Mon | February 12, 2007
Boy am I stuck.
I hate advice. The one thing I hate about writing class is all the advice. It's paralyzing. I had a resolution to submit once a month. January went well. Then last Saturday RR said not to submit. Actually he said to submit from the top down, something I have heard before. Then and now, the idea of submitting to those places paralyzes me. Plus, I can see I don't have anything relevant for them at the moment. And yet I will never have anything for them unless I get some smaller things done and build confidence from there. And yet I'm not supposed to go for the lesser places. So I can't do anything.
Never tell people about your plans. They always advise something else. I suppose it won't be the end of the world if I don't stick to my resolution. It will be just like so many other resolutions. But this one, I thought, was good for me.
Posted by Lily at 03:09 PM
Wed | November 29, 2006
nanowrimo fini
Posted by Lily at 12:42 AM
Mon | October 16, 2006
les magazines
The advice I received over a year ago, last last summer, was to go to the bookstore, read all the literary magazines, repeat, until I knew what they were all about, and then and only then, send submissions. However it has been a year and I have not done that, I figure I never will, even though I keep telling myself to. Falling short of that, I have been hoping to meet someone who knows one magazine from another, who could give me a clue or two. But I don't think that'll happen either. So I just submitted a story, "The Fish," to this magazine Juked. I don't know if it's the best magazine I could get published in, but it seems to "fit" more or less. Maybe if they reject me I will send it somewhere else. But I don't think so. I don't know of any other magazines. I don't read them, any of them. I said this already but I'm thinking about it again. I don't think there's any way to get me to read them, and definitely not all of them at once, and I think the advice given me was bad. Impractical. I think I'll probably only read magazines if I'm published in them, a bit of a catch 22 since I am not allowed to be published in them until I've read them. But if I forget about that part of the deal, there is a way into this loop.
Posted by Lily at 11:03 AM
Sat | October 07, 2006
nanowrimo
I have no idea what I will write about.
Posted by Lily at 11:58 PM
Mon | September 25, 2006
le groupe d’écrivains de Fort Greene
So I joined a writers group, that meets in Fort Greene on the second and fourth Sundays of the month at a wine bar. So I get to work on my wine-tasting skills as well as interact with other human beings whom I happen not to despise. It's kind of far away though, and not for me only (Larry lives around the W. 59th St stop in Manhattan). There are only four people in the group, really- Christine from memoir class, her friend Vadim who works at the same school as she does, and Larry whom she met from a group at Craig's list, which for some reason didn't work out for them. So half the group is making a huge trek to meet there. Anyway it remains to be seen whether the group "helps." It does provide a concrete deadline. I am not sure discussing things really helps me, it kind of saps my energy, actually.
Posted by Lily at 02:17 PM
Fri | July 07, 2006
I like my version better
My review of The Motel was finally "published" today... with added cliches ("looms large"?!) that don't even make sense/ aren't even true.
Part of me wants to tell them, but I realize it would be overkill at this point and besides I'm tired of defending every word. I already did some of that-- she emailed me with four changes, all of which I disagreed with, and told her so. I doubted whether I should have insisted on my version, but now I realize that if I hadn't, the article would have come out even worse.
All I have learned from this foray is that as tiring as writing something can be on my own, it's even worse in conjunction with an "editor."
Here is the review I turned in over a week ago (my first review was too short, at 300 words, which is a whole nother story):
The Motel (2005, 72 minutes, color)The Motel is the coming-of-age story of Ernest Chin (Jeffrey Chyau), a thirteen-year old boy who grows up in the less-than-ideal environment of his family's motel. His mother Ahma Chin (Jade Wu) discourages his development as a writer and puts him to work at the family business, where he regularly encounters prostitutes and other ne'er do wells. Ernest spends his spare time hanging out with his friend Christine (Samantha Futerman, Memoirs of a Geisha), who works nearby at her family's restaurant. When Sam Kim (Sung Kang, Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift) checks into the motel and appoints himself mentor, Ernest begins to confront everything from a mysterious box of fried chicken to the girl of his dreams.
The first shot of the film is quite telling-- Ernest sits on top of a dumpster, chomping on an egg roll. The dumpster, a generally ignored spot in the real world, is a "place" in the film-- it's in the parking lot of the restaurant where Christine works, and he gets to see her when she takes the trash out. Behind the dumpster, they keep a stockpile of porn (which they read with comical, innocent fascination). The dumpster symbolizes all the junk in Ernest's life, and is just one of many telling details in the film.
Viewers like resilient characters, and so it's great to see how well Ernest takes all of the shit that's thrown at him. It goes in and comes out in a more beautiful form. Ernest eats junk food, but his chubbiness, during his close-ups, seems lush and ripe. When he finally makes a move on Christine, his pick up line sounds like it's from a porno magazine. But when he says it, it's not dirty, it's just hilarious.
Sam Kim is another resilient character, who comes to the motel to escape his broken marriage, and yet almost instantaneously gives himself over to spicing up Ernest's life, whether Ernest likes it or not. Sung Kang is perfectly cast as this sexy older-brother figure who has problems of his own. He also gets some of the most quotable lines. "You didn't tell me she was Asian," he says to Ernest when he finds out about Christine. "They're trying to get away from all that. You just remind them of it." It's dubious whether Sam always says the right thing, but there's no doubt that he tries.
Samantha Futerman is great as Christine, the girl who's just a friend. She's a luminous presence and yet still seems like a kid. All the children in the film seem natural, including Alexis Chang as Ernest’s tattle-tale sister Katie.
One key event occurs before the action of the film begins. Ernest writes a story and enters it in a contest without telling his mother. Early in the film he wins honorable mention for this story, and his mother harshly chastises him about it. He continues to dream about the awards dinner, however, and the story, called “The Motel,” is a thread that runs throughout the film and ties it together at the end. The poignancy of the film’s title comes as much from this occasionally glimpsed story as it does from the setting where these characters live.
"The Motel" won the Humanitas Prize, Best Narrative Feature from the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and Best Dramatic Feature from The San Diego Asian Film Festival.
The Motel plays in New York June 28- July 11 at the Film Forum. Go see this rare Asian-American film!
It's not perfect-- for example I repeat words like "telling" and then "resilient," which some people don't like-- but their revisions trip up the flow, and numerous other things that I don't even want to sit here and list.
Posted by Lily at 01:28 PM
Thu | June 22, 2006
On Blogging
Tomorrow is my blog's birthday. Invisible Cube will be one year old.
I'd say the average lifespan of a blog is about a year. That's how old my Xanga was when I killed it. I killed it because I was tired of it, and because I knew that if I wanted those posts there was no easy way to save them. I killed it because I wanted to create a better blog (this one).
Now a year into this blog, remembering what happened to my last one at around this time, I am naturally a bit solicitous for its future. I say "kill" like I had agency in the death of my former blog, but really it just kind of died on me.
It had a lot to do with the reasons I just mentioned above- of which reasons number two and three have been addressed by my Xanga's reincarnation as Invisible Cube. But there is still the fatigue factor. A blog should be energizing, not exhausting. It should be fun, and not a chore or an obligation. I feel myself getting bored, wondering where this is going, if anywhere, and if it means anything or has any value. I haven't sorted it out yet. But I do know some things about my blog, and by extension, blogs in general.
Myths About Blogs
First, three myths about blogs. In January this year, I went to a reading for the book Best American Journalism of 2005 and this guy James Wolcott read his award-winning article about blogging. Nothing he said about blogs was true of my blog. They were all very familiar ideas, too- journalism, after all, mostly rehashes the same ideas in circulation. But I had never realized how wrong they all were.
One false belief is that blogs should be about something. My blog is about ______. If you can't fill in that blank there's something wrong, your blog is unfocused and illegitimate. "Theme" blogs exist, but there's a whole genre of blogs, typified by Xanga and Live Journal, which has nothing to do with theme, whose very structure is anti-theme. I think these "stuff I wrote" blogs are actually more common than theme blogs, and they're certainly a lot easier to sustain.
The blogger homepage used to say that you should pick a topic for your blog. Now it says, "Your blog is whatever you want it to be." So I guess they wised up. I think the idea that a blog has a topic or a theme was dominant a year ago. I definitely remember feeling obligated, when I started this blog, to have a theme. With some effort I overrode the idea and excused myself from it.
Another erroneous concept is that a blog should link to other blogs. This undoubtedly descends from the "The Link is King" school of thought-- that websites with more links to them are more important, that things on the internet sustain themselves by linking to other things. Also connected to this idea is the third myth, the belief that a blog needs comments. I distinctly remember Wolcott saying that links and comments were the lifeblood of a blog.
The lifeblood of a blog is the author writing posts and putting them up. Simple as that. You provide your own material-- it doesn't come from linking to others' materials, or from other people writing comments. In fact wanting links and comments is a fast way to insure your blog's demise, because it skews your focus and energy. You start to write things just to elicit reactions, and you lose track of what you need to write, what you need to think about. You worry too much about what others will think-- whether they will find it interesting, whether they will have anything to say in response.
This leads to my rules of blogging, which are mostly about not worrying about what other people will think.
Rules of Blogging
- Don't apologize for the blog. Resist the impulse to say Here is my blog, but you know I have been in a bad mood recently so it might seem bleh, or any number of excuses and disclaimers.
- Write about whatever you want. If you want to write about cake, write about cake. Don't try to be intellectual, or cover "important" topics. Also, just as sticking to a very narrow topic defined by a theme is problematic, trying to cover a variety of topics or to create a balanced representation of yourself and your interests will only make things difficult. Your blog is not you, it's just your blog.
My site motto is a quotation attributed to Katharine Hepburn: "If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased."
- Don't look back (and don't delete posts). This is because if you look back, you will find something you don't like, and start to edit, rewrite, and delete... and there will be no end to it. Soon you will have deleted everything.
The blog reflects where you were at the time, and you need to accept that. In fact, if looking back at your blog doesn't make you cringe then you should be concerned because it means you're not getting any better. You should totally look back and say I can't believe I wrote that. Tomorrow I will look at this and say Why did I write this? What was I thinking? But I won't change a thing.
The easiest way to not destroy your own blog is to not read it. Post and don't look back.
- When in doubt, don't tell people about your blog. I am not sure why this is true but I know it is based on experience. I regret telling too many people about it at the outset. I sent out a mass email and I put it in my email signature. I'm sure I told people about it randomly. It grates on me.
You need just enough of an audience, just some, and not too much. Audience is an individual thing, and you need to think about whom you'd be comfortable having as your audience. I can tell you that the answer isn't "everyone, everyone I know."
- If you told too many people, know that no one is reading your blog anyway. Except for your closest friends and the stray secret admirer, everyone forgets about your blog within three months of finding out about it.
I have a vested interest in reading others' blogs, since I have one myself, and even I don't read them, not even the blogs of cute guys. I am assuming that everyone behaves like myself, which could be incorrect. But I don't think so.
Posted by Lily at 08:58 PM
Wed | June 21, 2006
something I wrote will be on the web somewhere besides here
At the end of April, I went to a panel about literary agents. For once I was not in a bitter, alienated mood. It might have helped that the agents were nice and I was having a little vacay in the West Village. I talked to a few people. One of them was an arty Asian girl with glasses.
I invited her and the other three people I talked to, to my writing group. None of them joined. I returned to bitterness. Several weeks later, the arty girl emailed me about her new magazine. She invited me to a wine-tasting/ meeting, and I was going to be in town anyway so I went. I was hungry and ate like half the grapes and a third of the crackers. No one else was really eating. No one else was playing with this cute little dog either. Who were these people?
I felt bad about eating too many crackers so I took an assignment that same week. That was just last week. I interviewed this guy, whose movie premieres next Wednesday. I also wrote a short review.
The interview and review are supposed to go up on Thursday. I have my fingers crossed. I'm holding my breath. I'm succumbing to all sorts of cliches. I think when it happens I will be a little bit happier than I was before.
Posted by Lily at 01:56 AM
Wed | February 08, 2006
brokeback mountain
I saw Brokeback Mountain, finally, on Monday night. I was surprised it was paced so slowly and deliberately. Hollywood is usually accelerated and abbreviated. I think Brokeback was conceived and produced as a smaller film that got distributed widely. Or something.
I was surprised it was so mellow. It was like the story I wrote recently that everyone said was flat, that it did not arc, where it should have. I am aware that my story does not have a high sense of conflict. I don't know what to do about it.
Brokeback was okay. I wasn't expecting anything in particular, though I thought it would be better, more intense, more insightful, than it was. It wasn't bad but it wasn't sooo great either. All in all, though, I liked it, and thought it was good.
It isn't good to read reviews before you go to the movie, which I couldn't help but do for Brokeback. It ruins some of the experience because you've seen it before in your head. You know what's going to happen. And in Brokeback, not a lot happens, and so there is even less left after you already know the plot points.
I can't help but wonder if a resistance to conflict and preference for an even keel is cultural. Maybe conventions like "protagonist vs. antagonist" and "rising action --> climax --> falling action" are advantageous to a type of mind that I simply don't have. Then again, they say you must learn the rules before you can break them, so I suppose I must try. I am trying.
Posted by Lily at 03:54 PM
Fri | January 20, 2006
The Pond
For the second day I watched the striking of The Pond, the ice rink at Bryant Park. Earlier today it seemed likely I would not, for once, spend lunch hour mentally palpating the problem of modern isolation. It seemed I might dine with the grad curriculum pods. I had somehow established a pattern of not eating with them, because I had errands to run every day for the first few weeks I started working again back in Oct/Nov. Then other things... the end of which was, I think, that I grew to like my time alone, which I used to reflect and collect my thoughts. Or browse the magazine section at Coliseum. One likes anything if one spends enough time with it.
So while the prospect of actually speaking during the day, and engaging in conversation, was overall favorable, my first thought in response to the proposition was that I would miss seeing the breakdown of the park. It all neutralized to a feeling of indifference when it was 1:30 and I was too hungry to wait around, for them to get back from whereever they were, and considered that they might have left without me.
And so I sat in the park as usual, though slightly differently, as today I sat by the buddhaesque statue of Gertrude Stein.
I went ice skating twice. Once last Wednesday after work; again on Monday night. On Wednesday it drizzled and there weren't many people. On Monday, the last day of skating, the people moved in a herd, like rush hour. At a uniform and moderate pace.
When there are masses, everything is average and everything is rational. Much like contemporary fiction. It proceeds in its perfectly orchestrated and thus completely dead manner.
The kids do it right. They speed. They stop short, they cut corners, they go whereever they see an opening. They flail their arms, tumble, and are up again, frosted with shaved ice. Only they get the thrill of skating.
Both times, I scuffled in the perfect loop for a good thirty to forty minutes, in an extended warmup. Eventually I picked up the pace. I learned it is actually easier to skate if you go faster. It was only the third and fourth time I had skated ever. It is too bad I didn't start earlier in the winter.
Posted by Lily at 02:48 PM
Fri | January 06, 2006
self-improvement
I am such a lunatic. I am not working at kaps today, and yet I did related work. I did a GRE essay. The idea with these is to agree or disagree, or take some sort of position on the statement. Crazily, this is supposed to be done in half an hour. This prompt was not that bad, but some of them are like meaning of life type questions where you're just like, you want me to tell you this now?
"The widespread idea that people should make self-improvement a primary goal in their lives is problematic because it assumes that people are intrinsically deficient."
The idea of self-improvement is erroneous not because of its assumption that people are intrinsically deficient, but because the goal is vague and not directed towards a well-defined, tangible result. As an example, take New Year's resolutions. Why do most people fail to attain their resolutions? And yet many people constantly achieve their goals. I would argue that it is because a resolution tends to be for some sort of behavioral change, like exercise more, or eat more vegetables-- to change yourself in some way. It is self-improvement. A goal, in contrast, is to use who you are already, to achieve some purpose. It is more tangible and defined; it has a beginning and an ending. You can be done with goals but you are never done with resolutions. A resolution is more difficult than a goal.
Should self-improvement be abandoned simply because it is difficult? In a way, yes. One of the characteristics of a good goal is that it is achievable. If the "goal" is a continual concept such as "self-improvement," one never feels done with it, and therefore never gets the good feeling of having accomplished it. A better way to improve oneself is to wrap self-improvement up in a goal. In other words, set a goal such that self-improvement is incorporated in the process of achieving the goal.
For example, say a person fears technology. Whenever she is on the computer she has a corrosive fear that something horrible is going to happen. The self-improvement goal "get over fear" is not good. Even if it is broken up into actions she can take to get over her fear, "fear" is too vague a feeling to quantify clearly. At one point does she feel fear? How much fear is too much? Must she be absolutely fearless to have achieved the goal? Even the technorati feel nervous about computer problems sometimes. However, say she sets a goal to make a website. She has always admired people who have websites-- they seem so techno-savvy, so up-to-the-trends. This is a tangible goal. When she finishes, she something to show people-- and to show herself the next time she feels technophobic.
This differs from a self-improvement goal because the goal was not to change herself, but to make a website. An increase in comfort with technology was a positive side effect of achieving the goal, but it wasn't the goal itself. This is significant because even if she feels fear in the future, this doesn't detract from what she has accomplished. Whereas if the goal was to "get over fear," then the moment she feels techno-terror, she has lost.
In some ways we are destined to always battle ourselves and our disadvantageous tendencies. However in the struggle to become a better person, it is inadvisable and misfocused to make "self-improvement" the goal. Self improvement comes in the process of achieving tangible, focused goals with a beginning and an ending-- goals which, once achieved, can never be taken away.
Posted by Lily at 04:14 PM
Thu | December 22, 2005
Penn Station
All this transportation brouhaha makes me want to revive my Penn Station blog. I had a blog on blogspot called Penn Station for the sole purpose of venting my commuter thoughts. Then I stopped going into Kaps for a few months and the blog died. I started freelancing again about a month ago, but the time off made me realize there is no reason to have a blog just for Penn Station. One blog (this one) is enough.
What is this compulsion to write about the train? There is something about the train ride that makes it more of an event than a subway ride. On the subway you don't feel as if you've gone anywhere else. I mean, you've gone on the subway, but you are in New York. The train feels like a place in and of itself, or at least it is not part of any particular place. It goes through places, it isn't part of them. I think a lot of my compulsion to write about the train is an attempt to stabilize something, in my mind, that is neither here nor there, in reality.
And then Penn Station itself-- it's not beautiful like Grand Central (or like the original Penn Station, which was destroyed in the 60's) but there is something intellectually compelling about its form. With the number of entrances and connections, there's an interplay of the obvious and the not so obvious. Even when Penn Station is mobbed with Rangers fans, there are places that remain relatively unpopulated. These are spots few people know about, even though they're right there. And I like it that way.
My knowledge of Penn Station proved helpful on Tuesday, the first day of the strike. The morning was not a problem- there were more people exiting onto the street, who would usually have been dispersed to the A/C/E or 1/2/3 subway stops, but this merely slowed things up a bit. Going back in the evening, things were at a standstill on Seventh Avenue at 33rd Street. An unmoving mass of people blocked the main entrance. On one side they had formed themselves into a neat queue along the wooden police barricades, and I thought, people are so tractable. I stayed there for about twenty seconds and realized no one was getting anywhere, so went looking for other ways in-- after a few attempts, finding one at the mid-block entrance on 31st. There was almost no one on the train, because no one had figured out how to get down there. I enjoyed a quiet ride home.
A lot of Penn Station remains, to me, undiscovered and unexplored. Like the entire office space above Penn Plaza, and like the hockey stadium-- which I think I've been in, for a basketball game, but I have never seen it as a hockey rink. or field. whatever it's called. I suppose that part is properly called Madison Square Garden. But the fact that it's all right there-- together, and yet separate-- there is something interesting about that.
I looked for a map of the layout of Penn Station just now but couldn't find it.
Posted by Lily at 04:00 PM
Tue | October 18, 2005
how to think of topics for a short story
I contributed an article to wikiHow, called how to think of topics for a short story. It was fun.
I don't know how wikiHow or wikipedia really work, though, so I'm going to resist the temptation to write a billion articles, only to have them edited to death.
Posted by Lily at 02:15 AM | comment
Thu | September 22, 2005
benefits of writing class
I am in the library again. I am sitting by the window and getting a tan. or aging the skin on my face?
This guy in a green shirt keeps walking to his car in the parking lot across the street. It took me a good hour to realize he is the manager at Arminios.
I am trying to figure out how to manage and structure my time. It helps to be in a class because there's this external check-in point every week. It's the externalization that helps me. Nothing was said that I couldn't have come up with on my own-- and yet it helped to hear someone else say it.
I think I was one of the most dedicated people in the class. Or maybe I was the only one who had nothing better to do every Saturday for ten weeks. Attendance went down in the last few weeks of the course, probably because no one could hear her. She kind of talked to herself, in her own head, a bit.