Author: pookiebear

Decadence Tackycake

For years I’ve talked about consolidating and collating every single thing I’ve written into a central, preferably online, location. And for years, I’ve ignored the digital written mess building up though I kept buying domains and designing pages like it was going out of style. I kept producing the near daily online journal, sure, but it was everything else (the prose, the poetry, the essays, the fiction and the absurd) that needed a separate digital home. Bits and pieces kept getting shoved about into folders and sub-folders, directories and strange cataloging systems that made sense to my 23, 28, 34 year old selves but that the 39 year old self could only ask, “What the bloody fuck is this mess?”
So years of “some day” and “perhaps next weekend” were piling up. Domains bought, produced and lapsed. Finally, it was thanks to our telephone lines getting cut this past Monday morning for the fifth or sixth time1, I found myself with plenty of time (and with lack of Internet comes no procrastination) and renewed interest to work on this project. I pillaged my hard drive, went digging through all the nooks and crannies.
Here is what I found:

  • 16 books outlined & started (Though to be fair, most of them are similar in theme to the other and some are only a chapter or two in.)
  • Hundreds, literally hundreds, of finished pieces written in a variety of formats (prose, poetry, non-fiction essays, stories, etc.) that were published $deity know where
  • Dozens of pieces started, notated and never quite finished.
  • Hundreds of web journal entries dating back to 1996, with web publication “officially”beginning in July, 1998. This is in combination of what was published on The Lisa Chronicles from 1998 forward AND LiveJournal entries from 2001 and forward. For a long time there was separation between the two, but consolidation between the two started in the late 2000s.

Mind, this is just the digital forms. This is not including all the materials & research I have in paper format from when I unearthed what I unpacked and sorted my office last week.
Not everything I wrote is pure brilliance. Or even witty. Or fuck, even good for that matter. But finding those chunks of writing that are so pure, the language so on target or even just a simple line is so beautiful, I question who the author is every single time. And every single time, I genuinely am surprised to find out that said author is me.
I am overwhelmed, not only with the voracity of my output, but with the range of topics from men to sex to jobs to emotions to state of affairs to current events. I pile on reviews on books, movies and music. I drop science and knowledge on so much goddamned information, philosophize about everything. I thought the discovery of my high school journals was bad, simply because I had much more material then I originally believed, but the digital format makes the analog look paltry.
Writing is such a fucked up career move. I’m not talking about the Cassandras who pontificate about the chances of a writer making a living off of their work (slim to none), or how difficult it is to break into traditional publishing (slim to none) or even finding an agent (slim to none). I’m talking about this catch-22 mythos that if you do not publish something of brilliance before you are 30, you are worthless. But by the same token, there are dozens of critics who postulate that clearly one cannot have written a masterpiece when one is under 30 because they have nothing of substance to write about, let alone publish. (We’re a pampered generation, after all.)
25 came and went. 30 came and went. 35 came and went. I ate myself alive knowing I would never make it to 20 Under 40 or make some supposed (depending on who you ask) prestigious book list for best young writer. I would not be crowed with my supposed speakers for my generation, at least those as assigned by Time. Many of whom, if you’ve asked me on such topics, I tend to wholly disagree with or find their work highly derivative.2 Or full of crap.
It was like those years of interviewing myself in front of a full-length mirror, prepping for my big interview with Arsenio Hall that sadly never came to pass, was all for naught?
This is what I told myself (and continue to tell myself) for weeks, months and years. All the while, being bitterly, insanely jealous of writers as I watch them come from under the pack and push forward to the big times. While I beat my chest in mea culpa, waiting for my own recognition when I’ve done what? As time moves forward, as opportunities (we believe) get more scarce, as we find ourselves tired and lacking of energy because our youth has faded past us. Because tomorrow, tomorrow tomorrow is always another day but we always seem to think we can get caught up, inbox zero, take time off of work.
And we never fucking do.
I installed in myself I had completed nothing, when discovering all these years later that was such a blatant mistruth. How could I have ignored so much of what was completed?
Why did I live vicariously through others, paralyzed by jealousy when the back list actually exists?
Why did I, in so many ways, sabotage myself?
It ends now.
I have so much work to do.

1. Major construction on our road, the telephone company (regardless of various incarnation of said company throughout the years did not bury our lines at the minimum of 18″ as policy but between 3-4″. In addition, some of the lines were not properly marked.
2. Except for Gary Shteyngart whom I harbor such a major fan-girl crush on, that it is kind of (but not quite), stalkerish in its intensity.

38::39

To celebrate my turning 29 for the 11th time, we held a small party here at Throbbing Manor last Saturday in which I invited close friends and new neighbors. The turn out was good, last person was kicked out shortly before 4 AM, we ate party left overs for days and I did not, unfortunately, wake up in my own puke as I have been known to do before.
TheHusband, who is not so much socially awkward but that he hates people, wanted “TheHusband time” on Sunday, the actual day of my birth, to balance out all the socializing he did the night before. With TheHusband off doing whatever it is he does when he’s alone (namely, reading the interwebs, listen to podcasts and watching sports), I figured it was a good time to start unpacking boxes of books and journals for my office that I had not seen in years. Our living room bookcases finally arrived a few days before and in the process of unpacking and organizing those, I discovered more stuff for my office and I knew, likewise, that more items would be in the boxes marked the office that belong downstairs.
[In contrast to the recently arrived living room bookcases, my office bookcases have been here for months and I’ve not done a thing with them. Boxes in the guest room have been silently waiting for me to unpack them. The glare of the unpacked boxes is much like the glare of the pug when she thinks you’re up to no good.]
officebookcases-small For the better part of that Sunday afternoon, I spent time reading old journals dating back to my teens and 20s. Some entries were difficult because it was clear I thought of myself as being this sophisticated teenager when I was obviously so wholly naive. Other pieces were just sad in that back of hand to the forehead type of way and others were painful just for the memories they stirred. In addition, I also ended up reading some of the short stories I wrote through high school and it seemed that a lot of them ended the same way: someone dies a violent death. It’s pretty clear some things never change.
As I was reading, sorting and unboxing, I thought of these papers in several ways:

  1. As an archivist and with that in mind, how future generations are going to look at my work and attempt to figure out chronological order and such. Also how to preserve these materials in their current state AND move them digitally? Seventeen year old Lisa did not think to buy everything on acid-free paper. Seventeen year old Lisa was also hugely romantic.
  2. Collection fodder for story telling and telling of stories. I’ve long known I have had a habit of writing down bits and bobs on scraps of paper, which I’ve now collected into a folder with hopes to turn them into something solid instead of just collecting random bits of paper.

Re-reading these old tomes of mine sent me into two equal, but separate, trains of thoughts: I have accomplished much, have had experience and seen much of the world that most do not. Go team Lisa! On the flip side: Jesus Christ, I’ve pissed away a lot of opportunities, I’m soon to be officially old and there is still so much work to be done. Will I be able to get it all completed? Recently, my lovely friend John wrote an interesting spec on his own life plans and the fluidity of his life plans (from game Reindeer to game Caribou) as things in his own life have changed. This got me thinking about my own life and how I plan for the short term, not the long term. I have game ThinkAboutItTomorrow! TheHusband gets on me about this quite a bit whenever we talk about moving to Europe. He points out that if we go abroad every year, as I want to do, our chances of getting a home across the pond will either take longer or cost us more. Logic does not bode well with my own reasoning. I’m about instant gratification, I could be dead next year from a car accident and where will my savings get me then?
Since we’ve moved into Throbbing Manor, I’ve been having this minor existential crisis, of sorts, on a near weekly basis. But after reading John’s post, I began to wonder: If I spent more time living and less time wondering about this life I think I am supposed to be living, how different would my life really be?
Interesting thought.

To Be Read

Since we moved into our house six months ago, I’ve been finding books tucked into random boxes, hidden under clothes and in bits and pieces across the house as books that were given to me or purchased by me made new homes as soon as they sailed through our front door. And during these last six months, our core collection of books were in boxes in our living room, patiently waiting for a new home while their free-wheeling cousins lived wherever they found a place somewhere in Throbbing Manor. We did not bring any furniture with us when we moved across the state, but several months ago it began getting to the point where we needed to get bookcases and fast as I was tired of shifting large piles of books around the house to make room for more books!
(It also doesn’t help that I’m a huge proponent of our local library and have, on average, 10-15 items checked out that I rotate through on a weekly basis.)
I was overly exicted this week as it was a big week for us delivery wise as pillows we ordered in January (handcrafted with the tears of third-world children) and our bookcases and other bits were all finally delivered after months of waiting. I spent most of last night organizing our bookshelves and saying “Mother fucker!” quite a bit. The M-Fing is due to the fact that after a huge sort and weed before we moved to Grand Rapids (in which I donated dozens of boxes of books to friends and local library system in Royal Oak), there were boxes of more tomes in our storage locker that I only cursory went through and sorted before repacking them before the move. Much of those books, including books I have purchased since late fall, were books I have yet to read.
My TBR pile now extends across most of the top shelf (circled in orange), stands about 3′ high and there are several double stacks of books. TheHusband estimated there were close to 150+ titles there I had to plow through and at my current rate, would take me about 3 years to get through. Now, to be fair, there are a lot of duplicates (and triplicates and even a few quadlicates…) and materials that I would probably never read or even want to keep for reference, so that does help. But oy! I’ll have to curtail my library adventures and stop buying books for awhile.
TheHusband’s stack (outlined in blue) is worse not because he has more books then I do (he doesn’t), but that he hasn’t read a book in a few years. He’s also banned the buying of books for himself on the hopes he can get through his stack and move everything over to a Kindle for future purchases. This is all well and good but at his current rate, we’ll be bluetoothing everything to our brain when he’s finished.
[A click on any of the images below will take you to Flickr for the larger sized versions.]

The gaping hole in the middle (where the arrow for James Bond & Jane Austen point to) is for my complete works of Ian Flemming (which I currently cannot find) and all of my Austen titles which are in my office. Below is the second book case we purchased as a comprise as I wanted two large bookcases and TheHusband wanted one large bookcase so we got one large and one small. The goal is as the books are read and then they are moved onto the small bookcase, but if my calculations are close, we’ll be needing another large bookcase within 6 months to a year.
The poster above the bookcase is of Byron that I got at the Keats-Shelley House in Rome in 2005. We finally got it framed when we moved. The lamp is from WorldMarket and the fan is from South Korea, given to me by my friend Steve! The bottles are from our basement and were left overs from the staging of the house when it was on the market. The photo groupings are some images of me from high school and college.
Our style is Fauvist color with Mid-Century lines with tackiness thrown in.

While I’m here, I might as well show you the rest of the images of our living room which as of yesterday, is probably the most complete room in the house. We still have a long way to go in terms of furniture and decoration for other rooms in the house, but at least this one looks pretty homey with stuff on it.
The rug, grey ottoman and magazine holder are from OverStock. The leather couch (which is a deep purple), the orange pillows are handmade from ties and both items are from Design Quest. The end tables, bookcases, round stand lamp and the patterned chair are from Stone’s Throw. The frame above the fireplace has an original 1940 Art Deco inspired post of Michigan that was given to Michigan kids in the 1940s. I got it from eBay and had it framed. The sconces, chandelier and the tile work on the fireplace is original to the house.

View of the living room from the south-west corner.

View of the living room from the south-east corner.


View of the living room from the north-west corner.

View of the living room from the north-east corner.

Morris Street Project: May 21, 2011

Happy Memorial weekend, or as we American’s like to think of it: Another weekend for us to light things on fire, drink copious amounts of bad beer and strut our painfully overweight bodies in clothing three sizes too small.
TheHusband and I are getting ready to head out for own hedonistic fun, but wanted to get these images up before we left. I also took an amazing shot of a poppy this morning, that has bloomed in our front gardens while its brethren are too heavy to even keep their heads up. The poppy plants in our backyard, also the same gorgeous tangerine color, have also bloomed and the heads too are so heavy that they are laying on the ground.
I was thinking today as I wandered around our gardens taking picture that it seems that movement, blooming and the like doesn’t seem to have moved that much through the month of May. Turns out I was wrong. If you look at the shot of the front of Throbbing Manor from two weeks ago on 05/07/11, it looks positively barren compared to the shot taken on 05/21/11. The other thing you can notice is that on 05/07/11, the blossoming cherry located to the right of the image is in full bloom while two weeks later, the blossoms are gone and the tree is fully green.
Who would have thought so much has changed in a matter of two weeks? But it has and this is why I will continue to do this project, to document the things that previously would have gone unnoticed or possibly, even ignored. I love how lush our neighborhood is becoming and our backyard is looking positively like a rain forest.

Morris Street view.

Throbbing Manor view.

Le mie passioni, parte 2: Penguin Books

(Le Mie passioni,  Italian translation of “my passions,” is a an occasional series of things I really, really love.)


Penguin Books
This is not a librarian thing, an English major thing or an archivist or design thing: It’s simply just a Lisa-thing. The lust began in my youth but became personified in 2005 when Amazon.com started selling the complete Penguin Classics collection for a mere $8,000 USD (now pricing at $13,000 USD and change). Nearly 1100 titles of the greatest works of literature – ever in the history of the written word. Instant library, beautiful editions and awesome editors and translators.
Then, Penguin started outdoing themselves by presenting the classics (i.e. Jane Austen, Ian Fleming and F. Scott Fitzgerald) reworked with new cover designs by leading designers, releasing additional classics to bring the “complete library” up to 1300+ titles, introducing the deluxe classics, reworking their Great Food series, and of course, they have a fantastic backlist of contemporary titles. Squee! In addition, Penguin gets and uses social media with gusto: they are on the Facebooks, Twitters, RSS feeds galore and my favs, Penguin podcast and Penguin Classics podcast; Penguin just does so many things with such passion and thoroughness, that if it is wrong to love a publisher so hard, then, I just don’t ever want to be right.

Patron Saint of Piercings

My dear friend, Carrie-Anne over at Little Big posted today about SEO for Gangsters, which prompted me to take a look at my own keyword searches and see the haps.
Here is what I found:

To be fair, the “MLIS series porn” kind of makes sense because I recently wrote about the influx of erotica fiction in which librarians were heavily featured. But the “patron saint of piercings” is the funny one – considering I haven’t purposefully discussed body modification in ages.
Or it could possibly be a nomination of sorts? Well then, I’m flattered.

Le mie passioni, parte I: European dream

(Le Mie passioni, Italian translation of “my passions,” is a an occasional series of things I really, really love.)

I have been working on the Conversations about Mother cycle these past few weeks, only to find that I am emotionally drowning. The entries are all over the place, heavily bloated and I’m finding it difficult to make cuts and edits where there should desperately be cuts and edits.
I should have made an outline. The whole purpose of this exercise is to get rid of the pent up energy that prevails about my family, it is a “them vs me” moment, and yet this time the “them” is the words themselves. In addition, someone very important to me stepped back into my life after some time which pushed my heart beyond capacity. But that is another story for another time. Many of you may already know that I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder in 2003-4ish.1 One of the techniques for managing BPD is Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, and one of my favorite DBT tricks, as it were, is self-soothing. The idea is to create an environment, a safe haven, of things that feel, taste, smell and are visually pleasing to me. I’ve decided to step that up a notch and create a visceral list of things that soothe me. To remember, to remind, to help whenever I feel like I’m in crisis. Additionally, I decided that it may be time to infuse a little frivolity into my writing and this blog, to take the pressure off the Conversations about Mother cycle and the heavier stuff. I’m not writing because I’m mopey about the cycle and when I’m mopey about a cycle, I’d rather discover 15 new ways to reinvent the wheel then write. I also realized, after wandering around the blogosphere as of late, that sometimes the very best writing comes when we’re not taking ourselves so seriously. And if there is anything I have learned about myself in these last few years, sometimes the stick is wedged up my arse a tad too snugly.
Forthcoming is a list of things that are capturing my heart at the moment, one per blog entry to keep it on the lighter side. In no particular order, things that I’m passionate about as of late:

Castello Nel Borgo, Terni, Umbria, Italy

.EU Vacation Home
If you’ve been paying attention (and I know you have), the headers that rotate throughout my site are all images taken by me from trips across the pond. Paris, Rome, Edinburgh to name a few cities, I’ve been to eight countries in the .uk and .eu since 2004, with TheHusband and I planning on visiting more in the future. While TheHusband and I do not typically agree on a lot of things (music, books, film), we do agree on lifestyle choices. We’re both desperate to shed our American lifestyles and head across the pond, permanently. Our goal is to accelerate payments on Throbbing Manor (payoff in under 15 years), fast pass student loans (payments currently set so the final payment is to be made in 2021) and continue to save money in our villa fund. The ultimate goal, if all goes to plan, is within a decade we’ll BOTH be debt free and have a good chunk to put towards our vacation/European home.
But where to move to? My desires to live in various places is always dependent on the moment: When watching Doc Martin, I was desperate to move to Cornwall and open up a B&B. Then I’m reading P.G. Wodehouse and M.C. Beaton and I want to be in the Cotswolds, in a thatched little cottage while creating merriment and havoc around the countryside, while hilarity ensues. Again, while running a B&B or a used bookshop. Or I want to be in the Highlands, own a sheep farm while spinning my own wool. I’ve got dreams! TheHusband is much simpler, he just wants land, fruit trees, and a bubbling brook. In seriousness, we’re looking at places in Italy for our future dream/vacation home. Why? We love the culture, the food and the people. Italy is essentially the Detroit of Europe, therefore real estate is cheap. We’ve been to the south (me in Rome) and the north (TheHusband in Milan and Florence).
It’s fairly centrally located to most of mainland Europe. I have a huge art history boner for Baroque, specifically Caravaggio and want to see all of his works in person, at least once. Italian is a romance language and my sketchy French would help me tremendously to learn it, and it would be wise for me to have another language proficiently under my belt before we moved. While I could be happy just about anywhere across the pond, and so thus would the TheHusband, right now Italy calls to our soul. After we settled on Throbbing Manor, we started looking at Italian real estate. Right now, it’s Umbria. Other days, it’s Abruzzo. Who knows where the wind (or in this case, the olive oil) may take us?
1. Part of the hiccup with writing the Conversations about Mother cycle is that I need to delve into BPD and discuss it. It’s one of the most misunderstood mental illnesses and I should be bringing a voice to it – problem is, sometimes my heart breaks and I just do not feel strong enough to do it. But I have to and, I will.

Morris Street Project: May 14, 2011

Morris Street Project, Week 9
Nothing earth shattering to report in the world of our gardens this week other than everything is blooming within an inch of its life after the recent rains, including all the fucking ivy and creepers that keep coming back though I seem to spend a gazillion hours pulling, chopping and murdering anyway I can. We’ve also planted some of the vegetables and began plotting what to do with the rest of our lot as either the former owners or the flippers laid out and landscaped the plot to an inch of its life but did not do any upkeep in the interim until we bought it. This means that various ivys, nettles and creepers have taken over controlled areas and we may end up tilling most of our front and back yards back to soil and starting anew for next year. TheHusband grumbles that our city lot is much harder to tame then if we had bought the damned 22 acres in Ada with the bubbling brook simply because we could have just let everything gone wild. His consolation is that our dream of buying a ruin villa in Italy for our vacation home means that he can get his goddamned bubbling brook with olive trees aplenty. That is until we both see something of a modern condo layout in which, all plans are pulled from the table on the goddamned bubbling brook.
But I digress. In other news, the excavation company has not been working on our street all week, so what you see below has not changed since the image was taken. The talks from the crew that our street will be “finished” by the end of June seems to be a lot further away then they make it seem. I’d just like to point out that since we moved here in January, there has not been a week a port-a-potty has not been installed somewhere on our block. I’d like to think that with this being a historical neighborhood, that is not necessarily “period.”
Morris Street view.
Throbbing Manor view.
Drainage ditch across the street from our house.

Morris Street Project: May 7, 2011

Morris Street Project, Week 8
At first I was going to comment that I wish I had some torrid or interesting tale to tell to accompany this entry when I realised that I already forgotten about Conversations With My Mother (part i), which events occurred over the weekend. Forgotten is probably not a good word, “choosing to ignore” is probably better.
Mother’s Day weekend was almost too beastly hot in addition to the blinding sun which meant TheHusband and I spent most of the weekend in the gardens. I shot loads of images from around the gardens, which are far more interesting then the same street view and Throbbing Manor view I’ve been shooting almost religiously with my iPad2, but I still need to process them and I’m feeling lazy.
The images taken below have a washed out look to them, which I attribute to too much sunlight and I was not able to really color correct. I kind of dig the washed out look, so I’m okay with that. This weekend is such a contrast to last (blindingly sunny and hot, droopy with rain and cold) that the images taken from today (May 14) are looking much more lush.
I have been uploading all the images to a Flickr set and the transformation of our street is much more remarkable when you run it through a slideshow rather than the weekly installments I’ve been dishing out.
Street view.
Throbbing Manor view.
Ciao,x0x0x

To Read: Discworld Project

When TheEx and I split in the spring of 2008, I moved in with the family for a few months until I could save up a bit more cash before I moved to Detroit to finish my MLIS. This arrangement meant all my worldly goods were stored in their basement instead of having to hire a storage locker in the city, with the idea that I would be saving money in the long run for the move.
The winter of 2008-09 was particularly bad. When packing up my things to move to Detroit in January 2009, we discovered that out of close to 50 odd boxes of books (and some household items) that were stored in the basement, roughly 15-20 boxes were destroyed by water damage and flooding from all the goddamned snow. You see, one thing neither my ‘rents nor I figured into this storage plan was while their basement was not a Michigan basement, it suffered from severe leak problems which they never knew about since the winters were not as ferocious the first few years they owned the home.
With that being said, neither their insurance nor mine would cover the loss as the flooding of the basement was not due to burst water mains, hot water heater, or an act of god. The flooding was due to poor sealing of the basement foundation coupled with the house built at the end of a low hill. I.e.: Sorry, but you’re out of fucking luck.
I lost thousands of dollars in books and irreplaceable paper items such as letters, photos and journals.
It makes people cringe when I talk about the loss and my own heart aches when I think about it. Thankfully, with the help of my mother, I was able to catalog the damaged books and paper goods and have a decent idea of what books I’m now missing. Many, if not most, I will not replace as they are either out of print, given and inscribed as gifts or I no longer have any interest in the subject matter.
The exception to this rule is that I lost a good chunk of my Terry Pratchett collection, which I started collecting in the late ’90s and early ’00s. I was introduced to Pratchett by numerous people and became a huge fan (though to be fair, I started in the middle of the series at the time and didn’t care for it, so it took a bit more convincing to get me to start the continue on reading). Like the pedantic that I am, I eventually started at the beginning of the series, The Color of Magic, and pushed on. At some point, I caught up with the series and switched from buying paperbacks to hardcover (hc) books. Pratchett is one of the few authors that as soon as a book is announced for pre-order, I’m on that like white on rice.
A number of friends of mine who live across the pond, upon hearing about my Pratchett loss, asked me to compile a list of the destroyed books to help with replacement. While I did start purchasing Pratchett’s books in hardcover instead of paperback sometime in the mid-00s (when I caught up with the series), I’m not picky in which form I find the book (though I would prefer getting the British cover over the American one). Ultimately, I just want to get my collection close to completion again.
I compiled a list of Discworld books I DO have over at LibraryThing, which also includes materials about Pratchett and not necessairly by him. If anyone is able to help me out, that would be fantastic. I know a lot of Pratchett fans tend to have multiple copies of his work (differing covers, editions, etc) and if anyone has any extras they would like to donate to complete my Pratchett library collection again, that would be fantastic. Comment here or email me if we can work something out.
Destroyed:
The Color of Magic
The Light Fantastic
Mort
Sorcery
Wyrd Sisters
Guards! Guards!
Eric
Moving Pictures
Reaper Man
The Fifth Elephant
The Last Hero
The Wee Free Men
Hat Full of Sky (hc)
Thud! (hc)
Wintersmith (hc)
Missing:
(Books I’ve been unable to obtain in the .us or were unable to find easily)
Only You Can Save Mankind
Johnny and the Dead
Johnny and the Bomb
The Bromeliad Trilogy: TRUCKERS
The Bromeliad Trilogy: DIGGERS
The Bromeliad Trilogy: WINGS
Where’s My Cow?
The Discworld Graphic Novel

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