Back in January, while I was waiting in line at the crack of dawn in Park City to see a movie that pretty much messed me up for life, I received a call from my mom. We chatted, she asked the "how's-it-going"s, and I answered my "it's-going-fine"s punctuated by massive yawns and teeth chatters. She had been following my posts on the Sundance blog, and after she got through telling me how exciting it all sounded and how jealous she was, she offered a bit of constructive criticism: "Break up your sentences more. With periods."

She probably doesn't want me sharing with the world the fact that she once offered me long-distance writing advice, but her advice was wise and welcome, and worth sharing. It's also a little bit of what I've been doing here the past few weeks: breaking up the sentences with some much needed periods of silence.

It hasn't been entirely self-imposed: I recently signed up to work on a translation of a book I love, and since I've been devoting the time I used to spend writing things here to actually working on the translation, this page is quickly becoming one big pile-up of zen. Which, in its own way, is a nice little period to break up the sentences.

If you're disquieted by this silence, I come today offering you some noise. Some beautiful noise, courtesy of my brother. He and his band Apollo Run are about to embark on releasing a trio of EPs and touring the country to promote them, and need to enlist the help of fans to make that happen. They've signed up with Pledge Music and are offering all sorts of incentives for folks who are willing to become patrons. Also, 10% of their proceeds will go to charity. Watch the video of my wonderful brother and his amazing nineties hair (everything is nineties!) and think about helping him out. If your name is something interesting and/or unpronouncable, please consider choosing the option of having it written into one of their songs. I love giving my brother a challenge. (I've also promised to stop teasing him so much once he reaches 30. That's fair, right? Though I don't think being the big sister has ever had an age limit.)

And finally on the topic of music, I've been doing a lot of shorter writing about it on Tumblr. If you're starved for words, there are some on offer there, along with cryptic pictoral reviews of Greenberg and whatever other random thoughts and images come tumbling (ha!) forth from my giddy mind. A sampling:

• Age Difference
  I’m jealous he got to be there at the beginning of everything I ended up loving. Especially The La’s.
• Aaron's Mix Tape
  A few weekends ago I came across one of the mixes he made and sent me while I was living there, with its pasted-together cover and high school boy chicken scratch track listing.
• The National - Bloodbuzz Ohio
  How could I ever love this place - where I so often feel like *I’m* being thrown into the fireplace - more than I love Ohio? What was it I came here to find?

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.

I've started to mistranslate my own language.

When we read things, we often come to the table with our own notes, our own set of sources and references, glossing the text with what we already know about the author, the subject, the language. Sometimes we see things that aren't even there in the first place, but instead strongarmed into the meaning of the text through our own ridiculous ultra-modern lens. Today, I'm reading the letters of Dawn Powell on my lunch break, and this is how it appears in my mind (DP's original text in italics):

Now I'm in a gaga* state of British** and Boston*** refinement so don't let me hear you use any foul language or I'll be all a-twitter.****
* Lady.
** What was Nick Clegg thinking?
*** Must call aunt to plan visit north.
**** @DawnPowell: if only you knew what this would come to mean.

She goes on to talk about a dream she had about "a donkey who played the piano marvelously" and I can't even begin to tell you how my mind interprets that sentence. Explaining the particular way in which that piano, to my mind, is slightly out of tune and the reasons why that donkey has a slightly wonky ear would require layers of text I'm incapable of producing in a time as short as a lunch break.

A little further down in the same letter—written from Bermuda in the spring of 1930 to her confidant Coburn Gilman—she comes to the following conclusion about writing:

Life is so confusing. I've really decided down here that I cannot bear the terrible business of writing things that mean so much to me any more, that the only solution to anything is to write things that take up only your time and an ounce of brain—say short stories*—so that it means very little if they fall short...

* Or blog posts.

Or blog posts, Dawn. Or tumbling. Or a-twittering. They sometimes fall short too. (Ahem.)

Sometimes I wonder if we do this here thing because the risk is so low. Submitting a piece of writing for the scrutiny of others is fine when you yourself control the means of publication, and you don't have anyone else saying yes, or, worse: no. The low-risk investment of the internet. Pouring only tiny bits of our hearts out at a time. But still, in the end, realizing how much of it has actually been poured.

Gosh and golly, guys. Leave it to me to get sucked in by an awful rainy day, a troubled writer, and start spouting nonsense on the internet about the endless drama and complexity that makes up this need to write. And why we do it. And who we do it for. How much can one gal write about writing? Blog about blogging. Glub about glubbing. That sounds more like what I'm doing these days: glubbing. Glossing my own blog posts with meaning beyond meaning beyond meaning, totally missing the point I was trying to make in the first place.

I, Glubber, originally started writing this post to point out how interesting it was to me that I couldn't read that first sentence without thinking of Lady Gaga and Twitter.

What insanely winding garden path led us here?

Is this clear—oh, Cliff? I don't think so.
Do you want me to bring you an octopus, darling? There are several on hand.

Do bring me an octopus, Dawn. It would make for something more interesting to write about.

Stupid rain.

(A special thanks to commenter "latenac" for bringing Dawn Powell to my attention, Elizabeth Gumport for making her more intriguing, and Louis Bromfield for coming into the picture somehow. I'm on a devouring spree!)

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.

What makes you think you're the one
Who can laugh without crying?
What makes you think you're the one
Who can live without dying?

– Fleetwood Mac

I've been going through a phase recently of listening to an obnoxious amount of music from the seventies. Not my usual Big Star or T Rex, but the stuff I never even really liked when I was a teenager, the stuff we ignored on the radio in the drive thru beer place, the stuff that our science teachers performed in the talent show when they were trying to relive their youth and we just thought they were being lame*. (My ever-growing Todd Rundgren record collection — now up to 9? — can be blamed, maybe the endless number of Carole King albums we inherited with the record player as well.) This, much to my surprise, and much to the dismay of my husband, has included a great deal of Fleetwood Mac.

I'm working my way through their back catalog, and today I'm up to Tusk. When "What Makes You Think You're The One" came on, my ears pricked up. This particular song is nowhere in the running to be a favorite (my, Mick Fleetwood, why so angry at Lindsey Buckingham?), but as I was listening, those lyrics hit me. A slap on the arm — listen up.

I'm guilty of those things. In so many ways. I deign to think I'm invincible. That I'm somehow immune to physics or depression or death.

But I'm not immune to any of it.

I know this is a breakup song. (I also know, thanks to my recent seventies research**, that pretty much every song Fleetwood Mac ever wrote was a breakup song.) But give me the benefit of a little free interpretation, because at this moment, to me, it means something entirely different.

And then the lyrics, in their strange repetitive Lindsey Buckingham way that I'm still trying to deconstruct, came to their point:

Everything you do has been done
And this won't last forever

Wow. Guys, Lindsey Buckingham is right.

These things we do, as innovative as we may think we're being, have all been done by someone else, whether we know it now or ten years from now. Even this realization has been had before, by someone else going through their own whatever, wherever, whenever. As hard as it can be to come to terms with it, I think we need to remember that everything is temporary, and not always as important as we sometimes make it out to be.

And most imporantly: the world does not revolve around us. ANY of us. Me me me included.

I've been thinking a lot (again) about the overcrowding of the internet, how so much of what's out there is just copy-and-paste, the same emotions thrown out by similar-minded people, with similar backgrounds, elbowing each other, all aching to be heard. And how I'm no better than the rest of them. While I'm the first to praise the internet for letting voices be heard, and acknowledging that there are many voices I'm so glad I've heard, I'm wondering if I'm becoming too reliant on needing to be heard, on making a sound when I fall in the woods. J has been good about reminding me before: sometimes it's okay to just live without documenting.

(I don't know why it took a lyric by Lindsey Buckingham to drive home what my husband has been telling me for years, but there you go.)

I'm not about to put duct-tape over my mouth, tear down this site and spend solitary, silent weeks at a monastery, but I am about to start thinking more carefully about what is necessary to put out there, reevaluating (again) what I'm adding to the conversation.*** Just slow it down a little bit. Because this won't last forever. This was a much-needed (curly-haired, bell-bottomed, gravelly-voiced) wake-up call.

And now I'm off to listen to "Gypsy" for the Way-Too-Many-nth time.

*And then years later we would have a beer with them and realize we were the ones being lame.

**Something else I've noticed is that the first comment on every YouTube video from the seventies is inevitably about how the music back then had so much more substance than what is out there today, how everyone today is talentless, how things were so much better then.

***Blogging about not blogging as much? Check.

© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.

[Isaac Babel's] diary isn't about war, but about a writer during a war—about a writer voraciously experiencing war as a source of material. Viktor Shklovsky, who invented the theory that literary subject material is always secondary to literary form, was a great admirer of Babel. "He wasn't alienated from life," Shklovsky wrote. "But it always seemed to me that Babel, when he went to bed every night, appended his signature to the day he had just lived, as if it were a story." Babel wasn't alienated from life—to the contrary, he sought it out—but he was incapable of living it otherwise than as the material for literature.

 - from Elif Batuman's The Possessed

(If you haven't already, you should listen to George Saunders read and discuss Babel's story "You Must Know Everything" at The New Yorker.)

It's a strange thing to go hunting for inspiration on the days when you feel like you should write, but the everyday objects that surround you wither when you stare at them, begging them to be interesting for the moment so that you might be able to squeeze a sentence or two out onto the page.

I've never been deep sea diving among shipwrecks, but for all I can imagine it to be, I imagine that hunting for inspiration must be a little bit the same. Starting sentences feels like what it feels like to pull on a wetsuit, the scrrrmp scrrrrmp sound it makes as you squeak it over your knees, like that initial awkward and unattractive struggle of making vague ideas fit into verbs and nouns and adjectives. Committing to a passage is the moment you jump into the cold water. Then you dive deep to find meaning, pulling yourself further and further down, sometimes into complete darkness, and resurface with a grasped idea.

All too often I just come back up with a fist full of sand.

* * *

There are helicopters circling above us now, the rackety-rackety-rackety sound of them swooping and diving between the skyscrapers of midtown. Sometimes it seems like there are always helicopters above us, sirens below, like this city is in a constant and self-imposed state of emergency. I imagine various organs in protective casings flying above our heads, or policemen with binoculars following an escaped prisoner (wearing stripes and a ski mask? carrying a canvas bag emblazoned with a dollar sign?) up 59th street. Maybe these metal dragonflies above our heads are all full of tourists oohing and ahing at the rooftops and straight, darting lines of the avenues disappearing into the horizon. Or documentarians wielding cameras, clinging to a strap, leaning out of the door, maybe even in the curve of their lens capturing me sitting here at my window, typing about them.

Sometimes the omnipresent, everyday aspects of our life become so obvious you can't help but write them into words. I'm paying attention, helicopters. No need to shout. I'm writing you down.