Imaginary people invading the real world
I have some great news, my friends: I finished the first draft of my novel today! You can probably imagine how happy I am about this after months of work and partly struggling with writer’s block. The draft is almost 85,000 words long and has some in some parts already polish. It turned out vulgar, outright pornographic in parts and the thought of my parents reading it makes me want to crawl into a very dark hole. In some way that’s almost reassuring, but since they know my pen name, I probably can’t prevent them from buying a copy if I ever publish it. Scary!
Where it will go is still written in the stars. First I will have to start editing it. Only after the first, or maybe the second edit I will actually show it to other people. Since I’m in a bit of a grey area with some of the details, I will also have to make sure I don’t piss a certain person off, who happens to feature in the novel. This can either be a very bad thing if this person has a problem with it, since rewriting the lead character kind of defeats the point. However, if this person actually likes it, then this could actually open up some cool possibilities. At this point I can only be very unspecific about this, but I hope that it will all work out for the best.
I will now leave the novel be for a few days, since I will be busy with work stuff, but I expect to start editing in June.
I have also been working a little bit on a different project that is slowly taking shape. However, it’s a somewhat disturbing in some ways, so that I can only work on it over short periods. I tend to have the problem that my characters start invading the real world. The best example is the lead character of my novel. He’s obsessed with records and since I did a lot of research about the topic, I ended up buying some records myself and getting my brother’s old record player out of storage. Since the record player is rather shitty though I’m now planning on buying a good one and have literally spent hours researching the right kind of record player. I imagine, that once I have it, I will end up getting a new system for it as well, which will take more hours of research and so on. All because my lead character happens to be fanatic about records.
japanese spider crab © Lilly Schwartz 2012
Then there is the thing with the Japanese Spider Crab. One day this little monster featured in my other project in some remote thought of the main character. It really was a rather unimportant side remark and I can’t even remember how I even came up with mentioning it. However, days later I still ended up in the Sealife Centre here in Berlin, because they happened to have one of those beasts there. They can have a span of 4m and look really scary. Since this project meanders from one bizarre thing to the next I try to only spend a few days in a row on it, since I don’t want it to invade my life too much. I should probably also never write about really crazy characters, because it would probably mess with my head.
At the same time this very knowledge that fictitious characters can well start to have a real impact on your life as a writer is something that I really cherish about having written this novel. Writing gets you a lot closer to a story than reading it and it somewhat makes me wonder about some of the more disturbing books I’ve read over the years. I wonder what these books have done to their authors.
New ideas and some progress
These last few days have been rather productive when it comes to writing. Although I have been trying to work mainly on the novel, I was inspired to work also on a different project that combines writing with visual imagery. I used to do this already many years ago in quite a different and very minimal fashion. Back then I worked on this by taking pictures and adding a short statement to it, inside the frame. The statement might have been one word or just a half sentence, usually in German. Back then I was still writing poetry. Not particularly good poetry, I might add, but just the usual teenage angst type of stuff.
If you want to meet this old incarnation of me (and maybe understand a little German, although that’s not entirely necessary for the most part), head over to http://www.klickerklacker.info. I have to say that the UX is slightly off, since it was supposed to illustrate that the world is not intuitive by itself. If you want to get to know people you sometimes have to keep prodding at some issues, even if you think you’ve already reached the end of the line. So, after the pop up opens you can find more than one picture, just keep clicking on the pictures until the window closes. Nowadays I would probably use a different approach to typesetting on the pictures themselves as well, but a few of the pictures I still find quite interesting.
strange apparitions © Lilly Schwartz 2012
The project I’m working on now is again a combination of text and pictures, but this time with a focus on the text. The pictures I use are mostly public domain, old illustrations from long out of print books, historical photographs, or pictures taken from scientific sources. The idea is to create a study of how different lines of thinking flow together with the perception of the external world. By taking aspects of our visual culture out of context, we can easily create a view that is largely unrelated to what reality really looks like. All of this is based on the assumption that our perception of the world mainly depends on how we interpret what is happening around us from our individual viewpoint.
It is in fact also a quite personal project and might not even say much to other people, since within the project I take little things that happen to me and interpret them differently in a what-if kind of mode. Instead of the relatively down-to-earth type of person that I have become over the last few years, I take on a very paranoid, maybe even misanthropic viewpoint. Of course this can only make sense for anyone else, if I really go overboard with this and create an interpretation that is so absurd that everyone immediately sees how strange all of this really is. The weird thing is that this different interpretation might be closer to what my view of things would have been like during the chaos of my teenage years, of course without reviving the more naive aspects of teenage angst. It plays with melancholy, anxiety and a sense of doom that befalls us for no apparent reason, while working mostly with strange coincidences and focussing on disturbing aspects of the world around us.
So far I have no real clue, where this will lead me, whether it will be long or short and whether it will even reach a conclusion, since it meanders through every day thoughts, obsessions and nightmares. As I say, I’m actually concerned that it might not make much sense to anyone else at this point, but I think if done right this can also be quite interesting to other people. I will tinker around with this for a while and see whether it works or not.
On the novel front I have finally cracked the 70,000 words mark and added a scene after being a bit blocked for a while. I’m not sure how long it will still take me to finish, considering that I’m somewhat distracted as well, but it feels like I’m close to finally wrapping up the first draft. There are still at least 4 scenes missing, but I already know most of their details since I’ve been going over them a lot in my head during the last couple of months.
Ode to shit
what happened to babe © Lilly Schwartz 2011
In its natural state, life is pretty balanced. Shit gives rise to the complexity of life and life again produces shit. It’s waves and waves of life, shit and death that all interrelate somehow and make sure that shit and corpses don’t take over the world. Without the continuation of life the world would gradually decay until it was just covered in corpses and dung that eventually decompose into some kind of goo. At least that’s how I imagine the end of all life. Some call this movement towards the ultimate final goo the second law of thermodynamics, some call it entropy, and other less fair-minded people, like me, just call it the shit we have to deal with, mainly because ‘shit’ is such a short and poignant word.
What people tend to forget is that shit, corpses and death are utterly necessary for life to even exist. Not plants or insects are at the bottom of the food chain, shit and corpses are. There is all the ugly iffy type of life that birds eat all the time, worms and insects and these wouldn’t exist without heaps and heaps of dung and dead goo. There is a somewhat disgusting, somewhat beautiful relationship between life and death that needs to be spelled out in these terms somehow, so that people are reminded of how life really works and make their choices accordingly.
We go into a supermarket and buy a piece of flesh from an animal that was at some point a living, breathing entity. This being had a mother and possibly big eyes that let humans go “Awww cuuute”, because we’re genetically inclined to care for cuddly little things with big eyes. Well, until one day the cuddly little thing isn’t little or cuddly anymore, and then we have it for dinner. Just, that nowadays people don’t even see anymore that they’re eating a part of a corpse, unless someone makes it real obvious and sells a whole dead piglet. Yes, we eat corpses. Chilled corpses maybe, but still, we have something in common with the worms and insects that are at the bottom of the food chain. We don’t want to be reminded of it, but it is true nonetheless.
We don’t want to see corpses, we don’t want to see death in its reality. We don’t want to be reminded that one day the worms and insects are going to get us all, unless we give ourselves to the fires of hell, no wait, the fires of the crematories. We wax our relatives up, paint their faces so that they somehow don’t look so dead. We don’t leave them lying around until they start to look somewhat disgusting, no we chill them and then we bury them six feet under. It’s more hygienic that way.
The same we do with shit. It goes down the toilet and is flushed somewhere, God knows where, and that’s the last we see of it. Dog shit lies in the street and we feel inclined to fine the dog owners if they don’t make the shit disappear. It’s just not very nice is it? We don’t want to see shit, just like we don’t want to see corpses and dead relatives being eaten by worms.
However, without corpses we don’t get our steak or Sunday roast. Without shit there is no food chain, no life, no world as we know it and sometimes it’s important to spell it out. Even our own deaths are necessary, because without it there is no room for the children of our children.
Now, the problem with avoiding shit, death and corpses all the time is that we tend to forget how to live. We don’t take risks that might get us killed. We eat only healthy food that doesn’t make us happy, we take all the excesses out, the extremes, the jumping of cliffs, hitchhiking with strangers, walking through parks alone at night. Those might even be reasonable precautions, but what’s even worse is that take it one step further. We don’t do stuff that involves paddling through valleys of shit. With this I mean that we try to avoid doing things that confront us with heaps of stuff that we don’t want to do. Maybe it’s bureaucracy, maybe it’s talking in front of a lot of people, maybe marketing or putting yourself on the line. And we all try to avoid this shit as much as possible, because it scares us.
Without shit, there is no beauty though. Musicians have to face the whole industry if they want their albums to be bought. And without their albums being bought, they will stop being musicians, unless they’re terribly idealistic and have too much time on their hands. Full-time musicians have to go on the road to play shows, with the right timing, the right publicity and terribly uncomfortable circumstances. They have to face labels and even the worst of the worst, music journalists, who to musicians often seem like vultures, because they turn the words in your mouth so that it actually gets them a story, even if there is none. Also writers have to face similar things. They face the critics, the publishing industry, book signings, reading tours, book fairs and the likes. No job is without its own valley of shit that you continually have to cross, just to get to the blooming mountains with dew sprinkled flowers.
The point is, those dew sprinkled flowers are worth it. How many people end up doing a job they hate, because they didn’t want to be facing one of these big and obvious valleys of shit? And how many of them still cross their own version of this valley every day? Annoying customers, bosses, efficiency ratings, monthly and yearly appraisals, layoffs, backstabbing co-workers and the rut of producing shit that nobody really needs anyway. And no dew sprinkled flowers whatsoever, because in the end you just look back and think “Whoever needed the crap I wasted my life with for the last 45 years?”
Whatever you do, there is shit all around, and that’s normal. Shit can only be avoided, by not living life altogether. The question really is, whether you want to spend your life waist deep in shit shovelling it from one side to the other, or whether you want to build a boat and enjoy the flowers on the other side. Either way, we just have to accept the shit, the corpses, even the worms, the insects and the vultures, because it’s all part of the circle of life. What we do with that is our own choice though.
And even if this all might sound somewhat dreary and depressing, from time to time someone actually has to write an ode to all this shit, because it’s all around us and somehow it fulfils its function. It enables us to live and do the things we like, even though we find it all pretty disgusting and terrible if we give it too much thought. And here it comes, an ode to the shit we all have to deal with, day in and day out:
It’s an ode
Oh, it’s an ode
to the trains that are late every day,
the dumb students you have to teach,
the idiots to whom you serve food,
to abusive customers all over the planet
and to all the pathetic bosses who don’t know shit,
to the people who walk slowly right in front of you
although it’s obvious that you’re in a hurry.It’s an ode
to the tax return forms,
or your apathetic unemployment agency case worker,
to the nonsensical phone calls that keep you from working productively
and your old computer at work that keeps crashing,
the rancid coffee in the office that smells somewhat burnt
and the milk that has gone off again
because you’re never home.It’s an ode
to the cat that always jumps on the table
although you keep telling it to get down,
to the screaming kids on all the airplanes in the world,
to your neighbours who wear high heels in their flat,
to the squeaking door in your office,
or the architects who enjoyed designing a building without windows,
to the oil refinery of which your town stinks
and the flatmates who steal your orange juice.It’s an ode to this,
and to all the other lovely shit that keeps driving you insane.
And now you better go back to paddling, my little sailors.
bearable is barely enough 