Writing

“Keep Going West” by Liz Pappademas

I know I said I was going to post a happy/ier song this week, but, surprise! It’s not Monday so that means I get to bend the rules even further. ‘Sides, it’s the Songs to Die By Hour with me, your host, Macabre Melissa.

There is nothing I love more than a lady and a piano. A lady and a guitar are pretty fantastic, but there’s something oh-so-haunting about pianos and their culture, texture, and even symbolism. Marina Tsvetaeva is a Russian poet from the early 20th century and she’s fantastic, but she wrote a prose piece about her early childhood with her mother, a pianist unable to come to fruition, and the struggles between generations fighting amongst music and poetry. Ever since reading “My Mother and Music” — and writing a few papers on it — piano and great poetic heights have been chained together ever since. Well, those two and hippopotamuses, but that’s another story entirely.

Liz Pappademas is both a poet and a songstress. The featured song, “Keep Going West,” off of the album “11 Songs” is just one of the incredible songs that are a simple and touching as a voice, a piano, and the mellifluous words of inspiration.

The horses’ heads hold up the morning,
And the low sky hangs in God’s own noose.
With my lashes long, I dream of the ocean,
And the glow that rang when last I kissed you.
Keep going west, keep going west, keep going west.

This is all about the connections we make with other people and the effects thereafter. As the initiator and survivor of many failed relationships with people, this song sometimes brings tears to my eyes as I think about the way people hurt each other and the resultant flooding emotions. The mantra of “keep going west” could be “keep breathing” or even “keep living.” The Russian propoganda poster symbologist in me wants to link it to posters of Lenin and Stalin looking stalwartly to the west — to the future — to show that the past is over, but this song isn’t as simple as that. The past affects us and seemingly everything around us, like the turbulent storms in Shakespearian plays as the main character is emotionally and internally conflicted.

Independence is important — the shedding of skins as relationships change and morph — and the line that the sky hangs in “God’s own noose” is the extreme extrapolation of this. The Dostoevsky scholar in me wants to link this to the line of “everything is permissable” in The Brothers Karamazov and the implications that if anything can be done, then God is dead and man has haphazardly taken his place like a three-year-old dressing up as a businessman, signing papers in crayons and fingerpaint.

She sings, “I looked back,” after all of the tumultuous events of the stanzas, showing that foundations are built between people, they may crumble and fall, but each failure is sacred, something to be learned and gleaned from, the “glow” of memories will eventually soothe over any angry welts. We cannot allow God to hang in his own noose; we must dream of the ocean, of the ever-changing tide and current that will eventually make the interrupted sand smoothe again.

On a more personal (and writerly!) note, I listened to this song non-stop while writing an extremely hard part in my novel. I have a character named Nathaniel and he has this love/hate relationship with Gwennie, the heroine. He concurrently loves her and hates himself for loving her and takes this out in many different forms of abuse upon her. One particularly difficult scene deals with his domination over her completely which sparks a change in her thinking about the way she deals with the people around her. This song was sort of a perfect soundtrack for that. Gwennie, after much more crap happens to her — there are some sleepless nights where I’m unable to lay my head down because I feel like I’m a horrible human being for doing these things to her, a fictional character — starts going west, and sometimes she looks back, but one of her many character flaws is that she doesn’t often enough.

On another related note: someone in the comments section of youtube posted: “You broke my heart a little.” I agree, for the first time ever, with a commentator on youtube. What is the world coming to when people actually say smart things on the Internet?

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Round Two. *Ding Ding*

I finished reading The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco the other day, and as usual, what I read affects what I write. There was once where I stayed up the entire night to finish The Road by Cormac McCarthy, only to be unable to sleep before my shift at the coffee shop and writing a rather visceral scene in which our heroine, Gwennie, beats up some rival vampires, eats a young French aristocrat and then goes into a stupor from her poisoned blood. Another time I read a novelization of the second Care Bears movie and proceeded to write a scene in which our one-legged hero, Doc, goes to summer camp and finds out that there’s an evil camp counsellor possessing kids, or something. I might have blocked out the ending to that movie from my childhood because it was rather traumatizing, though I was totally cool with seeing Se7en when I was eleven. Except I can’t eat SpaghettiOs anymore.

Achnyway, Mr. Eco sort of has the same problem I do. And I quote: “The dialogue created another problem for me. In other words, as I was writing the book, I realized that it was taking on an opera-buffa structure, with long recitatives and elaborate arias….but the dialogue? At a certain point I feared it would sound like Agatha Christie, while the arias were Suger or Saint Bernard” (Eco 517). Well, strip me naked, send me to the past and call me Kyle Reese! I have the same problem as a respected Professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna. (Just call me Professor MK Sauer. I teach Vampire Literature at the University of Blogna.) I don’t even know what semiotics is, but that’s unimportant. What’s important is that a dude who wrote an entire book about monks murdering monks, who then goes on to say that if you read his book solely because you want to read about monks murdering monks then you’re stupid, had the same problem as me. Wait a tic…I think that kid might be the Avatar.

What problem is this, you ask, because you’re astute, not unlike Brother William of Baskerville, the Holmesian hero of our holy, yet hugely highbrow history? We both like fedoras. No, I mean, really like fedoras.

That fedora really IS ruggedly handsome!

Well, where doesn't it hurt? HERE!

Think of Indiana Jones in Temple of Doom when he almost loses an arm trying to get his fedora. Almost there. Now replace Ilsa from the Last Crusade with that same fedora, and then you catch my drift.* No, I jest. At least about Mr. Eco, as I’m sure any relationship he has with that really good lookin’ hat is purely Platonic.

No, the problem we both have is that our dialogue and our narration have seemingly two different voices! My blog post about polyphony covered that and I just wanted to let you know that this is a legitimate concern for writers and that the first step to overcoming voices in your head trying to fight for the narration wheel is to admit you have a problem. Hi, my name is MK Sauer — (Hi, MK) — and I’m constantly trying to reconcile two completely different moods for my novel.

(Hey, wasn’t there an episode for Forever Knight where Nick the Vampire was trying to treat his blood-drinking like an addiction and he went to an AA-type of meeting and met Ms. Trinity-before-she-was-Trinity-and-all-impaled-and-junk and she was a sex addict? Is that a stretch? Well, I guess vampires are the recurring theme, so we’re clear. )

*I can only say a German accent when saying, “This is how we kiss in Austria.” Unfortunately, I have to play out the whole scene and continue macking on air and then say, “And this is how we kiss in Germany,” and the smack the air, and then become rugged and handsome and tired and say, “I liked the Austrian way better,” and then do my best Sean Connery accent and say, “So did I.” Usually by the time I’m done, if there are witnesses who don’t know me, I’ve accumulated a few stares and/or phone calls for help.

On a somewhat related note, Brother William is played by Sean Connery in the 1986 movie version of The Name of the Rose with a very, very young and very naked Christian Slater, who was in Interview with the Vampire. So that just goes to show that everything in my blog is connected. EVERYTHING. Which is why I have a game called Six Degrees of Count Dracula. Now all we need is Kevin Bacon to play Dracula.

Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. Harcourt, Inc, 1984.

God, I’ve been out of school for two years now and I still have to quote properly. What’s next? Taking notes on a Dostoevsky novel when I don’t have to? Wait, I’ve already done that. What’s next, next? Reading up on my 17th century New England history by watching The Libertine? God, that movie’s only good if you want to see someone die of syphilis.

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Polyphony vs. Messieurs Jekyll and Hyde

I like big words. Which is kind of like saying, “I like to eat jellyfish tentacles.” You get weird looks, some rolled eyes, and a sort of “prove it” attitude from most. One of the big words I rike isth a oord room — oh, excuse me, I had to slurp up my jellyfish tentacle there and it was impeding my ability to type in a way so that it sounded like I had something in my mouth. Excuse me.

(Sometimes you get people who don’t like big words yelling at you for using said big words and all you can do to tell them off is use more big words and then all of a sudden you’re back in time, killing your grandfather, creating a paradox and then the fourth dimension will collapse upon itself, you stupid bitch. [That’s a quote from a movie called Southland Tales, which I never saw, but my friends quote it all the time. In fact, I could write an entire post on the whole simulacrum-thing between them, me, and Family Guy, but I’ll save that for a rainy day.] More often than not I try to use “indubitably” in these conversations. Maybe I’ll throw  in an antediluvian troglodyte or a boorish back-sided broom-calumniator for good measure.)

A Russian literary critic named Mikhail Bakhtin wrote an extensive (and rather exhaustive, in my humble opinion) series of articles on Dostoevsky’s work entitled “Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics,” in which he talked about a big-word-favorite of mine: polyphony, or  having many voices in a one-narrator novel. Basically, each character within a Dostoevskian novel has their own psychological platfrom from which they think, act, and speak. Or, to quote my favorite website for literary techniques, wikipedia: “each individual character is strongly defined, and at the same time the reader witnesses the critical influence of each character upon the other.” Wow. Usually I’m rather sarcastic about wikipedia, but that’s actually a rather succinct definition. Good job. Now go clean up your article about adverbs and then we’ll go for coffee or something. Uh-uh, second date, no tongue!

Now, being a humble narrator, though not completely immune to the effects of sleep-deprivation and inspiration as of right now — something I refer to as the orange juice and toothpaste combo of the writing world — I find it hard to reconcile the two very distinct voices I have in my head. (Leave the schizophrenia jokes to me, kids. I’m a professional. Well, not really, but I am a Notary Public. WITNESS MY HAND AND SEAL. Uh, I mean, SEAL! Whatever. Club sandwiches, not seals.) The first is the rather irreverent, sarcastic, and Joss Whedonified. Basically what you read here. The other, however, is what I call the Emo Nathaniel Hawthorne. Now, those three words — harmless by themselves — together can be somewhat misleading. You haven’t had an example of this yet, though when I tend to get all literary on you, it gets closer to my main voice. I go for the psychological heartstrings — hence the emotional bit — and I’m rather descriptive — hence the Hawthorne bit. Where the Nathaniel comes into play, I have no clue. I don’t even know how this dude got here.

Can't you just see some manliner on those baby blues?

My dialogue is often closer to the first and my paragraphs are usually in the second style. It bugs me a lot that they don’t mesh well together, leading me to wonder if this is an act of polyphony or a case of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hydes. I also have no idea how jarring it really is, since I’m too close to my work to have an accurate view. Well, one day, when my looks have faded, an editor will tell me exactly how annoying it is. I have the feeling it’ll go over much like the introduction of 3D movies to the one-eyed and depth-perceptionally challenged. (I actually have no idea if the new 3D movies work with one eye or not. I guess when I’m playing the Avatar drinking game where you take a shot everytime there’s a horrible cliche watching The Last Airbender, I’ll figure it out.)

So, if I’m Dr. Jekyll, where’s Mr. Hyde? He’s right behind me, isn’t he? I guess I’ll go run upstairs—
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Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself

I’m not exactly a man of wealth and taste, but I would say that I have a wealth of imagination and a taste….for blood. Okay, okay, I’ve been up late again, watching Dracula movies from the 70s. (To tell the truth, Frank Langella was the only performance I believed, but Udo Kier has the best pronunciation of the word “wirgin” this side of the Thames.)

I wouldn’t necessarily say that I have multiple personalities, or am a sociopath or talk to the dead, but I feel that writing is a little bit of all three. You have to be somewhat inclined to talk to yourself (I do this in parking lots all the time when I walk to and from my car and then proceed to say, “Stop talking to yourself. Great, now you’re talking to yourself about talking to yourself–Stop it…stop!”), somewhat inclined toward the darker UV side of the human spectrum of emotion (looks cool, kinda trippy, best with sunglasses), and able to channel the voices of others in a somewhat authentic way (because dialogue, let’s face it, is more than just putting quotes around a bunch of random words. You get me, James Cameron? What? No, I don’t see you. Get lost, this is my blog.)

I’m a lady. Whoa-oah-oh. I’m a lady. I joke all the time about my obsession with Kate Beckinsale, and the like, but this clears up any confusion. Not that this lets you off the hook, Len Wiseman. I’m still coming for your wife. What? She’s hot, she’s a hotter vampire, and SHE STUDIED RUSSIAN LITERATURE. I study Russian literature. INSTANT ICE-BREAKER. You know, the ice-breaker after the awkward, “Sorry I pushed your husband down the stairs. See, there was a bug…” speech.

I had a conversation once with a professor about the difference between a woman who writes and a woman writer and got looked at sternly for saying that I didn’t want to be known as a woman writer because that carries the connotation that everything I write about has something to do with being a life-bearer and that the words you’re reading now were inked in my own menstrual blood. Don’t ask, just let that happen. I’ll be taking complaints in the comments section shortly about this. There shouldn’t be a difference with a reaction to my novels based on my gender. Yes, I’m a lady, but I also like explosions. And replacing limbs with various weapons-that-can-produce-a-lot-of-gore. (My right big toe has been replaced with a mini-zamboni, just so you know. Those things can cause some damage. Just ask Mr. Wiseman.) And my main character is a lady, but she also likes to eat people.

See, I write about vampires, in case you couldn’t tell from all of the vampire-riddled paragraphs around here. I call it high-brow horror. Dracula meets Dostoevsky, if you will. It’s not your grandpappy’s vampire novel and it ain’t your daughter’s neither. No sparkly posers here. In fact, sparkly posers bother me. I deal with the psychological impact of what it means to be turned into a vampire after a lifetime of abuse. I also deal with chopping up peoples’ legs and ruining peoples’ lives with amphibians. (Hey, just ask Hellboy and he’ll tell you all about those rascally frogs and how we need to get them off of our streets now.)

The Lost Boys is my favorite movie. I read Dracula when I was 12. Every year for my birthday, I have a vampire movie marathon. The good, the bad, and the so-bad-it’s-good make an appearance, and every year I try to watch as many as I can before falling asleep. It is one of my goals in life to actually induce hallucinations from sleep-deprivation caused by vampire movie overload. (Also known as the Death By Stereo syndrome.) I do not actually intend to survive this event because nothing else will compare with it, ever. Not even Sinead O’Connor. Or Prince. Or the dude formerly known as the bald-lady-who-ripped-up-a-picture-of-the-Pope-on-TV-once. I always get those two confused. I own several pairs of fangs and act out parts of my novel with Bloody Marys and my cardboard cut-out of Keanu Reeves dress up like a vampire for Halloween costumes.

I have blue hair. Well, now, at least. It’s more of a teal-ish color, or, as I like to call it, Atomic Peacock. A few months ago it was lime green. Soon it might be purple. It’s been every color but orange, which will probably soon change.

I have ginormous feet. And you know what they say about big feet? Big shoes. And you know what they say about big shoes? Good luck trying to find a pair of heels that don’t make you look like Attack of the 50-Foot Woman. Or, DAMN, if we’re in Japan. Or, you know, however one says DAMN in Japanese, which I figure to translate roughly as, “Man, look at the size of that tentacle!”
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Dracula is My Co-Pilot

Welcome to my blog! Enter freely and of your own will, and leave some of the happiness you bring (and by happiness, I mean, of course, your soul.)

What if blogs were like the thresholds to a person’s home? And what if vampires couldn’t enter them without being invited first? Well, the internetz would be much more bloodthirsty, more nocturnal, filled with pasty-looking weirdos, but also be filled with horrible puns (a la “Who ordered the stake? Oh, you? Is medium rare all right?”). So, basically, it wouldn’t change at all, but it’s my part here to change it just a little bit.

See, I’m a writer. No, you haven’t heard of me, but you will. I plan on enslaving you all using my Hypno-Ray into thinking that I am the second best writer on the planet. (Where do you think I got the MK from? From that article on wikipedia about MK Ultra, damn straight. Actually, from my parents.) Well, see, I can’t be the first because that belongs to a dead Russian author, but I can be cool with second. Lots of second things are pretty awesome: silver medals — good for melting down for silver bullets to kill werewolves. Uh, being second-string quarterback is pretty glamorous. (Or so I’ve been told because, let’s face it, I watch a man’s sport: curling. I mean, I wish I got paid for sitting around and doing nothing! Which is nothing at all like writing novels. No. Not at all. That’s silly.) And, let’s face it, where would Count von Count be without the number two? One! One bad joke! Ah ha ha. Ha. *sobs*

(I really don’t usually use this many parentheses when I write, but I feel that by exaggerating their application, I’m showing how hip I am in displacing the usual grammatical structure of these things by placing my somewhat irrelevant thoughts in them to show you that this is, indeed, not like your mama’s blog.)

No, I mean you’ll hear of me one day because I’ll become published and swanky and tattooed. *Needle scratch* Hi, mom. And by tattooed, I mean respectable. Like, monocle-wearing respectable. Maybe even a top hat. But not a Lincoln-sized top hat because, I mean, I’m not Lincoln-sized myself. That would just look ridiculous. I’m maybe 3/4 Lincoln-sized. But I do have an Indiana Jones hat that I may or may not wear and hum the theme song to Raiders of the Lost Ark when I’m re-enacting the Nazi-melting scene with my skull, Rochester bored. (I also have a whip. Ladies?)

Achnyway (I have a kid that I work with who always puts an ‘ach’ in front of words like anyway, okay, and hello, so that he sounds very Fiddler on the Roof-esque), this is a blog to introduce you (the reader and sometimes commenter, but hopefully not stalker or raging hater) to me (the writer and sometimes artist, but hopefully not attention-whore or annoying, awkward basement kid) as I finish up the second half of my novel and try to get published. This is sort of a way to get my name out there so I can create a fan base before even getting published! I hope to one day become Queen of the Interwebz. What? Felicia Day already has that title? Well, slap me with some whipped cream and get that ginger over here so’s we can fight for the right to bear that moniker! I mean, read this blog. Because I write it…covered in whipped cream. Okay, not really, but I’m sure there are tons of crumbs in my keyboard to attest that I eat next to my computer all the time, which is practically the same thing.

Mainly, I’ll be posting my thoughts about stuff that I encounter. Most of it will be about writing, but some will, admittedly, be about the stuff that keeps me up at 2AM. Who am I kidding? This might just be the weirdest blog you’ll check every day ending in -day and/or month ending in….er….-ber, but it’ll keep you up at night. Because you’ll be wondering what kind of brain thinks of things like what I’ll be posting. Not because I would ever stare at you while you sleep or anything. Only vampires do that. And remember, you invited me in.
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