shiny emerald wisps of inspiration

sometimes, though not so much lately, I feel like I am fighting inspiration off with a stick--making great efforts to do one thing at a time and actually finish a project before yet another wouldn't-it-be-nice-if-I-also... comes along to take me in some new direction.

inspiration, for me at least, isn't always the most useful thing. it can be distracting. or infuriating, the way it tantalizes me. I tend to be plagued with flighty, wispy kinds of inspiration. the kinds that hover just out of reach, just beyond practical-possible priority.

an hour or so ago I read this piece about teaching abroad. about the prospect of "relocating to a continent renowned for civil unrest, poverty, and disease-- but also for untarnished landscapes, wildlife, many cultures, and a complex history." high daydream potential, this sort of thing.

and yes, some of the descriptions in this piece are on the sweeping, sensationalish side. but you can at least see what I mean about the distance stretched out between me and such prospects. this inspiring stuff always seems to float just six inches or so higher than my hands seem to reach-- things to daydream about but not things I could actually do-- not yet anyway. and perhaps that's the way daydreaming is supposed to work. before you can reach a thing with your hands, you can settle for reaching it with your brain. imagining it. a first step, of sorts.

on Monday I attended a very nice talk by a former professor of mine: Dr. Cheryl Ball. she taught my professional writing capstone course ten whole years ago. since that far-away semester, she has worked at three other institutions and done many more boundary-pushing academic things. she taught and researched in Norway on a Fulbright scholarship. she is developing this fancy-looking revolutionary publishing system.

sometimes inspiration starts out as envy.

or maybe they are secretly long-lost twins, envy and inspiration. yeah.

anyway. the talk on Monday was about digital humanities + digital publishing and the paths Dr. Ball has wandered in getting to where she is now. now she is scholaring in an emerging field she calls publishing studies, a place full of multimodal and digital work, editing, technology, infrastructure, and lots of other finicky processes that have to do with making things public.

she began the talk with childhood tales featuring inspirational words like vision and initiative. and she ended with this slide, of which I took a crooked and slightly fuzzy photograph:

there are, I saw on facebook earlier, several much better photos of Dr. Ball's visit to Indiana in an album here.

her concluding list of lessons learned isn't earth-shatteringly inspirational in general, but in this specific sub-section of academia it counts. for me, swimming in semi-aimless circles in the middle of my PhD, it very much counts. so I have typed these points out again for ease-of-reading and for the thought-provoking reminders they might be to my current and future overly-inspired but somewhat lost, less-motivated self.

publishing studies has taught me [Dr. Cheryl Ball]...
- editing praxis for media-based texts
- the arbitrariness of style guides
- the ethics of access/ibility and preservation
- the importance of building communities and infrastructure
- the importance of global communication practices
- the necessity of teaching writing in use-contexts
- the necessity of teaching multimodal communication
- that vocational training isn't a dirty word for liberal arts.

there were examples and stories referenced at each of these points, but stories and examples are not as easy to transcribe into a neat list. I will have to trust my memory to weave the stories from her life into and alongside stories from my own.

the paths I'm wandering aren't the same. ten whole years is a long time and lots of things are different in the world. the wouldn't-it-be-nice-ifs that I follow around (or don't) will be unique to my brain and my habits.

at the moment, one of the wouldn't-it-be-nice-ifs that I have wrapped my fingers around is reading audiobook snippets for LibriVox. I have an official page in their catalogue as a reader, even. I've only just started. the project is wide and ambitious. it's not the exact same kind of digital publishing Dr. Ball presented, but it is a digital publishing project nonetheless, and a fascinating one. we'll see what it teaches me.

thirteen: unlucky

not even the heady scent of fresh-mown grass or the sweep of springtime clouds and breezes--not even a strawberry ice cream cone--none of it, nothing--has succeeded in lifting me up out of this well (deep, deepening, deeper than yesterday) of what if why not when where how not why which who why why not but why. I am choking on feelings. smothering.


there are no stories in this. no sense. the universe is sinking me.

i am that girl. or i could be, anyway.

someday, when I grow up, I think it would be really awesome to perhaps run my own design, advertising and interactive studio in Chicago, as an ongoing experiment in web publishing, design and commerce.

okay. it needn't be in Chicago. in fact if I set up such a studio in Chicago, I would be in direct competition with the original ongoing experiment that is Coudal Partners. which would not be very cool of me at all. and yes, okay, I may as well admit right now that I copied the last half of my first sentence from their tiny 'about this site' blurb at the top of coudal.com. and maybe that wasn't very cool of me either, but I don't think they'll mind.

Coudal Partners is one of those websites I can never remember discovering. it's just always been there, feeding me random interesting links and thoughts and ideas. they make notebooks. they host layer tennis. they put together really random (some not so random) videos from time to time. basically, they do whatever they feel like, and if it doesn't work out, they try something else.

I guess that is what everyone does, in some way or another. keep trying things until they click.

Jim Coudal, the guy in charge of this studio in Chicago, said something very cool in this SXSW presentation. I always want to remember it. he said:

"--hire the girl that can write. Because being able to write is a sign of an organized mind, and writing is a tool that is not usually learned well late."

I'm not going to start claiming that my mind is what anyone else might call organized... but I will say that I can write. and that is important. I should probably find some meaningful things to do with that skill, one of these days.

once upon a time I heard an interview Mr. Coudal did here, with some guy named Dan Benjamin. it should be really inspiring to listen to the unconventional ways some individuals get away with making a living, but usually it just makes me a little jealous. so many things do that. seeing people who manage to do awesomely creative stuff every day is something that should ignite a lot of scintillating hope, but so often the sparks just sit there, pointlessly smoldering. I have no one to blame for that but myself, I guess.

consumed

"And you read one page of it or even one phrase of it, and then you gobble up all the rest and go about in a dream for weeks afterwards, for months afterwards--perhaps all your life, who knows?--surrounded by those six hundred and fifty pages..."
- Jean Rhys. 'Till September Petronella.'

it's a collection of short stories with no more interesting a title than Collected Short Stories. and that little snippet from it describes quite a lot of the voracious, disconnected-from-real-life mood I feel like I've been in lately. what a strange human trick this is, pulling out of other people's words all these great but simple connections to the things we happen to be going through now. Jean Rhys lived a life nothing like my life. she lived in the Caribbean, and Paris, and saw all kinds of desperate moments. my life is not like that, my world not like the world of her stories. but still, we find ways to relate.

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things is not a collection of short stories. not exactly. you might call it a tapestry of short stories. its stories are not short or separate, but they are almost, somehow, distinct enough. sharp and focused and bright, pinned only at the edges to the larger plot of the book, so they feel like they could stand on their own.

but they don't. that's okay.

of course nothing stands on its own. I project my own colors to these narratives. my own soggy memories and half-formed aspirations get plugged into the spaces between those beautiful paragraphs.

but still. it's a lot of take. not much give. it isn't fair, is it? all these hours I put into eating up the creative efforts of all these other people. all these nights I spend wishing I were as prolific, as dedicated. as lucky. but I've started telling myself to quit being jealous and be inspired instead. one of these days it'll really sink in.

"...time passes whether you’re doing something with it or not."
- Felicia Day. 'How I Started Writing.'

the ebb and flow of envy

there was a girl, on a horse, who had ridden through seven provinces--from Nova Scotia to Alberta--across the country. I expect she planned to make it eight and end up in Vancouver tossing pennies into the pacific.

the glimpse I caught of her from my bicycle, as the sunset glared across the prairie, manages to stay vivid and blurry at the same time. I remember the bulk of her horse, her tall boots against the saddle and tack. some green in her riding outfit, the curve of her helmet and thin dark hair that seemed to be in loose braids. the whole look of her and the fact of her transience was beautiful.

who was she? why was she doing this? I don't know a thing about her besides what I learned in that glimpse last summer. today I am jealous.

jealousy is a little vice of mine. it comes in at the oddest moments and starts badgering me into feeling sorry for myself, tempting me with so many imagined other-ways-things-might-be. but today I am framing a picture of this nameless girl on her horse, setting it here on this shelf, and trying to be glad that she paused there in the sunset, for me to glimpse.