LUCY CORIN

there is so much going on in my family right now, and so far away– they are all over the place– not many of them but all over, like a the fingertips of a giant claw holding the earth.  not to be grand.  but there is something about the numbed out perspective that made me feel, somewhere between the staircase and the laundry just now, a sense of the book I am trying to write– the large shape of it, the way to make it concrete.  The boy madman is almost dead when we see him on the page, but we hear about his history, and we see some fallout, the biggest fallout right about where I left off writing before teaching this quarter.  The girl madman has been not in the book– she has been incapacitated and missing.  But now that the boy madman’s story has come to one kind of head I think she can really rise from the dead.  I have to remember how aware she is of having risen from the dead even if it isn’t visible to other people.  Now she can move the plot.  I know the image that goes with this section.  My sister painted it.

people on my fb have been complaining about too much posting about food and I know how annoying the idea of san francisco is to people who don’t live here, so I thought I would post a picture of what I had for breakfast here in an ironic spirit of the relevant detail, and the abuse of this method of character development in fiction (do I really need to know what you had for breakfast?) as it resonates with the obsessive personal identity creation of online culture.  so what does this say about me?  The moose was a gift from a great guy who took us dogsledding in Alaska.  I sauteed the leftover bits from last night’s dinner with red onion and zucchini.  Add a grind of pepper.  The eggs are very fresh and scrambled perfectly.  The pieces of cheese is a really crystally kind of swiss and yes they are meant to connote beams of sunshine and gesture at the lemonade.  the pink stuff is pickeled red onion which just means I marinated slices in lemon juice.  there are tulips wilting in the background.  What I really want to know is:  is this meaningful disclosure?  am I a more or less coherent character now?  one time in an early story I wrote a paragraph of character description by just listing a bunch of random things and noting how easy it is to suggest a whole human from scraps.  Is it easy?  It’s not easy.  You can suggest a person, the trouble for fiction is then so what?

moose and eggs

what if the novel is not funny, that’s like a main thing I have to offer is funny– it’s off kilter constantly, but it’s not moving in and out of lightness enough, what’s my problem?

also I am not seeing the characters as characters yet, especially the main girl.  what if she is has a friend with a dramatic romantic love life and keeps telling the friend to tamp that shit down…what if her need to reduce drama is stifling her in a way that is funny to read, but her arc has to do with moving from tamping to peace?  that’s a quiet arc but it could be a nice challenge to make it meaningful.  though I am so worried about starting the arc not at stasis but in flux, but that is what I think, that normal is not peace normal is war.

if I can write a version of china that exists for people who don’t know anything, an “idea of china” that I’ve been thinking about since I wrote an apocalypse with that phrase in it, and that can be “space” in the novel, maybe now that I get to go to rome, and rome is about architecture, and I don’t know anything about architecture but it’s all over my book, then maybe some spaces in rome can be about TIME.  the church on top of a church on top of a church.  is it san clemente?  also a marble mine.  in the mine is a marble room.  I am interested in entirely white spaces, where frankensteins wander off, finally.

got an iphone ap to teach me italian by playing games, played a game about the numbers 1-20 for about ten minutes and even that was terrifying.  i have about five months to get over my bullsh*t.

I still think my hat was left on the floor of a fancy restaurant that when I called couldn’t find it.  I think someone who sat at the table later kept it.  that’s the kind of vanity I have about that hat, now that it is gone.  monday moma not so interesting.  big beautiful pictures of pubescents with their home beaches as backdrops around the world.  it was a nice exhibit, nice to spend an hour in there, sweet, lost time, not interesting time I guess but so what, unless you’re going to the museum every time you’re stuck on your book b/c it seems to work so often but this time you leave stuck, too.  But I prioritized it this week.  I am not hitting my personal deadline and am afraid of impending busier time at work, but I am okay, because I am set up for a long stretch starting june and there’s nothing like that vista to give a girl hope.

thing I did for art was have an extended fantasy about an abandoned institution like a jail or insane asylum renovated as housing for aging artists matched with young moneyless artists who they could mentor, so the young ones get free or cheap living space in exchange for care taking and the old ones get caretakers and everyone gets a community that is still making stuff.

meanwhile writing is hard b/c things in my life are hard.  the things in my life are connected to the things I’m trying to write, and it makes the writing feel (let’s see some writers wld say ‘too close’ and that’s probably part of it but also) comparatively pathetic or irrelevant.  maybe I’m just so drained.

I’m writing some new apocalypses for a project at my local Moma.  It’s fun and I’m trying to make sure it is working with and not against the novel.  I was going to try to find paragraphs from the novel to work out in terms of the paintings I’m writing in response to and maybe I’ll still do that but I don’t know.  I killed a character in the novel the other day and I’m still feeling weird about it.  So I guess it makes sense that I go back and write some apocalypses, feeling this way.  There have just been a lot of terrible public deaths recently, it’s pouring rain which is sort of comforting and sort of just wet and cold, and there have been several people in my life who I love who are suffering hard.  I had a few of those days I am at this age familiar with where I’m thinking “why am I functioning so well?  Is mine a hardened heart?” but then I go ahead and feel stuff plenty soon enough when I’m somewhere nice for feeling things.

Also I went to two museums over the weekend with my father and lost my hat.  I recently ended up with various documents from back in the day of my life and one that I got out to give to him is a postcard I sent him from my first writer’s conference/workshops– it was bennington in 1991, I was still a teenager, and I politely (judgmentally to cover up socially terrified-ly?) declined an invitation to a party thrown by Bret Easton Ellis rumored to be filled with cocaine we could all enjoy in order to return to the rooming house I shared with a nun and write.  In the postcard, I wrote to him (my dad) about how I thought he’d like my teacher Jerome Badanes, and I said that “Jerry” said I was precocious (I forget… something good…) and impatient.  Writing a good novel is a lot about being patient.

Over the weekend I got to go to the what is it called– not a rough cut, something more polished than that but still in progress– screening of a film at _______ films in the _______ neighborhood of sf where I never go except to see the free view.  I got to go because ________ , a really nice neighbor, is associated with ________ via _________  gave us tickets, which makes me personally both “thank you” and a little edgy re “handling my ambitions/ avoiding sensations of starfucking.”  The film, which I am not to talk about publicly, was all style no substance, hollywood and the wacky folk therein.  It made me think about the criticisms of lit that is “writing for writers” or “masturbatory.”  I’m always defending against those criticisms, saying something like one or another work in any mode can be bad or good, it’s not the mode that’s good or bad.  I think I can love a film about- hollywood-for-hollywood, as an outsider.  I guess I think Day of the Locust is an example but maybe I just got into that movie because I liked that book.  Or because that movie doesn’t exactly carry the thesis “hollywood is phony but all our hearts are stupid and we love it!”  ie this movie just reminded me of everything that grossed me out about that world (except for the cool collection of stuff photographed stylishly) when I was dating a woman peripherally associated with it (the Industry) a few years ago.  The other day I looked at the website of a guy I did theater with and fooled around with a few times in college who became a famous sidekick on a sci-fi tv show and now has a business helping people succeed in the Industry and it just grossed me out, or seemed sad or something.  Including the part where I loved that cheesy show.  So when people call books bad for being masturbatory what they are saying I think is that they hate the culture/community/ personality type they associate with where that creative product comes from.  They don’t want to hang out with those people, or those people make them feel bad about themselves or the world in a ‘what has become of us’ sort of way.  Because if you LIKE someone, you probably LIKE watching them masturbate, after all.

When I think about it, all the movies about hollywood that I love are largely send-ups, with a sheen or bubble of plaintive affection.