Hibernator

 

We Are Safe While Sleeping print by PhizzWizard on Etsy, $18.

This is just a formality. My terribly lonely little blog has been gasping for air, and attention, in the last few weeks.  My cats have been pawing at the bedroom door wondering what the heck happened to everyone (they can’t go in there, boyfriend is allergic).  The pile of dishes, mail and clutter has been steadily growing.  What happened to Audrey?

Truth be told, in the late days of February I become a hibernator.  I’ve done nothing, literally nothing creative for about two weeks.  This is a dry spell for me.  I lurk around my house in the dark after reading chapters and chapters of murder mysteries, glancing at the unattended to-do-tasks (open mail, put laundry in hamper) as if it’s the novel incarnate, but this time the killer is a seeping sense of domestic failure and artistic gloom.

Oh, so sad, Audrey!

So what have I been doing, then?

In addition to dreaming of summer, we’ve been indulging in reliving the Sopranos from Season One.  I’ve been reading “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and I’m 20 pages away from finished after staying up until 3:30am last night (on a school night!)  We’ve ventured out in to the not-that-cold to visit pizza joints, Indian food oases and dive bars with delicious breakfast.  On Saturday I lived vicariously through a MECA student who photographed Kate with  her Toyo (I miss my Toyo!) field camera at her apartment.  Like an arty vampire, I watched her frame photographs, direct her subject, snap — and probably feel super satisfied with herself.  Jealous.

After some guilt I expressed about being a puddle of inactivity, boyfriend reminded me that no one should expect anything of me at this point in the winter.  God damn it, he’s right.  I’ll tend to my Etsy responsibilities as needed but much energy needs to be stored so I can hit Spring with the full force it deserves.  I think I may start drawing because it’s non-committal and totally fun.  Dishes be damned:  I just won’t throw an elaborate dinner party any time soon.  Kate lent me the second book in the series I stayed up like a zombie reading and I will absolutely finish one (tonight) and dive right in to the other (probably tonight through 3:30am again).

Then there’s the matter of The BIG THAW.  Wow, I am so excited about it but at this point there’s nothing I can really ‘do’ until February 28th when all the applications are in.  My amazing artists are working on the poster design as we speak, applications are coming in daily (all are amazing, I hope we have room for everyone!) and I’ve already divided up the floor layout to figure out the numbers we can accommodate.  But this is what I need to focus on, this is the big deal of 2011.

I refuse to feel guilty about sink scum or scattered shoes this week.  If I get to them, I get to them — if not, who really actually cares?

Then there’s the matter of feast and famine.  I learned long ago (after four intense years of art scholarship) that you can’t go-go-go all the time at art.  Some people can, but they are totally insane and don’t have the best living/hygiene/sanity standards among us creative people.  After art school I took an entire year and a half not touching anything creative before coming to my senses.  Perhaps a busy December marked with the flourish of creating a craft sale out of thin air in January made this relaxation in February completely necessary.  Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.  Perhaps in a few weeks something will pour out of my hands so freaking fantastic that not washing my hair for three days seems totally justified!

I encourage everyone reading this to join me in a night of sloth, eat potato chips off a bowl perched on your stomach, wear the same shirt to bed that you wear to work the next morning.  Hibernating solidarity! The bears would be proud.

Breeding Reading

Thank goodness.  You know when there’s something you care about but you keep on forgetting to be enthusiastic about it because you’re so damn tired from being enthusiastic about 50 other things?  I learned, this morning, that for me that thing was reading.  Not reading like “Oh, here’s a book by my pillow, I’ll read that as a substitute tranquilizer,” but reading like “Why are my hands glued to this book?  I can’t put it down!  I love to read its pages!!”  That kind.  Fabulous Allie from Broke207 wrote this post about LibraryThing based in Portland, Maine.  Wahoo!  I read her post, clicked the link, half-heartedly signed up and then saw what the website had to offer.  All of a sudden, I remembered how much I like to read, learn about new authors, new lifestyles, cry irrationally at bad romance novels and laugh (and snort) obnoxiously at short stories while boyfriend is trying to cook dinner, play video games, write a song, etc.

In addition to offering conversation forums on any and everything book-y, LibraryThing lists local events and has a library feature where you can list ‘your books’ which at this point I’m just starting with January and tracking my bookwormy progress through the apple of literary selections throughout the year.  Some genius obsessive compulsive candidates on there have fantastic numerical goals for this year:  ”75 books in 2011!”  ”13 books this month!”  ”I’m going to read 5 books today!”  You… inspiring… asses.  Let’s just say I’m going to read a MILLIONTY books this year and if I don’t make it then at least I will have read very close to a millionty books.  LibraryThing (in addition to all its other offerings) will be the visual progress to this end.  Let’s bring it full circle and say I’ll even try to write a little about them here on my L.E.D. blog so that you all know I don’t just hide in my attic like Bart’s Twin Brother hunched over a workbench and bottle caps all the time.

Outside Lies Magic, by John Stilgoe.

Wow.  I’ve literally been reading this book for 5 years.  And it’s not even that long, page-wise.  Here’s the scoop:  John Stilgoe is a Harvard professor who teaches ‘wandering.’  Which is a pretty ding dong damn hard subject for a bunch of 18-year-old over-achieving pencil pushers to wrap their steel-trap minds around.  (Settle down, I love Harvard AND her crazy students who don’t know how to look both ways in while jaywalking). Hard for them mostly because it involves unlocking the door on the steel trap.  Stilgoe explores the methods of observation while wandering and elaborates on histories as they relate to infrastructure: railroads, the interstate, fences, power lines ad infinitum.  Or so it seems – this book is seriously less than 150 pages but every time I finish a few pages I have to think for a long time about the implications of its content.  I’ve fully digested most of this and am about 10 pages away from finishing (and probably starting again).

How did I come to know about this book?  My sophomore or junior year in college our teacher assigned it as required reading for the class as the subject matter really speaks true to photographers and artists, if no one else.  I spent the entire four years of secondary education as a Wandering Major.  I remember a keen sense of time/space as I walked Huntington Avenue my first weeks in Boston – to look up and catch a woman shaking a white blouse out of her window (wrinkled?  freshening up?) against a dark gray rain-wet roof and pale gray sky.  Trains intersecting as a stranger in a red coat walks towards me.  Photographer on a walk without a camera:  sad.  This is what Stilgoe starts to get at but he approaches it in a much more Harvard-y history way.  Can’t blame the guy for playing to his audience!

Slow Eddie, by Bruce Jones

You may have seen me drooling uncontrollably about this book before.  Thank you, Kate Sullivan-Jones‘ Dad, for writing a book that combines all the things I love about serious, thoughtful novels that contemplate overarching lifelong concepts AND soap operas a la Twin Peaks.  The book starts off by piquing the intellectual’s interests in very compelling ways (suicide, lust, longing) and finishes with some serious “Oh yes!  I love romance and cute things!” without going Danielle Steele on me.  It turns out, Kate says, that his Dad is secretly a teenage girl.  Awright!  Once when I went over to my father’s house and saw the really fantastic mess he’d created he said he was regressing to age 9 for awhile (awright!) but nothing as juicy as regressing to a 17 year old girl.  That is unique, and that person should be a writer.

In addition to being well-written and introducing characters that you become really invested in, Slow Eddie takes place on the Cape and in my book that’s local, so I love it.

~~~

That’s it for now.  Kate lent me The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson.  It’s a murder mystery that takes place in Sweden and that’s really all you need to know for now.  I’m excited because this book is huge, or huge-ish so it will make me look smart when I read it in public places, which I plan to, because that is what being a Booky McGee is all about.