband died.
His family and hers were noble;
Both were established and stable,
Prosperous. They did not know
Where she had gone, though high and low
They searched, for her son was the heir,
And as they did not find, they feared
The worst and felt that she had killed
Herself, and thus also the child,
And they stopped looking, though ‘twas late –
Diligently did they try it,
But ‘twas to no avail. She’d hid
Them too well in the deepest wood.

Pages

2009-03-27T13:37:00.000-07:00

Just a brief word on my recent editing progress - I divided my six hundred page book up into four sections to make it more manageable to edit, and I am only four pages away from completing the first one. I can knock that out today or tomorrow and move on to the next section. I am starting to get my motivation back on it. I was so tired from the grueling process of writing the book all through 2007 and then the even more grueling process of re-editing my first book that I kind of lost my focus for a while. I carved out some downtime to read a lot of books and rest up, and that was a good idea. I am now finding myself excited by the improvements to the book and the process of re-reading itthat is required to make them. I love this book, and poured heart and soul into it. It's worth all the effort that it needs.

I also pulled out the CD-ROM's from the self-publishing class I took a year ago and I uploaded the lectures to my ITunes so I can refresh my memory on the process. My next major purchase will be music equipment and LogicPro software for the Mac, but after that I am aiming to release the book, hopefully in the summer - that's six months behind my original projected schedule, but I guess that is not so bad considering our current money apocalypse. We'll see if anyone has any pocket change left to buy it.

Deus Ex Machina

2009-03-17T20:29:00.001-07:00

I spent a huge amount of time working on my new computer, and I am finding that I do have a learning curve to master the Mac. I have used PC most of my computing life because I've worked in editorial and office environments and they don't use Apple for the most part. I've taught myself a lot, and had a heart attack trying to install my photo program (1400+ pictures wiped from my camera's memory when it reformatted for the new system), but all is well, and I'm loving this divine machine. I can't wait to install the MIDI and Logic Pro, hopefully in a few weeks. I've set up my desktop, screen saver and Safari homepage all to reflect the Fleur D'Amour logo and webpage, and that is helping me get motivated on art projects other than writing. I am way behind schedule on my music because of all the chaos from 9-11 and Katrina, but I've got a whole folio full of songs that I've written over time, and it's time to dust them off.

The Apple Has Fallen From the Tree of Knowledge

2009-03-06T13:49:00.000-08:00

I finally got my Apple MacBook Pro. I found a deal at one of the authorized resellers, MacMall, and bought it a week ago. I paid a few bucks extra for expedited shipping, and I got it before noon this past Monday. With their markdown (I think it is a 2008 model) and a $180 combined rebate on the laptop and software, I saved over $400.00 off of retail. Sweet. I already installed iWork, iLife and Norton AntiVirus and registered the machine. I plan to spend time this weekend installing the software for my Kodak digital camera and transferring photos. I need to post new stuff to my Etsy shop, and I've got to upload a ton of pictures for that. I also want to organize my France photos.

I still need to buy some more stuff associated with the Mac to get it primed to do everything I want to do with it - I need MIDI stuff, Logic Pro software, renter's insurance, a case to prevent scratching, a better laptop bag, etc., but I got the machine and I am really, really happy. I've got tons of poetry and writing material in an ancient PC laptop that I need to transfer to the new one so I can work on it.

The best part of this is that I was reading about Paradise (more about that later) when I found this computer online. So I named it Adam.

Mont St. Michel

2009-03-06T13:48:00.001-08:00

I found this beautiful photo and wanted to post it because it reminded me of my wonderful trip to France last summer:

http://www.panoramio.com/photo/3947779

Some Taoism for You

2009-02-26T15:40:00.001-08:00

"Manifest the simple, embrace the primitive, reduce selfishness, have few desires." - Lao-Tzu

Some Sufism for You

2009-02-04T15:18:00.001-08:00

“Know that since God created human beings and brought them out of nothingness into existence, they have not stopped being travellers.” - Ibn al’Arabi

Priorities

2009-02-02T13:17:00.000-08:00

I had a minor dilemma this weekend that highlighted the tension I am feeling between work and play. The bulk of my time is divided between work that pays most of the bills and work that I love, writing my books and music, which I also consider play, probably the best kind that there is. Those two activites take up literally almost every waking minute that I have, and the remainder of my time gets eaten up by household chores and errands. The area of my life that has suffered as a result is socializing and entertainment. I spend most of my leisure time at home, either reading or on the computer working on my writing projects, social networking to build a base or working on my Etsy shop. When I do go out, it's usually to cover something I've been assigned to review, like a concert or film. I haven't had any freelance assignments lately because the economy is so dire, and there is very little work to be had, so I've really seen almost nothing and been almost nowhere. I've been feeling socially deprived lately because of that, and I let myself cut loose more during the holidays, when there were a lot of parties, but have been getting back into the work groove since then. The reason I am so motivated now is that when I was really young, I constantly ran around here and there, and while I had fun and learned many useful things, I also wasted a whole lot of time. I wish I could have some of that time back to put to better use making art, which is why I work so hard now. It really is rewarding to create things, and while I still have to do other work to cover bills, I'd honestly rather spend most of my time writing or working on music and art than doing much of anything else. I spent a lot of this past weekend on research and book edits, but several of my housemates kept asking me if I wanted to attend the Edwardian Ball on Saturday, a costume event which always happens in San Francisco, but came to Los Angeles for the first time this year. Here is the website:

http://edwardianball.com/

I really wanted to go, and I also really wanted to use the evening to get work done on my book. The event also had a large cover charge ($30.00) and I am saving money for my Apple laptop, so I was thinking about the money aspect, too. However, my housemate Dena especially pushed me to go, because as she quite rightly said, artists need creative stimulation and this was certainly going to provide it. I waffled back and forth all day, and did not decide until the last minute whether to go or not; the only thing that convinced me was when my housemates Evonne and Brent came downstairs ready to go, and they looked amazing. So, I gave in and went. I pulled together a costume in about twenty minutes, which says something about my closet - I wore a long black poufy skirt, a Victorian blouse, a big gold locket, a capelet I bought in London, a huge black vintage handbag, crocheted gloves, a flower thing in my hair and carried a long stick umbrella. I went with my other housemates Ryan and Elizabeth and their friend Beverly, who also all looked fantastic. The ball was at the Tower Theater in downtown L.A., which was a perfect setting for it, with ornate wood and crumbling paint. Half of the Los Angeles creative community was there, and everyone was decked out. I saw someone with a Chinese lantern on their head, a lady with a wolf's head hat (it did not appear to be an actual wolf's head), wings, bustles, top hats, corsets and a stilt-walker. There was an aerial act (the Vau de Vire Society) and the local Cirque Berzerk. We took in the show until the ballroom dancing started, and we stayed until about 1 am, which was plenty long enough. The tickets turned out to only be $25, score, and I ran into a lot of people I know. I also felt very much at home. I don't want to club anymore really, only on rare occasions, but this was nightlife with value added. I was in bed by 2 am, and while I wasn't very productive the next day, I am still glad I went. I contemplated this whole thing a lot over the weekend, because while it seems sad that I have had to sacrifice a lot of social context during the last few years in order to get my own stuff done, I've made amazing progress and it's been worth it to me. I had a lot of fun when I was really young, and now I want a flourishing career and I am willing to do the work that that requires. I am at a different stage of my life now, a more inner-directed and focused one. It's not just a function of being older, either. I've never had endless energy. In an analysis of my past socializing, I realized something important: at the height of my social activity, when I was in college, if I went out a lot, something else always suffered, and that was usually school. If I ran around all weekend, sometimes I would have to skip a few classes the following week because I was wiped out. That's why I am so careful now. I know there will be consequences if I waste too much time and energy. Being the breadwinner changes everything, too. I haven't had student loans to fall back on for years. After I buy the laptop I still need to shell out more for a keyboard, microphone and software. I've had to put off these purchases for so long for various reasons that I don't want them to get pushed back anymore. Once they're paid for, I have other things to save up for, but I can cut loose a little more, too. My art is the meaning of my life for me, but it has to be said that it was also a lot of fun to dress up like a big china doll and go to a costume ball. It's not like that happens every day.

Book Stuff

2009-01-29T09:34:00.000-08:00

I deployed my new Acer netbook computer this past week so I can get more book editing done during the day. I am averaging three pages of edits every morning when I use the netbook on my commute, which is not bad, and it's making it much easier for me to reach my goal of at least ten pages a day. I work on it over my lunch hour and in the evenings, too, as much as I can stand. Some days I really enjoy getting into it, re-reading what I wrote and polishing it to make it as beautiful and perfect as I can, and some days, when I am tired, it feels like climbing Mt. Everest over and over again while small rocks continually slip out from underneath my feet. That's when I know I need a break for a day or two, and just give up and read someone else's book rather than making my own.

I read something a little depressing the other day in media news, regarding self publishing. In addition to the terrible economy and the challenging media landscape, there are simply far more books now than potential customers for them, because print-on-demand has made it so much easier for anyone to create and sell a book. You really have to do a lot now to make your book stand out in order to attract customers for it. Publishing success seems to get exponentially harder every day. On one hand, it's awesome that creating things is no longer such an elite activity. On the other hand, the very accessibility that makes it easier to craft and release work has led to a media glut of untold proportions. I don't know about anyone else, but some days I feel so overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data I am expected to process that I just shut down. I have never had much luck getting past the gatekeepers of traditional media, and I know that many worthy artists have had the same experience. Even Harry Potter and Star Trek almost never got content deals, which tells you indisputably that the old model was just ridiculous. Imagine how much money would have been missed out on if those had never gotten distribution, let alone the enjoyment they've provided, and who knows what awesome stuff is out there that never did get disseminated? A lot of what is in the public sphere now isn't very good, it has to be said, but I say yea to anyone who wants to make art and show it to people. It's just a little daunting to contemplate the effort it's going to take to get attention for my own worthy project. That's why I am writing this blog and Twittering and undertaking all of my social networking activities - like anyone else with something to say, I want to raise my profile because I want people to find me, and read what I have written and to take something useful away from it. Like any artist, I want people to know that I am alive, and to learn what I am about. I know I am taking the right steps, and I am glad to do the work - I love to write, I love to make things and design things, and to put all of that energy in service to my own art is my dream, so I am truly living it right now, by writing this account of my own creative process. That's the whole point of life, no matter how much attention you get, and you should never write for acclaim, anyway. The only way to go about this art thing is to write the best and most honest thing that you can, do what you can to shepherd it and hope for the best.

Arts and Crafts Movement

2009-01-26T14:09:00.000-08:00

I buckled down this weekend and took photographs of all of the new merchandise I have for my vintage and crafts shop on Etsy. I got behind on that project because of my near-move and subsequent residential space re-design late last year and then due to the holidays. I wanted to get the new stuff up online for Christmas, but I was just too tired and busy. I've also been demoralized by this wretched economy. Honestly, I've only sold a handful of items from Etsy since Thanksgiving and I lost my will around it. I've got some really pretty stuff, though, and I think if I price it low enough, it might move. I had a lot of fun taking the pictures. I used the warehouse art space where I live, and I set up the portable closet storage that I got as a gift over the holidays, so organizing the stuff to shoot and ship it is much easier now. My housemate Robb, the video artist, was working out there, too, and played some chill ambient music the whole time, which made it more like play than work. I'm going to discount some of my older stuff into a clearance section, too, and I am rethinking ways to package some of my craft projects. I plan to make some toys and jewelry soon, too, which will also be fun. I've been working for so long and so hard on my books that I think I do need to mix it up a little more with other creative outlets. I cannot WAIT to get my Apple laptop and MIDI; I think this year is going to be fun no matter what.

The Holy Grail of Book Editing

2009-01-26T14:04:00.001-08:00

My new little Acer netbook is a gem (literally, it's sapphire blue). I used it on my commute for the first time this morning and got six pages of edits done. I finished my first edit draft of Parsifal last night (via hard copy markup - that's by hand on a printed manuscript, which is why this whole process is taking me so long) and now I'm going back and transcribing the changes I made into the master file. I still need to print it out after every draft and read it as it appears on the printed page because sometimes you catch things that you miss on a computer screen, but this is still going to be a lot better with the netbook. I'll save on paper and printing and I'll save time and energy.

Higher Education

2009-01-26T13:28:00.000-08:00

I've been looking at some educational programs to fulfill professional and creative aspirations that I have for the future. I found a publishing arts certificate program at Antioch College near Los Angeles that sounds interesting, but I just discovered that it is prohibitively expensive - $12,000 total. That's more than I want to invest in an industry that is undergoing what may well be the death throes of its prior business model. Honestly, I just want to gain the skills to release my own content, books and music, and at this point I think I will be better off for the most part investing in equipment and training myself to use it. I do think I want to pursue the music production certificate at ULCA - that fits well with what I actually hope to accomplish and it's only $6,000 total, payable a few hundred bucks at a time as you register for each short-term class. I had looked at a similar program at Musician's Institute a few years ago, but it was over $20,000 and they had no night school program, so if you were a grown-up and had a day job, you were out of luck. This UCLA one is much better in that regard, and I think it's just a better program overall. It's more geared toward the real world, and teaches all the Logic Pro applications and also music business material. I've learned some of that stuff piecemeal over my time in and out of the music industry but I'd appreciate a refresher course on some of it, and an intro to everything I don't know. My first priority at this point is to get the MacBook Pro and an upgraded MIDI set up, and then I'll register for the program, hopefully in the fall. That sounds doable.

Portable Workstation

2009-01-23T12:09:00.000-08:00

I bought a little Acer Aspire One netbook from the clearance section at Best Buy, and I love it. I’ve barely started using it, but I can tell it is going to be very helpful for portable writing and edits. I maximize the productivity of my commute time by usually taking the bus and train instead of driving, and I do a lot of writing and editing then to bookend my day. I work from a printed edit copy while in transit, making markups by hand and then entering them to the file later. This is tantamount to creating an illuminated manuscript – it goes very slowly and creates double work for me, but I did not really have a solution until now. I am still saving up to buy an Apple MacBook Pro for music and larger projects, but until I get that, all I have had to work with is a very old IBM Thinkpad. The battery stopped functioning a while back and it’s so old they don’t make replacements anymore, which is why I have had to resort to such old-school tactics for my edits. My housemate has a netbook like the one I ended up buying, and I asked if I could see it. I realized it was a perfect solution for what I need, because it’s really lightweight (less than three pounds), it’s got enough memory for work documents and email, and if it gets lost or stolen, it cost less than $300, so it’s easily replaceable. I bought the sapphire blue one, because that was the only one marked down, and I love it. I named it Computer Jee, in homage to Slumdog Millionaire (I looked it up online, and that really is the way to say "computer" in Hindi), and found an awesome Ganesh painting for my desktop wallpaper. I plan to give it a test run this weekend at home on the edits I’ve already done that need to be entered. This really is a huge step forward for me – I think I can speed things up by 5-10 hours per week working this way instead of by candlelight and quill pen.

Here is the model I bought in case anyone is interested – I really think this is a good, affordable tool for writers: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=9163291&st=acer+aspire+one&lp=1&type=product&cp=1&id=1218040477207

And here it is at regular price in different colors:
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?_dyncharset=ISO-8859-1&id=pcat17071&type=page&st=acer+aspire+one&sc=Global&cp=1&nrp=15&sp=&qp=&list=n&iht=y&usc=All+Categories&ks=960

And here is the main product website:
http://www.acer.com/aspireone/

There are several kinds of netbooks on the market right now, but I bought the Acer because it got the highest consumer rankings for its class. My housemate Ryan highly recommended his, too, and he's very tech-y, so I figured if he liked it, it would be good enough for me. You can apparently get a longer life battery for it, too. The one it comes with lasts for about two hours, but the six-cell battery is supposed to be good for up to seven hours of worktime. It’s a little pricey and apparently it weighs a little more, but I want one anyway. I think it is worth the investment.

Re: edit progress, I’m less than twelve pages from finishing my first edit draft of Parsifal. This is also huge – it still needs work, but it’s moved from being a true rough first draft into a workable manuscript. I should have all of the current edits entered by early spring (it’s six hundred pages long, so it’s going to take a while). I’m already on a second read-through at the back end, too. When I get tired of just entering edits I’ve noted by hand, I go back and read through the first section where that process is already complete. I also need to work on refining the notes in the back that explain my inspiration and the spiritual meanings behind some of the concepts. I have not touched that in months and it needs a lot of filling out, but I am very pleased in general with where I am with the book.

Old School Style

2009-01-05T18:01:00.000-08:00

I promised a post about why I consider elderly ladies to be style icons, and what it is that I find interesting about the way that they dress. I love vintage clothes for one thing, as I’ve said before, and I like the way that older women mix the vintage pieces they held onto from their youth with newer things. I remember seeing ladies in NYC who had lovely coats they had obviously been wearing since the 1950’s and ‘60’s. One woman I saw on Staten Island walking in my neighborhood near the ferry to Manhattan had on a pretty black wool coat with three-quarter length sleeves that I especially liked and she had paired it with an equally retro black shift dress and contemporary gold sandals. It looked fantastic on her. Another lady I saw on the ferry one day had a perfect solid black ensemble complete with a huge patent leather handbag, a black raincoat, low-heeled black pumps and her hair tied back with a black and white print scarf. She was also hauling a black metal wheelie cart, the kind you use for groceries or laundry – she had dressed up that much just to run errands, which I thought was really cool. A friendly lady in my old neighborhood in Williamsburg, Brooklyn stopped me on the street one day, saying “Forty dollars!” and hoisting two plastic bags of groceries. I said, “I beg your pardon?” She replied, “Forty dollars for these! Everything is so expensive around here now.” This was right as Williamsburg was gentrifying into hipster-land from its original incarnation as an old Polish/Jewish neighborhood. We got into a conversation about how much the area had changed, and she told me that the great-looking Jackie O glasses she had on had cost her $300 for the frames alone at an optical shop on Bedford Avenue. She also looked amazing – in addition to the glasses, she wore her hair in a Jackie bouffant and had on an olive green ‘60’s swing coat. I like nice things, but I am naturally thrifty (that’s a survival skill for a writer, and it’s part of why I like vintage) and I value my older clothes. I really loved the fact that these ladies had bought well-made coats forty years ago and took good care of them so they would last. I consider that admirable. They are practical and once they got something good they held onto it, and used their energy and money for better things than shopping frivolously (something I’ve certainly been guilty of). The final style example I will give is a lady I saw walking with her husband in my neighborhood here in Los Angeles a couple of months ago. They were both Indian and about seventy-five years old, and she had on a sari with sandals and an old cardigan sweater, and wore her long silver hair in a single plait down her back. He had on little old man slacks and a plaid shirt, and they looked awesome together, like anyone’s cute grandparents, except for the exotic touch of the pretty sari. I think the fundamental reason I really notice these ladies is that they are old enough to be past dressing to please anyone but themselves. The outfits they were wearing weren’t anyone’s idea of current fashion – they were all dressed simply and in well-preserved but dated pieces, but every one of them looked elegant and comfortable, and their retro things looked perfect on them. They weren’t going for a conscious “look,” they were wearing what was natural to them. That’s what I liked the most about it – their clothes just made them look very true to themselves. That’s what I strive for. If it takes a lifetime to fully achieve it, that’s fine. I've got clothes from the '80's I'll probably be wearing for forty more years, so I've got a start on it already.

Hello 2009

2009-01-05T13:20:00.000-08:00

The holidays were awesome this year, but I'm glad to get back down to business. I actually spent a lot of my time off productively - I ran a lot of errands, did some book edits, and read a lot. I've been researching several topics for writing material and just general personal interest, among them Nordic/Germanic mythology, and especially stories concerning Yggdrasil, the World Tree (cosmic axis mundi and world pillar). I read a useful book from the Los Angeles Jung Institute Library called Gods of the North by a British writer, Brian Branston. He gave a good overview of the Northern cosmogony up to and including Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods. Anyone who has been following my Twitter posts lately knows I am kind of obsessed with the axis mundi. It's turning up over and over again synchronistically in my work and has been for some time, explicitly so at least a year now and more subtly for much longer. A related and dormant project I've been working on for a very long time suddenly flowered again a few weeks ago and I wrote 120 handwritten pages over the course of 24 hours. I woke up writing and wrote all day and into the night, and woke up again writing the next day. The story takes place on the world tree and is highly alchemical in nature. It started as dialogue in poetry with music, and I thought it would be something geared more to performance, like an opera or musical play, but it suddenly turned into a book with related songs, which I think is really interesting. I have not touched it since that day when I poured out so much in an unbroken stream, but I read the Northern gods book to prime the pump again. Creativity is weird - you can't predict when it will flower, but you can court it. You have to woo it with pretty images and words, and give it interesting material to think about that stimulates the unconscious mind. I'm very happy with what I did in fact produce lately, ecstatic in fact - it was of very high quality, and was also inspired by a book called Prospero's Island by Noel Cobb, about alchemy in Shakespeare's The Tempest. That work influenced mine, as well. My project is kind of a stew of different cultural elements, all of which are traceable to common Indo-European mythological roots.

I am also researching buying a new computer. I want an Apple Mac Book Pro and am looking all over the web for a deal. I need one to develop my music and multi-media project ideas, and I put off getting one last year so I could attend the three conferences I went to in California and France, but it's time to invest in the equipment I need. The only thing I've bought lately is some Amazon penny books for my research (the Rig Veda, the Poetic and Prose Eddas, The Niebelungenlied) but I've been pretty good with my funds otherwise because I want the computer really badly.

I'm one step closer to publishing the first book, too - my friend is almost done with the original cover painting. He worked hard on it over the holidays and said he just needs to clean up a smudge and will scan it for my approval this week. I met a writer at my housemate's holiday salon, and got some leads on publishers from him, too. I plan to research them and follow up with him this week. I also want to follow up with Charles Upton, a writer who contacted me about his book, a Sufi work entitled Shadow of the Rose. I've been reading it, I love it, and it has a lot in common with some of the conclusions I have drawn in my own work about Sufi influences on medieval European aesthetics and ideas. His publisher sounds very promising and I want to ask him for information. Another lady who also visited a housemate and who works on multimedia projects of her own expressed enthusiastic interest in reading my book, so I plan to follow up with her.

I also just made a sale on Etsy, too, my first of the year. A lady in Paris bought a little black dress; it will go out tomorrow via international post. I've been surprised how many sales I have made to overseas clients - Italy, France and Australia so far. One thing I worked on some over the holidays and need to devote more effort to in the coming weeks is my shop. I bought some closet organizing materials with a gift card I got as a present, and re-ordered a lot of my vintage merchandise. I need to photograph some things and make some more craft items, too. The shop only trickles in money, and less so the last few months due to the dire economy, but it's still fun. I've always loved vintage and I always wanted to be an entrepreneur in that regard, so it gives me an artistic outlet besides the writing.

Year End

2008-12-05T12:01:00.000-08:00

My poor neglected blog - I've been so busy lately that I haven't posted here regularly, not to mention my even more deprived music blog, Fleur D'Amour. It's one of my main New Year's resolutions to get back to both of them. I love posting here, just haven't been able to organize my thoughts for anything longer than a Twitter post lately.

I finally finished moving and painting, and my room looks great. There is some minor cleanup to do putting some office supplies and clothes away, but I'll take care of that this weekend. I'll take pictures and post when I am done, because the room really does look cool. It took a lot of effort to update it but it was worth it. It's a really good synthesis of where I am now combined with elements from my past, both from my family and the life I've lived since I left home. I also managed to include markers from the many distinct phases I have gone through in my own aesthetic development - all in one room!

I plan to do a lot of general wrap-up and organizing over the next few weeks. I've also been neglecting my Etsy shop and I need to reevaluate it. With this poor economy entrenched for the long haul, I'm going to lower my prices significantly and keep them there. I also need to make a lot more stuff to list in the shop - I have been trying to get to that, but was just too busy with the book, conference, etc. Etsy people seem to love the handmade thing even more than the vintage thing, and I am happy to oblige. I don't have all the time in the world for it, but I do have a few hours a week to devote to making things. I wish I could have gotten it done before Christmas, and maybe I can get some of it accomplished by then, but better late than never.

I've also got catch-up to do on my writing. I haven't been writing for magazines at all lately because I've been busy with the books, and I want to line some up for next year that I can contribute to regularly. I plan to work on Parsifal edits all through Christmas, and research more about getting The Flower of Knighthood into Amazon's Kindle offerings and do a cost breakdown for the small print run I want to get underway. In this economy, I don't think I have a prayer of finding a publisher for epic poetry, so better to just get the thing out there. I've been researching the Hogarth Press model, the small house founded by Virginia and Leonard Woolf to publish her books and which they started from one tabletop printing press. That's a business model I can get behind - the modern equivalent is a laptop, which I am budgeting to try to get in January at the post-holiday sales. I want to use that to make a big push toward more social networking in 2009, too. I still don't have much readership here and I need to utilize Facebook, etc. in a more integrated manner and set up pages for my books and other projects. Then there is the poetry contest I want to enter in March - that might lead to being published, but only if I can win it, and there is no telling what their objective taste will be. I am going to do my best to impress.

I want to wish everyone happy holidays. It's been a crazy year what with the second Great Depression and all, but let's work to make 2009 successful and fulfilling.

Clothes Make the Woman

2008-11-18T13:28:00.001-08:00

I promise I'll stop blogging about clothes soon - it's my most shallow interest and I spend way too much of my time and energy on it, but with all of this cleaning, moving and storage upheaval, it's in the forefront right now. I am about ready to move on, though - I streamlined in order to simplify so I would have more time for greater things like my books as opposed to clothing maintenance. I cleared some mental space by removing physical underbrush from my environment. I wish I could be like Catherine Deneuve - she looks amazing no matter what and she looks like she makes some effort, but not all that much, because honestly, she doesn't need to. I am not that lucky in the glamour department, but I do have my own thing and I am content with it. I mostly sit at the lunch table with the goth kids, but I'm not extremely so. I just like black and vintage or plain stuff like Donna Karan, Japanese clothes and military styling, and I don't veer much from that aesthetic blueprint. When I was in NYC lately, I was also reminded that I still dress a lot more East Coast than West - I bought most of my clothes while I lived there, and it shows. You'll look at the subway or a Manhattan street in winter time and it's just a sea of black wool, which describes a lot of my closet. I've got a little bit of UK in my wardrobe, too, including a Pringle of Scotland bag that I love and a wool capelet that I bought in London in 2003. I think I am sometimes at least slightly frumpy, but if that is the price of comfort, so be it. I never wear heels, I am too tall for them, and I am partial to boots and long skirts and black t-shirts of all kinds. I might as well be wearing jammies today - I've got on Uggs and an American Apparel t-shirt with a kangaroo pocket and a hoodie, and I am as happy as a clam. I am a little bit frumpy and a little bit rock and roll - I also have some awesome music t-shirts including Pink Floyd and the London mod scene. Hopefully that balances any dowdiness I may carry from some of the more old lady clothes I sometimes wear (although I will blog about little old ladies as style inspirations in a separate post - seriously, there is some generational matriarchal wisdom to be gleaned from older women's clothing choices). It really all just reflects my personal interests and experiences, especially with the places I have lived and travelled. For a good example of that, I recently had to replace my backpack (I take public transit a lot and I carry my huge book manuscript around with me so I can edit it) and I bought a black corduroy one at Target and sewed a small embroidered patch from the gift shop at Mont St. Michel onto the flap. In another recent instance of a souvenir purchase, I also bought a gorgeous probably-1980's black floral print skirt in Paris for about five euro, and it fits like it was made for me. Because of little things like those sentimental items, my mother's old costume jewelry, my auntie's perfect black leather clutch bag, my cowboy boots that remind me of a pair my daddy wore when I was little, and my own long-standing thrift habit, I can guarantee you that no one is dressed exactly like me, and that is just the way I like it. I think that is what clothes are meant to be - style rather than fashion, and an entirely personal expression that becomes elevated to art by living it.

Wardrobe Mayhem

2008-11-17T15:28:00.000-08:00

For today's style report, I am wearing one of my favorite vintage shirts that I pulled out of storage in NYC. That means I have not worn it for three years and I am happy to have it back. It's a little 3/4 sleeve black polyester top with an interesting button close at the neck that was made in the late '60's or early '70's. The buttons are small and fake tortoiseshell and the neckline has sort of a gathered effect that I like. The sleeves bell slightly, too, which I think is really flattering.

I found several great items right away in storage and mailed a big box back to myself. There are some pretty lace things, a lot of cashmere gloves I bought discount in NYC at after-Christmas sales over the years, a tartan wrap with my family plaid (Leslie, from Aberdeen), an English schoolboy scarf, a big metal medallion necklace with the god Mercury on it and a nice black velvet clutch evening bag with a gold heart clasp that I hope to use over the holidays.

I also rediscovered a pair of grey short cowboy boots with sky blue stitching that I bought at a thrift store in Dallas. I stumbled upon them when I moved my garment rack of long dresses so that I could paint the ceiling on that side of the room. Score. I'll wear them this later this week.

I love clothes, especially vintage ones. This is why I have so many (too many) of them, and why I've been so talking so much lately about having gotten rid of a lot of things. It's a big step for me to do so, and a positive one. I have lots of nice pieces just sitting in storage and other things right in my apartment that aren't being worn much, so my Christmas gift to myself this year is to get them into circulation.

Ciel Ceiling

2008-11-17T15:17:00.000-08:00

I am still in the process of moving stuff back into my room at the artist's community and I took the opportunity to paint. I started a while back and never finished it. I had mixed several cans of a pretty pinkish lavendar but found that they are missing; I think they got thrown away. I found a small amount of the base lavendar I used for that batch and mixed it with a warmer neutral color to make a very nice dusty rose-ish shade. I used that on three walls and I painted a door and the ceiling robin's egg blue. A niche by the window that holds my dresser is the original lavendar I mixed months ago with scattered silver stars painted on the ceiling and I am going to paint a few more stars on the blue once it dries to tie everything together. The whole effect of the room is sky colors, which is very pretty and striking. I think the lavendar I had mixed would have been pretty, but maybe a bit too much for the entire big room, so perhaps it is for the best that it vanished. I wanted to use the paint we already had instead of letting it go to waste, and I did not want to spend much money. I did this scheme for only the cost of painting tape to keep the seams even. Not bad. I have kind of a Paris flew market design aesthetic and it looks nice with the pale colors. The floor is hardwood but it's kind of dull because whatever stain or polish was once there has worn off. I may do a rag-rub of a golden oak stain to brighten it a little. I think that would work nicely with the blue and pink. I have a gorgeous comforter from Anthropologie in NYC that looks like a patchwork of many vintage floral fabrics and it has a lot of muted hues that will pull everything together.

NYC

2008-11-12T11:41:00.000-08:00

I want to say, by the time I moved from NYC three years ago, I was so tired of it that I would have been happy never to see it again. Now that I don't have to live there anymore and deal with the expense, overcrowding and stress, I learned that I can enjoy it again, maybe more than ever. On this last visit, I stayed on Staten Island for two nights in my old neighborhood and saw people whose company I found really stimulating. I love that area, too, with the harbor and the Verrazzano Bridge. It's really homey and comfortable. I stood on the street behind my old building for a long time, looking up at what had been my bedroom window, and remembered sitting on the fire escape watching boats go back and forth. I also recalled an amazing storm over Presidents' Day weekend one year when the wind blew so hard that it forced snow in through the cracks around the old, unsealed windows. It literally snowed in my apartment. I spent the last night of my trip at my friend's apartment in the Bronx, and we walked around the neighborhood looking at the beautiful old homes and ate dinner at Montezuma, a great restaurant there. The next morning, I commuted in with him on Metronorth. His train stop is at Marble Hill, which really is a huge marble hill. The station is right on the Harlem River and the ride into Manhattan was gorgeous. I got off at 125th Street to catch the bus to LaGuardia, and that went really well. The ride is pretty short, and I got there with plenty of time to spare. Yaay for planning well. I also spent a little time in Philadelphia and Atlantic City, and overall, it was one of the better trips I've ever made.

Catching Up

2008-11-12T10:42:00.001-08:00

A lot has been happening lately. I was going to move, but decided against it at literally the last minute, and I am glad that I decided to stay put. I've had to move a lot in the last few years due to hurricanes and other disasters and I realized I have put down some roots where I am and that I need to stay in the network I have built. That feels like the right decision for me for now, and even though I lost a little money on a deposit at the other apartment (I had even moved some of my stuff out and into the new place), I still feel good about it.

One benefit of almost moving is that I ruthlessly pared down some of my possessions in order to fit into what would have been a smaller living space at the new community. I cleaned out my closet and had a yard sale and took stuff to resale shops, all of which netted me about a hundred bucks, and I also donated about fifteen bags of random stuff to charity. Something about this near-move seems to have thrown a kind of switch in me that made me want to streamline my life. I think the horrible economy is working on me, too. I have always enjoyed buying new clothes, but I am not only content to just work with what I have for now, I suddenly want even less. I got an immediate reward from editing my clothes: I kept what I actually really, really like rather than having a lot of things just for fun, and I feel more personally connected to my wardrobe now. I still have a lot of clothes, I'll never be a Zen master with two robes and a pair of sandals, but now every single item in my closet has been seriously thought about. I have a small pile for repairs and alterations, too, that I have been meaning to do, and will budget for those expenses rather than buying anything new.

This attitude carried over into my just-completed NYC trip as well. I still have storage there, and I plowed through it over two days and donated more than two vanloads full of stuff to the Salvation Army and dumped some old furniture. I stored most of my Staten Island apartment contents when I moved to New Orleans in 2005, and it's all stayed there ever since because I had to move on to Los Angeles after Katrina. The plan was to haul it to NOLA from NYC over several trips with a cargo van I had bought for the purpose, but after evacuation, temporary residence in Dallas and ending up all the way across the country instead of just halfway, I had to just leave it in storage for a long time. I finally decided that I don't need all of it, and made a trip about a year ago that pared down some, and did the same this time. I've reduced the monthly rental expense by more than one-third and the volume by at least that, and I plan to go back for several days in April when it warms up and finish the winnowing process. Then I'll be equipped over the summer to bring back what I want to Los Angeles, and, sadly, probably store it here for a while, too, but at least it will be in the same region/state/town as me. I am tired of being so scattered, and I want to move on with my life after so much disruption. Gas prices have gone back down, but when they topped $4.00 here a while back, I realized it made no financial sense to move furniture all the way out here. It would be cheaper to replace it than to ship it so far. Just like with the clothes I mentioned above, I went through boxes of stuff with the sole criteria, what does this mean to me? I only kept things that I have a genuine attachment to. If it was just pretty or something I don't really use but thought I should keep just in case of a future need, it got donated. I come from a long line of hoarders, and I want to grow past that. I thought I might be in that Staten Island apartment for far longer than I was and I accumulated a mountain of possessions. Realistically, I won't be moving into another space that large any time soon. I had a rent-stabilized one bedroom there in an old building with lots of room, and I can't afford that in Los Angeles at the moment. I also have other priorities now: I want a much better laptop, I want to travel more, I want to beef up my savings and retirement and I want to finance my art projects. Knocking out that storage expense and the cost of maintaining so much stuff will get me to those goals more quickly, so it's worth the sacrifice to me. I needed a stable and attractive home when I created that situation, and I enjoyed it for more than three years. I still have a nice living space and plenty of pretty clothes, I just don't feel I need as much as I did then. It served its purpose and I can move on now and share my discards with someone else who can give them new life.

Regarding my artistic goals, I received my receipt in the mail today from the grant application I submitted in October. They have processed my package, and I am in the running. The winner will be announced in March. I also worked some on book edits while I was travelling to/from New York. I really enjoy reading my Parsifal book, even when I am laboriously combing though it to polish it. If I win the grant, I plan to use the money to self-publish at least two books, and to found a small press to keep them in print.

Twin Peaks

2008-10-28T14:06:00.000-07:00

I watched all of the Twin Peaks gold box DVD in less than two weeks. That is thirty hours of programming and a lot of bonus material, by far the biggest marathon of media absorption I've ever undertaken. I have been Twittering about my theories about the show and its deeper meanings, and I want to write a long post here gathering all that together - it was fascinating to me, and I can feel an essay coalescing. As they say in TV land, stay tuned.

Moving Right Along

2008-10-28T13:58:00.000-07:00

I am almost moved out of my old artists' community and into the new one. I have one more big push this weekend. I've been a basketcase dealing with all of this, but I keep getting signals that I am doing the right thing, so I am trusting the process, as they say.

I finished my artist's grant application and mailed it in yesterday. That is the first grant I have ever applied for, and it was an interesting experience. It's for a very large sum of money, with this organization:

http://www.aroomofherown.org/

The grant is for $50,000 over two years to help a woman writer carve out the time to pursue her writing projects. I pursue mine no matter what, but a stash of money to help me publish them would change my life. That is what I said I would do with the award if I won it. I would buy a better laptop and start a tiny publishing venture for my work. This economy could not be worse for trying to launch anything, but the award won't be announced until next March anyway, and it would take me a little longer to set everything up and roll it out. I am working on that anyway. My priorities for next year are saving money, paring down and simplifying my life, upgrading my laptop, working on music, visiting my family in Texas, and self-publishing a small run of my books.

Very David Lynch

2008-10-17T12:18:00.000-07:00

Regarding my move, my housemate at my old community brought home the complete set of Twin Peaks on DVD and we have been watching it. I borrowed the DVD's and am working my way through them as I pack up my bedroom. All I have to say is, that is a way to make this move even more surreal.

The Next Step

2008-10-17T12:02:00.000-07:00

I am suddenly moving from one artists' community to another, staying in Los Angeles but relocating to a different neighborhood. I have been at the first community, The Sugar Shack, for two years almost to the day, and I had no plans to move as recently as two weeks ago, but I stumbled upon another one that is more music-oriented and that I think will be a good place for me to live for a while in terms of developing that part of my career. It's closer to downtown and the music scene in Silver Lake/Echo Park, and the other residents are almost all professional musicians. It's in an old convent which reminds me of something in New Orleans, where I lived briefly until Katrina put a stop to that. It also reminds me of another artists' community in Dallas in an old church where I lived for a while after I was forced to leave New Orleans. I've met five of the people there, and I like all of them. I am still friends with the housemates at the first house, but I got a strong feeling when I found this place that I need to go there next. It's certainly shaken my energy up - I got a move on this week and brought home a truckload of free boxes for packing and I've been sorting through clothes and stuff to give some away and sell some more. I've had an issue that has dogged me since I left home to go to college that I have more personal stuff than I ever really can rent enough room for. Cities are so expensive and space is at such a premium that I've always had to cram stuff into a little apartment or pay to store too much, and I am sick of it. This space is smaller than where I have been living, so I need to pare down, and for once I don't feel bad about it. I had a big rent-controlled apartment on Staten Island in NYC for three years and I accumulated too much. I also picked up a lot from family storage in Texas and enough is enough. I won't get rid of family things, but I have enough vintage clothes and purses and shoes that I could go the rest of my life without buying a thing and still be okay, so it's time to purge. I have always thrifted and yard saled for entertainment, and I have a lot of lovely things that I paid pennies for, so I feel okay about recycling some of it. I am supposed to be moved by the first weekend of November. It's interesting, I have a very intuitive feeling about this place and there is a lot of synchronicity around the move. My aunt told me that her very first apartment in Los Angeles was only a few blocks from my new one, which I take to be a good sign.

Grant Money

2008-10-09T17:25:00.001-07:00

I am working on a grant application to try to get some funding to publish my books. It's a very long application and I have to prove some level of financial need, providing tax forms, etc. I've been pulling all of that together and completing the nuts and bolts part of the application, with contact information, etc. There are several required essays and I have finished two of them in the past two days, one asking for a description of how the cash award would help me meet my artistic goals, and the second requesting a description of what my writing means to me. It means the sun, the moon and the stars, and I basically said that. It's a large amount of money, and if I won it, it would change my life. Here's hoping the passion I expressed in my essay is convincing to the grant panel. I've put aside my book edits to work on this for now, which is totally worth it - it won't take me too much longer, and it's due by the end of the month. I needed a break from editing, anyway, which is why I've been reading the color and theology book. I think I needed that break to clear my mind for the grant application, and focusing on it will clear my mind enough to get back to editing after it's done. See how neatly it all works?

The Temptation of Faust

2008-10-07T16:22:00.000-07:00

The color and theology book I've been reading (see the post below) included a lot of Goethe, whom I love. I had not read Faust in years, though it was a big influence on me at one time, and it was very pleasant to read its poetry again. I looked it up online today to divert myself from the current financial and political maelstrom, and discovered that instead of being a distraction, it instead fits the times perfectly, and puts them into some perspective. One related article I found concerns alchemical themes in the work:

http://www.levity.com/alchemy/faust.html

I just Twittered about the plot point where Mephisto artificially manipulates the economy of a kingdom by convincing its court to indebt themselves to him based on his issuance of paper currency against their territory's gold futures. The empire has been ruined by out-of-control spending, and he offers the courtiers a short-term solution that will cost them their souls in the long run - soul's gold traded for worthless paper. Does this sound familiar? Amazing how the classics can reflect on social situations centuries later - if you write on universal themes, your work will stand the test of time. Mephisto finds men to be so self-destructive that they eagerly embrace his treacheries. Sometimes, he does not even have to get involved - he just watches them ruin themselves: I find, as always, it couldn’t be worse./I’m so impressed with Man’s wretched ways,/I’ve even stopped plaguing them, myself, these days.

The alchemical article also elegantly analyzes the roots of Faust's problems with Mephisto and finds them in patriarchal culture, always one of my favorite targets and very much a part of what's to blame for today's social issues. The dualistic god of patriarchy splits the psyche and sends Faust's vital nature and his anima into his unconscious. He lurches through life listening to his own lowest nature, unable to truly value women because he projects his own inner feminine onto them in a broken fashion. Only in death can he become whole, as he is trapped in the prison of dualistic thought all his life long and requires a transcendent experience to overcome it. The very woman whom he corrupted and whose untimely death he caused comes to his rescue in the afterlife, interceding with the feminine divinity on his behalf: All that shall pass away is but reflection./All insufficiency here finds perfection./All that's mysterious here finds the day./Woman in all of us show us our way.

The author of the article, Adam McLean, neatly comes to the conclusion that all of the characters in Faust together represent the integrated aspects of the Self. Faust requires death to unite them; hopefully, the rest of us can do so in life, while we can still make an impact on this sphere. Early in the work, when Mephisto is talking to God, the devil comments on the way Man uses his reason in a manner divorced from his inner being. This is a classic failing of patriarchy, a worship of rational intellect that fails to take other aspects of consciousness (such as emotion or intuition) into consideration. I will leave you with this last quote to ponder on - ask yourself, how do you apply your faculties of consciousness and reason? Do you use them humbly and compassionately, like Gretchen, the Sophia figure who is willing to aid her former oppressor? - or arrogantly and egotistically, like the financiers who thought they could outsmart and exploit their fellow humans by selling common dirt as diamonds?: Man might appreciate life a little more: he might,/If you hadn’t lent him a gleam of Heavenly light:/He calls it Reason, but only uses it/To be more a beast than any beast as yet.

Here is a free online translation of the Faust text if anyone is inspired to read it: http://www.tonykline.co.uk/PITBR/German/Fausthome.htm

Archetypal Psychology

2008-10-02T19:27:00.001-07:00

“Most people find it quite beyond them to live on close terms with the unconscious.” – Carl Jung

Where Imagination Meets Sustainability

2008-10-02T14:53:00.000-07:00

We get some highly interesting visitors at the artist's community where I live. My housemate Dave Hippchen is an actor, and he lived in Florida before he came out to Los Angeles last year. He has friends from there who have formed their own production company, Cinemap. Their names are Josh Horn and Dan Maninna and they are Emmy-nominated producers who worked for PBS prior to forming their own company, where they work on projects combining art, culture and environmental sustainability. Here is their website:

http://explorecinemap.com/

They are currently traveling around the country and were in California to pitch a new show they are developing called Canvas Earth. The tagline for it is "Where Imagination Meets Sustainability," a good description of their whole ethos. The pilot episode features a community in East Africa that is totally self-sufficient and produces amazing artworks from reclaimed glass refuse.

Here is the site for that show - it gives a really good idea of their general focus:

http://www.canvasearth.tv/

The Sugar Shack, where I live, is a community whose primary purpose is to foster creativity, but which also has a big focus on becoming more self-sustaining and environmentally sound. We have housemates past and present whose professional work involves environmental concerns (scientist Ryan Wartena, architect Elizabeth Marley and green entrepreneur Jedi Wright among them) and they want to get us off the local electrical grid and into solar energy, and move our water usage into a system that recycles our runoff for further distribution (conserving a precious resource in an area prone to prolonged dry spells and shortages). We are also planting a drought-resistant garden to replace a more conventional one, and several housemates are pushing for a compost bin to reduce our waste impact. We were all happy to learn about this show. It covers an area of overlap that could use more exploration, namely the connection between the creative impulse and that of preservation of the planet. I am schooled in the arts and not so much in environmental studies, but I am learning a lot living here, and it makes sense to me that artists would be among the first to commit to going radically green. The vanguard of thought includes both elements, and combining them seems like a very attractive way to make progress with global environmental concerns. The Cinemap guys have committed considerable energy and resources to their project, and it's very cool. Check the show out - hopefully it will be coming to television soon.

The Theology of Color

2008-10-02T11:33:00.000-07:00

I am up to page 431 in edits for Parsifal. I took a side-trip the last few days into some esoteric reading and it has slowed me down, but is well worth the slight delay. The book I have been reading is called Color Symbolism and is a collection of essays on the meaning of color in spirituality and religion. It was published in 1977 by Spring Publications, a Jungian publisher, and it is a record of some of the presentations from a conference at Eranos which was held in 1972. The interesting thing is that I have had this book for years. My friend in Austin, TX bought it for me, at my request, for my birthday sometime back in the nineties. For some reason, I never read it, until in 2004 or 2005 when I was doing a lot of spiritual work, I picked it up and looked briefly at one essay, "Color in Christian Visionary Experience," which tied in to what was going on in my life. I picked it up again about two weeks ago, and, again, it is synchronistically connected to both the section of Parsifal I have reached in my edits and some other things that have happened lately. I read an essay about color symbolism in Africa that dovetailed with alchemical stuff I have been studying and, strangely, with the Persian Sufism expressed in the other book I've also blogged about lately, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, by Henry Corbin. I somehow knew way back when I asked for it that this book would be significant someday, but am amazed at how prophetic that has turned out to be. As Dionysius the Areopagite says in the paper about Christian visionary experience, God is primordial light. Colors manifest from that light as veils of its descent and radiation into lower worlds, including our own; therefore, their presence represents the presence of divinity throughout all of creation. Color is extremely important in both of my King Arthur books, for exactly that reason - it indicates the principle of divine action. I've read extensively in the past about the meaning of color and light, but this book has taken me to a new level of understanding. I have just reached a section in my book edits where Parsifal undertakes the initation of a solar hero, and with each level he reaches, another color appears until the entire spectrum is represented. In work derived from that of Jakob Boehme, also referenced in the same paper, each color is associated with an archangel and a major note of the Western musical scale. Without having been familiar with his work at all prior to writing my book, that is a major component of the iniation process that I created for Parsifal. It's an archetypal construct, an element of the psyche, and occurs in many religious traditions.

There are additional essays which cover color sense and the meaning of color in biology, concepts of color in the ancient world, color and the expression of interior time in Western art, and the elimination of color in Far Eastern art and philosophy. This is the more comprehensive Eranos yearbook from which these essays were taken in case anyone is interested:

The Realms of Colour – Die Welt der Farben – Le monde des couleursLectures given at the Eranos Conference in Ascona from August 23rd to 31st, 1972 – Vorträge gehalten auf der Eranos Tagung in Ascona vom 23. bis 31. August 1972 – Conférences données à la session d'Eranos à Ascona du 23 au 31 Août 1972
Eranos-Yearbook/Jahrbuch/Annales 41/1972E.J. Brill, Leiden 1974

The condensed book I am reading is not available on Amazon right now, I'm sure it is long out of print, but here is its info in the event anyone wants to track it down:
http://www.amazon.com/Color-Symbolism-Eranos-Excerpts/dp/B000K1UJQE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222982156&sr=8-1

More on Spring Publications:
http://www.springpublications.com/aboutspring.html

More on Eranos:
http://www.eranosfoundation.org/index.php?node=76&rif=bd80812e4c

More on Dionysius the Areopagite:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysius_the_Areopagite
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-Dionysius_the_Areopagite

More on Jakob Boehme:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Boehme

West Hollywood Book Fair and Editing Progress

2008-09-29T17:38:00.000-07:00

I attended the West Hollywood Book Fair for a little while on Sunday afternoon in order to try to research more publishers and writer's resources. The size of the fair was a lot more manageable than the annual L.A Times Book Fair at UCLA and there was the added benefit of free parking at the Pacific Design Center across San Vicente Blvd. I walked around and while I did not find any likely publishers, which didn't surprise me, I did find a little cove of writer's groups that offer workshops, networking opportunities, etc. I signed up to receive email info from all of them and I took literature so I can see if I think they would benefit me to join. I also joined up for the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society e-newsletter.

I am up to page 420 in my Parsifal book edits as of this morning, making slow and steady progress. I've been glued to the news today reading about the European bank nationalizations and the failure of the U.S. bailout bill, but I hope to work more on the book tonight. My pretty fantasy book is more than a little happier than the current global reality and I'm looking forward to getting back to it for a while tonight.

Self-Editing

2008-09-25T13:34:00.000-07:00

I reached a milestone in my current book edit of Parsifal - I'm up to page 400, two-thirds of the way through. This edit cycle is excrutiatingly slow, because it's the very first one. I forgot how much work there is to do on the first run-through after completing the manuscript draft. I finished writing my previous book back in 2004, and edited it over the next two years, in fits and starts between moving and dealing with Hurricane Katrina and life in general. Then I put it down and wrote this one. It was more than a year before I picked The Flower of Knighthood back up, and I had done several drafts of it to that point, so it was fairly refined before I looked at it again earlier this year, and it STILL took a huge amount of effort to polish it to my satisfaction. So, I am sure I have a lot of work ahead of me, but as I always say, it's worth it to me. What else would I be doing if not this? I like to write more than anything except making and enjoying music, and I'd rather spend my time refining my own work than doing anything else, except maybe making more artwork. I want to live the life of a productive artist more than anything in the world - it's the only way of life that makes me happy and it's worth any amount of hard work.

Speaking of music and productivity, I posted a review of the show I went to last week - it's up now on my music blog, at:

http://fleurdamourmusic.blogspot.com/2008/09/one-trick-ponymarvelous-toydivisadero.html

Places to Go and Things to Do

2008-09-19T17:56:00.000-07:00

I'm very glad we have reached the weekend. I am going to go see a band tonight, Marvelous Toy (http://www.marveloustoy.net/), at Pehrspace in Echo Park. I reviewed them a while back for Performer Magazine, and they have a CD release party this evening. After that, I plan to kick back for the weekend. I want to work on setting some laptop stuff up and editing my book (I'm past page 350 in Parsifal) and just general clean up and catch up. I also need to work on my next pitch letter for my travel article - the inflight magazine has not bitten yet on the France trip, but I have several more places to contact. I am behind schedule on that, but I went on another short trip last week and I've been really overwhelmed with details since I got back. The artist grant I am interested in applying for needs my attention, too. I printed out the application form and plan to look at it tomorrow to start formulating ideas of how to frame my pitch for the award.

I just want to say, too, that I have been looking at one small press after another for The Flower of Knighthood, and one small press after another says that they are not currently looking at manuscripts because their slates are full. Just another nudge toward putting it out myself.

Mid-September Check In

2008-09-16T17:28:00.001-07:00

I've been Twittering much more than blogging lately because I've been busy since I got back from France, but I wanted to make an effort at an update post. I've been working on edits for Parsifal and am more than 300 pages into the manuscript. I've been writing a little on The Engagement of Sir Gawain, too, and I'm researching some artist grants that are coming up. I'm still struggling to write the description of my trip - I did so much that I've just been taking it one activity at a time. I made a couple of other brief trips lately and I've been doing a lot for the artist's community where I live. I've also been re-reading a favorite book The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism by Henry Corbin. It's really speaking to me, and it seems important at the moment. There are some incredible parallels between a climactic scene I wrote for Parsifal and a mythological thread described in that book. Again, it's all archetypal, coming from a common layer in the human psyche, and again, Parsifal may have a Persian origin. Persia = Iran, so the connection is clear to me. I'm still finding interesting cross-pollinization between Islamic mysticism and medieval culture, and I'll be following that vein for a very long time. I'm still freaking out a little, too, on what a medieval studies professor from Toulouse in southern France told me - she said that the French universities have discontinued a lot of their medieval studies programs. The period has apparently fallen out of favor, pushed aside by more modern concerns. Also, it's not just France that's lost interest in the Middle Ages - other countries in Europe have followed suit. This is why I never was tempted to become an academician. The field has become too trendy, focusing on intellectual fads rather than substantive work. Giving up on one of the most important and formative periods in history is inexcusable. It would almost be more understandable if American universities were guilty of that, it's the new world after all and we have our own history and culture, but for Europe to give up on European history is mystifying to me. Not only is it a renunciation of their own heritage, studies of that period could help understand the current realities with the strained relations between the Islamic and western worlds. The seeds of present conflict were planted back then, and we need to understand that in order the resolve our differences.

Etsy Update

2008-08-25T11:25:00.000-07:00

I posted more vintage clothes for sale on Etsy, about fifteen items, and I sold one within an hour of finishing. Awesome. I noticed my shop has more fans, now, too, a total of fourteen. I spent some time this weekend starting to make some things, too, some jewelry and other little trinkets made out of fabric which I will post soon. My designer/artist friend Oz started a shop last week, also, to sell his paintings and drawings. As soon as he gets it going I am going to form an Etsy team with him to have cross-promotional events. His shop is named Forestgod, and mine is Fleur D'Amour, the flower goddess. Perfect for joining forces.

Shop updates are here (also in the sidebar to the right):

http://fleurdamour.etsy.com/

World Traveler

2008-08-20T15:59:00.001-07:00

I just pitched an in-flight magazine with a story based on my France trip. I think they would be a good fit, and they have a huge circulation, so I hope they go for it. If not, I have researched six other places to send it, and there are always more.

I've decided the safest way for me to blog about my trip without giving up too much of the material I may need to reserve for first rights in a magazine is to write here for now only about the conference itself and the measures I took there in support of my book and to leave details of the sightseeing for later. It was my first academic conference, and I learned a great deal and met a lot of people. I want to write about it here in case it can help anyone else evaluate whether that kind of event would help their own project or career. I also just had a blast in general in France, and want to preserve all of my memories in writing. As you can see from my photos, it's so, so pretty, and I went at probably the best time of the year, with perfect weather.

More Pictures and More Words

2008-08-18T10:54:00.000-07:00

I posted my month's allotment of photos on Flickr, and all of them are from France. The ones above are but a few samples - you can see more of them at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fleurdamour/

I am also adding this link to the sidebar at the right for future reference. If you are interested, check back, because I took hundreds of pictures on this trip and will post a lot more in the future.

The Holy Fool

2008-08-12T15:03:00.001-07:00

My manuscript for Parsifal is 600 pages long at this point. I have finished an editing pass through the first section, which ends at page 147, and have gotten as far as page 184 in the second section. I remember when I was writing it last year, sitting on my bed one evening and it suddenly broke into the two sections. I was surprised, but it made sense. The first part of Parsifal's story is his upbringing in the forest, his first home, the backstory of why he ended up there, and the events that carry him to Camelot, his second home. The second part is his leaving of that second home on his epic quest for the Holy Grail. The place where my text divided is right as he is knighted - it gives a clean demarcation between his boyhood and the mature manhood that follows after he leaves his education and enters his career. A lot of what these stories mean to me personally and why I was motivated to write them is the coming of age motif for a knight, an icon of masculinity, in an era that is timeless and mythological - I have been working for years on animus development, the advance of my archetypal inner masculine psychological components, and these knights and their growth into heroic manhood both stimulate and reflect that process. Camelot and legendary Britain are also an excellent metaphor for the unconscious mind, the place where these processes occur. I saw a quote on the wall at the King Arthur exhibit I attended in Rennes, France, at the conference that I felt expressed something of this concept very well. It said, “Pour sa dame, le chevalier dans le secret de son coeur décide de faire des prouesses…” My command of French is imperfect, so I am unsure of the tenses, but it basically says, "For his lady, the knight in his secret heart decided to undertake heroic feats..."

As far as the manuscript goes, I also need to finish writing a notes section in the back explaining some things about the book and my sources and creative ideas. I have written some entries but I have a lot of scattered material that still needs to be distilled. I had some very unorthodox sources of inspiration for this book, not all of which are Arthurian but are rather from a range of spiritual traditions because the Grail unites all of mankind within itself. There is also still the same Jungian vibe as in my first book, an aspect which will never leave my writing as archetypal psychology is intrinsic to my own creative process. There is a process of participation mystique that occurs in the writing of these books that is part of the animus development that I outlined above. These characters are elements of my own experience of the archetypes and by expressing them, I explore myself. Parsifal is a Holy Fool, an innocent who is untouched by worldly ways until he is near to manhood, and he carries that purity of spirit with him on his quest. His innocence is the very core of his heroism. I was glad to discover that element in my own nature, and to allow it its full expression in this work.

Moving Forward

2008-08-12T10:13:00.000-07:00

I have spent the last few weeks working on organizing myself for the rest of 2008 so I can make progress on all of my projects. I toiled for several days to create a useful list of everything I need to accomplish and put all of the items both in categories and in chronological order of when they should happen. I also color-coded everything according to its importance, and according to whether or not it involved an immediate cash outlay, so I can just glance at the thing and see what's a priority. Lastly, I made a budget for all of the listed items that do require an expense, so I now know exactly how much I need to allocate to meet my goals. I've also been moving forward with editing my Parsifal manuscript, researching publishers for it, looking for grants and writing contests, following up with contacts from the conference in July, joining more social networking groups, looking into taking some more UCLA classes, and putting aside money for a new computer. I've also been working on pitches for my France experience, which is part of the reason I have not yet written much about it. I don't want to publish too much here about it until I know what, if anything, will be going into articles elsewhere. I don't yet have a track record as a travel writer, this will be my first foray into that arena, but since this also falls into the area of arts and culture, I am comfortable enough to try it. I love to travel and that market is a lucrative and dependable one, at least more so than fine arts. It's also a happy marriage with my artistic interests, since almost all of my travel is planned around arts events of one kind of another. More predictable income from writing assignments would help me cross things off of my list much more quickly. I've also made some more sales on Etsy, and I plan to focus a little more on it going into the holiday season. I need to sit down and make some things for it, something I am looking forward to. I have a lot on my plate, but I feel good about getting so much done thus far in 2008, and if I can close out the year by knocking things off of that list, I'll be really happy.

One Hundred Posts and the Holy Grail

2008-07-28T13:40:00.000-07:00

This is my one hundredth post on this blog, and I had thought I would save such an anniversary number for a rundown of my conference experience in France, but I still can't get my head around it enough to write about it yet. It was my first visit to France, and it was long, almost two weeks including the two days in transit. A lot happened and I think I just need a little more time to process it before I write about it. So, I will write about my writing again. I took my notebooks with me to France, but ended up being so busy and stimulated that I did not do much writing or editing while I was there, but I could feel my creative well filling, as the Artist's Way says. I worked on my Parsifal edits a little on the plane coming back to Los Angeles, and continued on that over the few days following my arrival back home. I originally picked up where I left off in March when I went back to The Flower of Knighthood for a final polish, but I realized that I was struggling with it because that was in March and I spent so much time and effort on the first book that I didn't connect perfectly back to the Parsifal manuscript when I returned to it in mid-stream. I went back to the beginning of the book and started reading back over it, and finding a few more edits to make, and that is going much better. I'm thirty-seven pages into it now, having originally covered more than two hundred, but it's well worth the backtrack to get my bearings again. I want to read for continuity as well as edit, and that's going perfectly so far. I worked very, very hard on this book during the last months of 2006 and all of 2007, and I'm proud of it. I am also finding another happy outcome of the weird order in which these books have been composed - as I've said before, I wrote the first one and edited it, and thought it was through, then discovered after I wrote the second one that I had learned a lot about writing during the process of creating it and could go back and apply that to the first one. With that new knowledge, I went and re-edited it, and now I am finding that via that undertaking, I have now learned much more about editing, which I can now apply to the second book. Synergy! I'm therefore both a better editor and writer than I was when I started; I am really excited to see what I can bring to the next book, which I mentioned in an earlier post I have also returned to. I like being productive, and the past few years have certainly been so. I now have Parsifal to edit, and two more books in the series to finish writing, a play that I've been incubating for years, lots of songs, and a multimedia project that I've also been conceptualizing for a very long time. And, there are always magazine articles to be written. The thing I like best now is creating; making things makes me feel happy and alive. I have enough material in the pipeline to keep me fulfilled for at least another decade, which gives me a great deal of hope for the future. The Holy Grail is the realized Self, and the best means for self-development that I have found is the practice of creativity. I find the Grail each time I write or sing, which makes every single day a sacred quest. I think that that sentiment is well worth spending my life on, not to mention my hundredth post.

Back from France

2008-07-26T08:20:00.001-07:00

I returned from France on Tuesday the 22nd, but have been too tired to blog about my trip yet. I have never been so jet-lagged. It's so bad that I've gone to bed between 8:30 and 9:30 every night this week, which felt amazing, but I've gotten exhausted every afternoon around 4 pm because my body thinks it's past midnight. Bear with me, I certainly have more interesting things to say about the trip than that I am tired; it really was great, so good that I am already planning another visit for next year.

A Bientot Et Merci

2008-07-10T16:31:00.000-07:00

I leave for France tomorrow morning at 8:15 am. The Flower of Knighthood is published online as a download payable via Paypal and with the free sample enabled as well. My friend and I worked on it yesterday and today and got it up and running this afternoon. Here is the link if anyone wants to look at it - I've also posted it in the informational sidebar to the right for future reference and book orders:

www.fleurdamour.us/books.html

I have been packed for several days and I am ready to go. I have my current scribblings for The Engagement of Sir Gawain to take with me to work on during downtime, and am printing part of the Parsifal manuscript to take, too. For reading material on the plane, I have Dionysos by Carl Kerenyi (I blogged about it a while back, but did not have a chance to finish it because I was so busy editing my book) and Elements of the Grail Tradition by John Matthews. One of the fun things on this trip is that we will watch The Fisher King at the conference, I think in English with French subtitles. How cool is that? I can't think of a better place to see it. I may try to take a day trip to see Chartres cathedral, too - I did not think I had time, but I am going to see if I can change trains there on the way back from Rennes. Chartres is only one hour outside Paris, and I'd really like to see that cathedral. We'll see if I have the energy left. No matter what, this is going to be great.

Jongleur

2008-07-09T15:09:00.000-07:00

I’ve gotten a greater level of insight into my own creative process lately with the work I have been doing on various projects. I’ve been working on my books for a very long time now and I’ve gained some perspective by seeing how they’ve finally started to turn out. I never dreamed they would take this long, but I also didn’t count on things like 9-11 and Katrina impacting me and making me lose a lot of time. No matter - I really do think things eventually turn out the way they are supposed to. I do like writing for magazines to some degree, and I pursued that path aggressively for a long time when I first started writing, but I ran headlong into the massive cultural shifts caused by the first wave of the internet and the terrorist attacks on New York City. I was living there diligently writing and networking when the dot-bomb happened, followed shortly by 9-11, and the bottom dropped out of the media industry for several years. I could not find much paying work in publishing, so I took jobs in finance that paid the bills and applied myself to writing my books rather than pursuing much magazine work. I kept my head down like that for several years, and by the time the dust settled and I looked up, everything had changed drastically, and continues to do so. It’s almost impossible now to find a staff writer position anywhere on a magazine or newspaper, and so many career writers have been let go that the pool for freelance assignments is more competitive than ever. I started writing for outside publications again in 2004 and I’ve done so off and on ever since, but what seemed like a curse around 2001 (not finding much ongoing work in publishing) turned out to my advantage. It almost seems like everyone is starting all over again, no matter how much experience they have, and I was able to utilize time away from the industry to complete larger and more personal projects. I am very proud of my magazine work, but I am ecstatic about my books. It was a profound exercise in self-development (alchemy, as I noted in the post below) to apply myself to something for so long as the sole architect. It took a great deal of research (all of which was enjoyable, since it was on subjects I already loved), near-constant writing and sustained editing to create these works. They are not trifling at all – I tackled some huge topics in them, and they have modern resonance and social commentary delivered in the context of timeless myth. I hope they will find a willing audience – they are not exactly breezy, but they provide substantial rewards to a thoughtful read. I did my best to frame my philosophical and social concepts within lively action and poetic language, but there is a lot of solid material in the books which demands that the reader think. I myself like a good challenging book that teaches me something and that I have to work to understand, and I don’t mind tackling a very long or dense non-fiction work if the information gained is worth the effort to me. I am not really a sound-bite kind of person. When writing magazine articles, the hardest part for me is generating headlines – they have to be short and snappy to grab the reader’s attention, and I don’t always excel at that. I’ve come up with some good ones for some of these blog posts, ones that I am proud of, and it’s good practice for me, but there are some duds here, too. I like writing articles, but I think I tend to be better at long-haul projects like writing books. My sense of time has always been strange, attuned to longer cycles than most people’s seem to be – I think I’m more geared to a lunar pattern of weeks or months than to a solar pattern of hours and days. It’s kind of a spiritual outlook, attuned more to deeper currents of eternity than to the faster pace of daily life, which has always made me great at things like seeing the big picture and having a long-term perspective that lends itself well to big projects, but not always good at little things like always being on time. I am getting more and more practiced at juggling projects from both sides of that temporal spectrum, though. I wrote regularly for a West Coast music magazine the whole year or so that I was writing Parsifal, and I found that taking on smaller projects on a monthly basis helped break up the bigger project in some helpful ways. I decided to see the articles not as any kind of distraction to the book, but as a welcome break for a short period, and that mindset really worked to my advantage. It’s starting to carry over into the larger projects, too. The last few weeks I’ve been working on edits for both The Flower of Knighthood and Parsifal, and suddenly started writing the third book, The Engagement of Sir Gawain, all while planning for this conference trip and handling some other things as well. I’ve always been pretty good at managing the juggling act to some degree, but I seem to have attained some relatively new ability to keep more balls in the air all at once, and that is a very good thing. I think it truly just comes from experience, like having one book completed made it much easier to finish the second one.

Fideli D'Amore

2008-07-09T10:25:00.000-07:00

My creative interests are starting to come together in a way that is blowing my mind. I blogged in my last post below about how my housemate Ryan Wartena wants to set my whole book The Flower of Knighthood to music, and how, as insanely ambitious as that sounds, it has a precedent in the performance of bardic poetry and troubadour music, which are big influences on me. I have long been interested in the troubadours and trouveres (court musicans and poets in southern and northern France, respectively) and in the whole culture of courtly love in medieval Europe for which they provided the artistic expression. I am also completely fascinated with all kinds of mysticism in general and Sufism in Islam in particular, and I've been reading a great deal about the academic theory that Sufis in Moorish Spain greatly influenced the troubadours with their ecstatic hymns to the Beloved, i.e., God. They were not the only influence; there was also the cult of Mary, the older practices of pagan religion in Europe that placed a goddess in a place of high regard and other influences from the East via the Crusades, but I do accept the hypothesis that Sufi practice was likely a powerful component in the creation of that artistic and spiritual movement. I was drawn into the orbit of a Sufi order in New York that is under the direction of a female shayka of French descent, so I am fascinated for personal reasons to explore this meshing of worlds. The more I learn, the more I see that all of my major interests fit together to give a sort of breathtaking big picture of how this world is not composed of separate things but is instead a tapestry of interacting threads. This truly is one world, and there is one God, no matter in what culture He appears or by what name He is worshipped. The highest form of religion is to transcend forms, as mysticism does, and realize the importance of the Object rather than that of the path that reaches Him. My music project, Fleur D'Amour, The Flower of Love, pulls together all of my interests and is highly influenced by troubadour philosophy and aesthetics. The European mystics and artists also had a reverse influence on Islamic thought, as well, in a circuit of social interaction. A book I recently mentioned in this blog, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism by Henry Corbin (a French scholar also enamored of Eastern mysticm), had extensive commentary about Sufic fideli d'amore, the devotion to the path of love as the highest route to spiritual realization. That's an Italian term, and Corbin also used it to refer to the social and artistic milieu of Dante Alighieri, whose life falls into the time period of the height of courtly love. The middle ages are thought by many to be an era of barbarism and backwards thought, but there was a great interchange of cultures occurring in both the East and West that generated awe-inspiring cultural achievements. Alchemy, the spiritual practice of self-development as symbolized by the creation of gold from lead, began life as an Arabic discipline (al-kimiya) and was widely adopted in Europe. Jewish, Muslim and Christian thought interacted particularly in southern Europe to create such treasures as Kabbalah and the writings of Teresa of Avila. We could do a lot worse than to look to our own history for an example of how to communicate well with the Middle East. There have always been those men more interested in power than in wisdom who followed a path of conquest and strife, but there have also always been examples of mystics, scholars and artists who were happy to meet strangers from afar whose different sensibilites breathed new life into their own culture. My art is all the richer for having learned more about this gorgeous interplay and it makes more sense to me now that I have learned why I was drawn to seemingly disparate things. They really aren't disparate - Persia communicated with Paris long ago, and produced a context that generated such glories as Le Conte Du Graal. Those people managed to create that exchange in a time where travel between such farflung regions took years of dangerous effort - what a cultural and spiritual Renaissance we can look forward to now if we fully use this incredible tool, the internet, that connects mankind without boundaries. I put Sufis into the very heart of the Grail fellowship in my Holy Grail book, because they belong there. The Grail account may be descended from a Persian story called The Cup of Jamshid, and even if the stories are not directly related, they are archetypally so, at the level of the universality of human experience. Courtly love is itself an archetypal manifestation of anima and animus, expressed in the devotion of one sex to the opposite one in the ongoing application of unconditional love without expectation of material gain. It's a lovely model for unselfish devotion to the good of another as the path to supreme attainment, another pattern of so-called primitive medieval behavior that the modern world would do well to adopt.

The Day After

2008-07-09T10:00:00.000-07:00

It felt amazing to wake up this morning and realize that I am finally completely done with my first book. It felt great when I originally finished writing it in 2004, and then in 2006 when I thought it was done and sent it to the copyright office, but now it feels REALLY done, and I feel whole within myself in a way that is awesome. I skimmed through it again last night just to make sure of the final manuscript, and there is nothing at all that I want to change. As soon as I finished that, I gave a copy to my housemate Ryan Wartena, a scientist, artist and all-around Renaissance Man who has been highly supportive of my books. He told me later that he read some of it out loud, and could tell that I had really strengthened it with my hard work editing it the last few months (he had read part of an earlier version so he had at least a little of a benchmark with which to compare it). He got excited about it originally because he said he could hear music in it, and said we should make that real by composing something around it. I was like, it's 150 pages long, good luck with that and let me know how it turns out, but I was doing research recently on the topic of troubabour poetry and music for my next book, and was reminded that very long epics in the Middle Ages were, in fact, sometimes set to music. They were easier to sing than to recite, and I had Gawain sing a little in this book when he got up to read an epic poem, so it's not as far-fetched as I thought when Ryan first mentioned it. Thinking about it makes me tired, though. I'll ponder it more, but later; for now, I'm just glad it is ready to put out as a stand-alone book. I also told my other housemate Evonne Heyning, an artist, Second Life developer, web guru and non-profit arts foundation officer, that I found absolutely nothing to change in my last two read-throughs of the book, and she said, "Good! It's done then." And it is. It should be live online tonight. The only remaining things will be to promote it and either print copies at some point in order to really self-publish it (complete with cover art commissioned by me from Osvaldo Valle, my amazing artist friend and web developer in New York City), or maybe get a publisher, whatever seems like the best course of action.

There.

2008-07-08T16:02:00.001-07:00

I just finished the final draft of The Flower of Knighthood. It's proofread, edited, polished and ready for the conference. I am sending it to my web design friend shortly so he can post everything hopefully tomorrow. He's been working on the download/Paypal page for the last few days and I already sent him the free sample file, and now he will have everything he needs. We wanted to get it all up and running last week, but as usually happens, it took just a little longer. I still have three days until I leave in case of any issues. I am very excited, both about finishing the book and about my trip. I have everything planned down to a science and I fly out on Friday morning. I am packed and have all my travel documents and notes in order, and I printed up a bunch of the book samples to hand out to anyone who is interested. I also ordered special business cards specifically for the book to direct people to the download page, but there was a problem with the order, so I improvised by printing stickers with the same information and putting them on the back of my regular editorial business cards. I would have preferred the custom cards, but these are essentially free, since I already had a few hundred cards and stickers on hand. I will print several copies of the complete manuscript to take, too, to give to several people in the organization that might be interested. I want to make contact with someone at the Rennes Tourism Office in Brittany as well. I set some scenes in my second book in Rennes before I ever heard of this conference, and I think they might find that interesting.

I have one other note of profoundly happy news: I started the writing process again on the third book in this series, The Engagement of Sir Gawain. That really surprised me. I was planning to just go right into editing Parsifal as soon as possible but three nights ago I was sitting in my bedroom sorting out my bags for the trip, and found that I had packed two spiral notebooks when I only meant to take one. I sat for a while with the extra one on my lap, and suddenly got the urge to write. I wrote part of one scene, then flipped the book around and wrote part of another scene. I wrote the beginning and end of that book already several years ago, put it down to focus on the others that were closer to completion, wrote another scene for it about two years ago, and then put it down again. I knew that that one would be the next one that I work on, and I have been thinking about some ideas for it, but I did not think it would start up so soon. The last few days I have been working on three books at the same time, editing TFOK and getting ready to publish it online, editing Parsifal and now writing TEOSG. That is part of what put me behind schedule with the last edit of TFOK, but I am not complaining. I think this is probably part of the energy of this trip. I am very excited to go to France for the first time, and I think the book is coming from that. It's also going to be a great way to spend some of my free time while traveling. Where better to write a book than in Paris, or on a train rolling through the French countryside, or while looking out at the English Channel from the walls of a medieval city?

I went to the downtown Los Angeles library the other day and did lots of research on travel magazines, so I have a much better idea of the best ones to send pitch letters for a piece about the trip. I also looked over some travel guides for Paris and Brittany and found a few more interesting things to to do. Did you know that there is a museum of Romanticism in Montmartre in Paris, and that it has free admission? I am so there.

Almost There

2008-06-30T21:47:00.000-07:00

I just finished this last edit of The Flower of Knighthood, and am going to do one more starting tomorrow to look for any lingering typos and to make sure of the changes I made. My web design friend is still working on building the page to put the book up online, so I still have a little bit of time to look over the manuscript again before he is ready to plug it into the site. I made a few additions to the notes section in the back, not on this pass-through but on the previous one, and I think they really helped get my point across on a few concepts. Amazing that this late in the game that is still happening, which is the reason I have not called this done yet but instead keep working on it. I designed some business cards today exclusively for the book which direct the recipient to the website page. They look sharp. I am going to have them printed this weekend and take them with me to France to pass out along with the ten-page samples I also intend to print shortly. Everything is coming together.

Progress On All Fronts

2008-06-30T13:38:00.000-07:00

I made another sale on Etsy yesterday, to someone in Central Texas near where I grew up. I also am two-thirds through this edit draft of my book, and I got my materials to my web designer friend for the books page on my website. I designed the layout and wrote the text and he's going to format the text stuff and link the page to my PayPal account so I can take orders online by the end of this week. I packed most of my things for France, too. I spent some time streamlining exactly which clothes are the best to take with me, the ones that pack well and are versatile enough to mix together so I look good and don't get bored but also don't have to take too much. I have lots of clothes at home but I prefer to travel light. I may be running around Paris some with a wheelie suitcase, so it has to be manageable.

And Yet Another Edit Readthrough Finished

2008-06-26T11:49:00.001-07:00

In my endless round of edit drafts on The Flower of Knighthood, I just finished another one on the train this morning. I am going to print out the book for one more onceover to proofread the changes I just made, and then that is it, it goes online next week. I'm taking about fifty samples with me to the conference to hand out to anyone who is interested, and I'm printing business cards, too, to direct people to the "Books" page on my main website so they can download a free sample or the paid complete text.

My Etsy shipment to the Land Down Under arrived, and the purchaser loved the item, so I've now got 100% positive feedback from all of my customers. Sweet. No more sales yet, but I'll work on the shop this weekend. I have an idea how to improve the presentation of some of my arts and crafts items and I'll see if I think it works. I plan to start packing for my trip this weekend, too, and I'm going to the Los Angeles downtown library this Friday or Saturday afternoon to do some travel magazine research. The pitch template I wrote sounds good, and I just need to configure it to some particular publications. I wish I'd been able to send it out sooner, but with the book editing, setting up the online shop and planning the trip itself, I just haven't had the time until now.

Yet Another Progress Report

2008-06-25T13:43:00.000-07:00

I'm two thirds done with this edit round on The Flower of Knighthood, and in the last fifty pages I've only made three changes - adding one comma, changing "over" to "above" because it made the line flow a little better and changing "that" to "his" where either would do. So I'd say it's going quite well, if it's down to such trivial changes, and so few of them.

I got my train tickets in the mail yesterday for the round-trip from Paris to Rennes and back, and that made the trip more real to me. I also wrote a really good pitch letter for travel magazines to try to wring some paid work out of this journey, as well. I've had a mental block on that, and yesterday it suddenly just poured out in about an hour. I think I needed to finalize a little bit more of my exact itinerary in Paris and in the area around Rennes and Mont St. Michel in order to be able to write it. I did that this week, narrowing down the sites in Paris that I really want to see (St. Denis, Montmartre, Montparnasse, the Ile de la Cite, the Champs-Elysees, the Louvre, and the Latin Quarter) and the small side trips I am going to try to complete in Brittany and Normandy (Avranches, Saint-Malo and the Forest of Broceliande). I only have three days in Paris and six in Rennes, and a conference to go to, so I have to cram in a lot in limited time, and until I sat down and got online and figured it all out, I was a bit befuddled. I looked at the Metro website and got a sense of the subway system and how to use it, and I looked up the things I want to see and how to get to them and also how close they are to each other so I could come up with a realistic timetable. I want to use every second in Paris to see stuff because I don't know when I will be back, and I definitely feel the same way about northern France, because I may never go there again, if I have no compelling reason. I am going to try to hit the things that interest me the most. Avranches has a museum that houses the manuscripts from Mont St. Michel cathedral and that would truly complement my confirmed visit to the Mont. The forest is in a lot of the Arthurian stories, and I really want to see it. It's also very ancient and beautiful, a true Old World oak forest with Druidic history. Saint-Malo is negotiable for me, I'd rather see the other two, but if I have time, it looks cool. It's a walled medieval city that was a center of coastal pirate activity.

I fulfilled my first two Etsy sales, and got positive feedback, very nice feedback, actually, so I'm golden with that. I was a little worried because each package took longer to arrive than I expected, but they got there. I'm just waiting for the Australia mailing at this point. I have fifty-four items posted and more to list this weekend. I bought a pretty necklace on Etsy, too, a vintage 1970's mother of pearl dove that looks like the Holy Spirit. The Holy Ghost plays a huge role in my Parsifal book, because it's associated with the Grail, and I really wanted the necklace. It was $12.99, who could argue? I love '70's stuff, too, the really elegant things like pretty disco dresses and little suede shoulder bags and some of the boho stuff that's very feminine. The necklace falls into that category. The bird is about three inches long and hangs on a necklace of beads. It's so pretty I can't believe it did not cost more.

Weekend Update

2008-06-23T12:39:00.000-07:00

I posted more stuff in my Etsy shop over the weekend, and noticed I now have eleven fans. Yaay, it's gone viral! I don't know how people are finding me because I've done no promotion yet within the Etsy site community, but they are indeed finding me. Once I get everything posted that I have to sell, I will look into promoting the store. I've found Etsy shops in searches I did for one particular kind of item so maybe the same thing is happening with mine. I may just start conversations with all of them and ask. Nothing wrong with doing a little market research.

I'm almost one quarter through another edit of The Flower of Knighthood, too, and aiming for June 30 to go live online with the book. I was telling more people (also writers) last night about my books and they got really interested, which is a good sign.

I also watched four movies this weekend, numbers two, three and four in the Harry Potter series, and The Illusionist, which is one of the best movies I have ever seen. My brain is so fried from reading and from writing shop listings that I am craving visual stimulation and relaxation. I've watched more movies in the last month than I have in the past year and a half, maybe longer, and I feel better for it. I've worked so hard for so long on my books that I severely needed to blow off steam. I'm noticing that I am going back fresher to this latest (last? hopefully) book edit because of the diversion and input of images. The well is collecting rainwater again. It was running a little dry from me pulling up bucket after bucket of creative wellspring. I am refilling it now so I will have inner resources to go back and get to work again on editing Parsifal and on writing the next book, The Engagement of Sir Gawain. I've also got to focus on my music again at some point. I was leafing through my lyric book the other night and flipping out on how many songs I have and how long it has been since I worked on them. That's another part of my life well-deserving of some real attention.

Status Update

2008-06-20T17:45:00.000-07:00

I finished another edit readthrough of The Flower of Knighthood this morning. I'm also moving forward with getting it online, and when I ran out of manuscript on the train this morning, finishing it before I reached my destination, I started in again on Parsifal, which I also carry around with me for just such occasions. I don't know how good an idea it is to try to go back and forth on two separate book edits, but I've been wanting badly to get back to Parsifal and it felt good to do so even for just a few minutes. I'm very proud of it, too, and writing it was intensely personal.

I am getting very excited about going to France. It's only three weeks away as of today. I've been planning my two and a half days in Paris to maximize my time, and also the excursions I will be taking in Brittany and, hopefully, Normandy as well. I am staying in Rennes, and I hope to go to Avranches, Saint Malo and the Forest of Broceliande as well as the day trip I have already booked to Mont St. Michel. I have the conference for five days and several events in Rennes, so I have plenty to do. In Paris, it's all about Notre Dame and Saint Chapelles on the Ile de la Cite, the Champs Elysees, Saint Denis and the royal chapel, the Louvre and the Latin Quarter. I am staying three nights near Pere Lachaise so I plan a brief trip there, too. I am pitching the trip to travel magazines, hope someone takes me up on it.

I've now got ten fans on Etsy, though I have not made any further sales. I took some great pictures of new items a few days ago and I will list more this weekend.

Intellectual Property

2008-06-20T17:33:00.000-07:00

Here is a really good interlinking chain of intellectual property articles:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tim-berry/ebooks-copyright-piracy_b_108319.html

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/the-e-book-test-do-electronic-versions-deter-piracy/

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/22/can-e-publishing-overcome-copyright-concerns/

http://stevenpoole.net/blog/free-your-mind

I am all for the internet and the free dissemination of ideas, but there is the reality that people who spend the bulk of their work time generating content need at some point to get paid if they are to continue to do so. I've spent years of my life working on my books and I hope people find enough of value in them to want to pay to read them. It's not vanity or ego, it's simple reality. I have earned absolutely nothing so far on my books, and I sacrificed the pursuit of moneymaking activities while I wrote them because I felt they had greater value than anything else I could generate. I'd like to earn something material from them to put towards my retirement. Making art is something of a luxury but so is consuming it, and if a content consumer benefits from what he reads, he should be willing to pay for the value. Making art is also not entirely a luxury, it's a driving need for some of us that is as important as air or food or water, and I feel that what it contributes to human culture and development is important enough to pay for.

Another Day, Another Edit Update, and Some Philosophy

2008-06-17T10:17:00.000-07:00

I am more than halfway through another edit of The Flower of Knighthood, and am fast approaching the end-of-June deadline I have set for myself of getting the manuscript up online as a paid download and free sample. I am emailing back and forth with my web designer friend to set up a linkpage to Paypal and to set up the space on my existing website for this function. Exciting times. My housemate, scientist/artist/Renaissance man Ryan Wartena, is a tireless promoter of my work, and he sat me next to some interesting people (authors Daniel Pinchbeck http://www.realitysandwich.com/blog/daniel_pinchbeck and Paradox, a many-years alumnus of Burning Man and writer of performance pieces, both of whom are good friends with Ryan) at a dinner party we hosted on Friday night and told them about my forthcoming books, which started a lively conversation. He also told another writer friend who visited on Saturday about my books, and made me go get a draft to show her, demanding to know when I would have copies for him to give to his friends. So, yaay, Ryan! I am very grateful for his support, and for that of everyone at my artist's community. I promised to get him some copies by the end of the month when I get the download up.

The theme of the weekend seemed to be that everyone I talked to is seeking to make more time in their lives for writing. My housemate Brent Heyning (owner of Toyshoppe, http://toyshoppepro.com/) has done film crew and special effects and music road crew for years, and wants to focus more on developing his own projects, most of which involve a lot of writing. We talked some about how I managed to carve out time to finish two books, and I told him I cut out a lot of other activities and also maximized my available time every week by taking public transit as much as possible and using that space to write instead of having to be the one paying attention to the road. In NYC that was a non-issue, since I already took the Staten Island ferry and subway everywhere, but in Los Angeles, committing to public transit is a big deal. I freed up at least ten hours a week to devote to writing by doing that. I also cut out most television and movies and used my evenings to write, because what was happening in my head and on the page was far more entertaining to me than anything anyone else could make. I've been blowing off steam lately by watching movies because I reached a point of real deprivation with over a year of avoiding them, but it was still a sacrifice that was worth it to me. Brent was encouraged, and he asked me if I want to set aside some group writing time at some point. I've never tried that, so I am up for it. I'm kind of a freak when I write; I light incense, play medieval music and stare into space a lot, and occasionally get up to sort clothes or papers just to get a mental break for a few minutes, and then go back to my notebook. It can't be very exciting to watch, but being around anyone creating anything can help jumpstart the process of art so maybe it would be mutually helpful. The dinner party Friday was a fundraiser for a temple to be built at Burning Man this year (I am not a Burner, but many of my housemates are and consequently I meet a lot of people from that social circle) and the organizer Amanda also told me during Saturday cleanup that she wants to write more. I gave her the same advice I gave Brent, and told her to start a blog also. She does a lot of interesting projects for Burning Man and other things, and that would be perfect grist for the blog mill that might help her get writing assignments. She and Brent both said that they tend to overschedule themselves with projects, and that they feel they need to stop doing that and focus inward. I encouraged that in both of them. The way I see it, if you want to pursue something, then you are supposed to do so. There is something in it that you are being drawn to in order to unfold your own potential. I told Brent to focus on his most immortal ambitions. I figure no one will really remember me for the work I've done simply to support myself, or even much for my magazine writing, but they will remember books and music. That's what I am going for, my biggest ideas that really mean something and that will live on after I am gone. That is the only kind of immortality humans can achieve, and the best thing any artist can contribute to the world. Art is for everyone, I firmly believe that anyone can create something, but truly dedicated art really is kind of rarefied. It takes a lot to say no to everything else in order to devote yourself to creation, and that commitment shows. The things I want the most in this world are a family and a thriving career as an artist. I am not married yet, and I don't have children yet, either, and I decided that until I do have those demands upon my time and energy, I will use all of my available resources towards my art. I dearly want to have a family, but can't make that happen until it's ready to materialize, so I am spending the luxury of my time alone on what I value.

I also spent some time this weekend working on my Etsy shop and have almost fifty items listed, with more to post this week. I also sold a dress to a lady in Australia and shipped out the first two items I sold, to customers in Chicago and Italy. The web rocks - how else could you reach a worldwide audience with vintage clothes, let alone with books, music, etc?

Happy Day

2008-06-12T13:22:00.000-07:00

I am having a really good day so far. I opened my email to discover that I made not only my very first sale ever in my Etsy crafts shop, I made another sale right after that. Both were for small amounts, but that's fine, nothing in my shop is terribly expensive. That's part of my philosophy - I set the shop up to generate funds for my art projects, not to get rich. I know I am probably selling mostly to other artists and the vintage/thrift crowd, so I price things reasonably.

I also finished my edit of The Flower of Knighthood. I have a few changes to make to the manuscript, and will give it another proofread after that. I have to do some yard work in a group effort at the artist's community this weekend, but will spend the rest of my free time on the book and on getting more sale items posted in my shop.

Work VS Entertainment - Work Wins Again

2008-06-11T10:35:00.000-07:00

I was so tired last night that I was tempted to watch a movie, but I got home a little earlier than usual, and after resting for a bit, I decided to bite the bullet and work on my book some more. I am very glad that I did. I am now only twenty-three pages away from completing this edit round, and I am very, very happy with the manuscript at this point. I'll finish this review tonight, and print the revised draft for another read-through going into this weekend. I've been working on editing the book non-stop now since March, and I am so tired I am about to fall down, but I love what I have accomplished. I am excited about meeting people at the Arthurian conference and telling them about it, and after a brief rest, I will start up again on my editing process for Parsifal. I was working on it from January through March when I realized I needed to go back to The Flower of Knighthood, and I want to get back to the Holy Grail book. I've also been percolating on the next book, the third one in the series, The Engagement of Sir Gawain, and an unrelated play I've been working on for a long time that is also written in poetry, and some other project ideas, mostly connected to my music. I have not been doing much magazine writing lately because I've been so focused on my books, but I need to get back to that, too. It fills another need I have in my creative life, and I also get to meet interesting people when I do magazine articles. I have been spending some time recently working to find good places for promoting my books, by joining Arthurian discussion boards and researching conferences and conventions. I plan to take at least one more media class in the fall at UCLA to gain some more skills, and after the conference is over, I am going to start seriously saving money to upgrade to a new laptop so I can speed up my progress on all of my projects. I've gotten a lot done the first half of 2008, and have big plans for the second half, too.

Knighthood is Flowering

2008-06-10T12:04:00.000-07:00

I am more than two-thirds through the latest edit round of The Flower of Knighthood. I've made a couple of small word changes that really improved the manuscript. I wasn't even looking to do so, they just came to me as I was reading it. It really pays to be so diligent. You never know what you will find that you can make work better. I am hoping to finish this current once-over by this weekend. I gave my web designer friend the deadline that I want this up as a download by the end of this month at the latest, so we can iron out any problems before I go to France. In order for that to happen, I need to finish this round fast and do at least one more in order to check the changes I just made. Do you think I can do it? I think I can!

The Goblet of Fire is the Holy Grail

2008-06-10T11:52:00.000-07:00

No wonder I like Harry Potter so much:

http://www.harrypotterforseekers.com/alchemy/alchemy.php

This is awesome. I love alchemical studies, and my second book, Parsifal, is highly alchemical. I am finding out that elements I put into it unconsciously are turning out to be deeply mystical alchemical symbolism. I knew there was a lot of deliberate alchemical symbolism in the Potter books, but I bet some of J.K. Rowling's stuff is also unconscious. The alchemy is an inherent process in the archetypal psyche that is activated by the process of seeking God and one's spiritual destiny. Developing one's creativity is a highly effective means of activating it.

I especially like this quote from the website linked above:

If you read Harry Potter with this symbolism in mind, the story will transform from an exciting battle between good and evil to a method of absolute liberation from death, suffering and evil.

Righteous.

Validation

2008-06-09T13:09:00.000-07:00

Five people now list me as one of their favorite shops on Etsy! I posted some more items last night, and plan to put more up tonight. I also got almost halfway through The Flower of Knighthood over the weekend. I will work on it tonight, too.

Update on Crafts, Book, and Conference

2008-06-07T23:14:00.000-07:00

I spent some time today listing more items in my little Etsy store, and discovered that three people from the Etsy community have listed me as a favorite shop! That made me feel good. I haven't even really gotten going yet and people are noticing me already. I'm going to spend a lot more time tomorrow working on it, and working on the book edits. I started again Thursday evening with another re-read of The Flower of Knighthood. I also looked over my trip preparation notes for the French conference I will be attending next month, and worked out my next steps and budgeting timeline. I figured out exactly how much I need to spend on the train from Paris up to Rennes ($152 round trip) and am going to pay for that and the balance on my lodgings this month. Then all I will need is money for the trip for food, taxis and activities. Everything else will already be completely paid for so I don't have to worry about it.

Book Review

2008-06-05T15:17:00.000-07:00

All right, I finished another edit of The Flower of Knighthood this morning, one day ahead of schedule. I'll make the changes to the manuscript this afternoon and start reading it again for what I hope is the last time. I think I'll take the evening off first, though.