jaeleslie

There was this noise, and by the time I woke up I already knew what it was. It was the sound of five pounds of onions falling in their net bag from a hook onto the basement stairs, and then released from the torn net, bouncing down the wooden steps each on their own, at two in the morning.

Instead of going back to sleep then, I was thinking over how to explain how it is that I don’t feel like a failure for giving up on my National Novel Writing Month project only halfway through the month. I have, near as I can tell, only a couple thousand words written, instead of the twenty-five thousand that I should have done by this point according to all advice and guidelines for the project. And the words I have are remarkably ill-organized and little thought out. But of course it was pretty silly to think I could tackle that at the same time that I was off to Britain for the first eleven days of the month. It is very likely that I am never going to be able to write a novel in the month of November if I want to go to Novacon too.

As soon as I started the first jetlag, on November 2, the days started to get away from me, as you might expect. Soon I was noting events that occurred to me on the trip, and making plenty of gallery notes in my journal at all the art galleries I went to, but every day that went by so richly without any further attention to the Novel, the number of words that I would have to write to get back on track went up. What had made it seem like such a possible project at all was that a couple thousand words a day consistently applied is not at all beyond my abilities. But twice that, and particularly the thinking around how to choose which ones, does seem well nigh impossible.

Writing a novel in a month is a brash idea, and I liked it from the start. It is not a bad thing to have several thousand words scribbled down, however confused, and a lot of ideas. Now I have a word processing document captioned on the desktop screen too, and the title "Twelve Dancing Princesses" does match serendipitously with the photo I have there (from the Medieval Baebes website, you could google that) of a gaggle of variously dressed ladies dancing across a parkland. Those ideas have apparently been bouncing around in unconscious process for some time. But I’m just not going to be able to do them any justice this month. I have lots of projects that I have started and never finished. This is nothing unusual for me. I have half-done paintings and publications and writings and more crafts than you care to hear about in every possible stage of process, mostly closer to beginning than finishing. Getting to the end of a project from time to time is a great triumph, but starting something and leaving it while I go on to something else is business as usual.

I have all these photos and notes from Britain, which I collected from the photo shop this week and have barely put into an album so that I could show them to my artists’ study group at our meeting yesterday -- and a zine to publish too, and a teeshirt to design, and so on and on. It’s always something. Really way more important than a lot of other stuff right now is that I have a stack of novels to read for the Tiptree award, and quite a number of friends depending on me to be able to discuss and consider those works intelligently as a member of the jury over the next couple of months. I like reading them too. It does mean that I have to buckle down to reading the next half-dozen in the stack this week, while I also write the business pages for Turboapa and collate that and mail it out and go to the gym every other day or so and write up our collaborative book/box project and put some gesso on the boards a friend Elaine kindly sent to me yesterday and think about what colors to paint them and which cookies to bake for the holidays and spare a thought for getting the duplicator working again and maybe, just possibly, write a journal entry and post some photos of Warwick Castle somewhere. If I didn’t have so many things going all the time, I wouldn’t get so many of them occasionally done.

Smells like bruised onions down here. I don’t think I have found and collected them all yet.

Another Friday study group, and this time I had just gotten my photos developed from my trip to Britain and put them all in an album in some kind of order! I just got back Monday, after one of those thirty-hour days that the time-change will do for you, and I am still waking up at improbably early hours and falling asleep awfully early. I went to quite a number of galleries and took photos and bought postcards and made notes of what I saw. (Well, okay, half my photos were of Warwick Castle, which is pronounced by the way Warrick (for those of you to whom this is not intuitively obvious), where I had a great time climbing four of the five towers and checking the peacock garden and the Capability Brown landscapes and the great views of autumn color.)

So my friends in our study group let me rant a bit about what I saw at (1) the New Art Gallery at Walsall, housing a collection now available to the local community from bequest of the sculptor Jacob Epstein and his family & friends; (2) the Tate Modern, which we had seen models of at Milwaukee -- a rehabbed power station on the south bank of the Thames in London, which was gutted to hold six floors of galleries and an enormous entry hall, which this year is housing a truly remarkably engineered sculpture* that is so large you can't see all of it from any point in the hall, not to mention all the other twentieth century art of which I saw only a single floor; (3) the Tate Britain (old Tate) where I saw work from the four nominees for the Turner Prize, to be announced in January, and another interesting show about artists using their own lives as the subject of their art since the sixties or so, both with very interesting catalogues; (4) the Courtauld Gallery, which I happened onto on a rainy day walking around in London, and found a new show of my favorite period of early Kandinskys and rooms more of the Fauves; and (5) the Victoria & Albert where I got to see a bit of the textile galleries this time and made another pass through the dress collection just for kicks. Oh yes and (6) the Great Court of the British Museum, which was right in the neighborhood near our hotel, and has always been under construction every other time I have tried to see it.

Every one of these items obviously requires further discussion in a hyptertextual footnoted way. Just put in another dime.

*I have scanned the photo I took of one end (about a third) of Anish Kapoor's sculpture Marsyas, 2002. It is made of red fabric, laced to big, er, rings, and the other two thirds of it also look kind of like horns too but different. I was standing on the second floor of the gallery section of the building. You can look inside it; there is an interesting inside/outside thing going on, and the sculptor's statement made much of the flesh-like color. The tiny figures walking under it are people entering the building. Now I just have to figure out how I can post it here.