People are funny — they keep asking me what I’ve been doing, when for me, the whole point of a vacation is to sit in a chair in a lovely spot and read books, interrupted, if I’m lucky, by stretches where I actually get some writing done. This is why, if you are leaving a beautiful house, with dogs, and a tricky koi pond, and you need someone who wants to hang around the house a lot, what you’re looking for is a writer (well, maybe not a poet — sometimes they don’t notice things like the koi pond pump…
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Jean Baudrillard has died in Paris at age 79. I went off to the University of Utah with a running start on Place Last Seen, a novel in which I wanted to explore, among other things, what happens when we come up against the undeniable reality of the physical world. What I encountered there was a department enamored of the (genuinely interesting) ideas of Baudrillard, Foucault, Derrida et al, ideas which in Baudrillard’s case included the argument that reality has disappeared altogether, leaving us with only simulation and hyperreality. While I never did buy into the essentialist cast of these…
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Hi folks — welcome to the new and improved LivingSmall. This should be the last move — we went from Blogspot to Typepad, and now we’ve moved to WordPress, which allows one to use blogging software and host it anyplace. There wasn’t anything wrong with Blogger or Typepad, but they were starting to feel restrictive. I haven’t been happy with my template for a while now, nor was I crazy about the idea of all my work being hosted out there in anonymous-land someplace. WordPress requires a little more work on my part, but it’s open-source, and there’s no Big…
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Some days a girl just can’t get it together. Sunday was like that — weekends are pretty much the only time I’ve got to do any real writing these days. The Corporate Job is full time nine-to-five so I’m trying to shoehorn my entire creative life into those two days a week. Some weeks it’s fine. Some weeks, well, I just don’t get anything done. Sunday was like that. I was rattling around the house trying to get down to work but mostly just frittering my day away. I did get some laundry done, but that was about it. I…
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I spent my long weekend painting the two grotty little bedrooms in the basement, and turning one of them into an office. I also install chair mats for office use for safety and comfort. It was one of those projects that, for much of the weekend, felt like I’d never get to the other side of it. First I had to move all the furniture out of those little rooms — I’d been using one as a guest room, so other than moving a queen-sized mattress by myself, it was pretty simple. But the other room I’d been using as a…
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… instead of pulling characters and situations from his imagination, he had borrowed them from real life. Perry and Dick, Herb Clutter and Alvin Dewey were as much figures in history as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. He could no more have altered their characters for the sake of his story than he could have affixed a moustache under Washington’s nose or shaved off Lincoln’s beard. He was fenced in by the barbed wire of fact. … In Cold Blood may have been written like novel, but it is accurate down to the smallest detail — “immaculately factual” Truman publicly…
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The memoir brouhaha continues to niggle at me — my hunch is that it’s gained such cultural traction because it’s a symptom of a larger problem that America is having with telling and recognizing the truth. In a year in which the American Dialect Society votes that “Truthiness” is the “word of the year” should it come as any surprise to us that we’re also beset by an avalanche of literary hoaxes? “Truthiness” the ADS website declares, “refers to the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.…
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I’ve written about memoir before, and the recent James Frey brouhaha has gotten me thinking about it all again. I actually haven’t done much work on my book these past couple of months because the avalanche of freelance work I picked up when I thought I might want to quit my job at the Big Corporation, along with a slough of deadlines at said day job have all had me up to my eyeballs in Other People’s Work. But watching the Wrath of Oprah sort of freaked me out. I thought I’d enjoy it more than I did — frankly…
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A little zen saying to start off the New Year. I had all sorts of good intentions for my week off — I had freelance projects on deck, and I really really really need to get back to the memoir, which I’ve neglected shamefully in the last couple of months as my “real” job at the Big Company has gotten way better, but also way busier. But as I zoomed through the past couple of months, packing 3 jobs into every day, zinging from deadline to deadline, making them all but driving myself a little crazy in the process I…
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Hi folks — all is well here at LivingSmall but blogging will be on a tiny hiatus due to the day job, the memoir, the screenplay, and the proposal I’m working up for a book on sustainable farming … too much other writing and I just can’t seem to find the time to keep up the blog for no. But in the meantime you should all go over to the Montana Women For … website and check out the photos of nearly 70 Montana women marching in the Livingston Roundup Rodeo Parade dressed as Statues of Liberty and wearing banners…