Heavy Text Flow Day

I’m certainly doing better than I was yesterday. I ran into a bunch of people I knew, all together, and I really wanted to go out with them, but I was feeling so ill I warned them away, telling them I was sick sick sick and that they’d best stay clear. (Jerome, the French artist I know and see around once in a while, shook hands with me anyway, and I sternly advised him to wash his hand.) It was awful, awful, awfulawful. I took a taxi home though it wasn’t dark yet, and simply lay down and read one of the little books I’d picked up, called A Letter to Christendom by Rana Kabbani. Interesting, though seemingly out of print; just an Arab woman living in the West, reflecting on her identity and the decisions she made in adopting it, reflecting on her various experiences as the child of an ambassador in many different countries, and so on. After all 70 pages of that I fell into a deep sleep, and woke to find ,myself very warm and comfy. So I got up, fetched my computer from the closet in which I’d locked it, and began to write. And write, and write. I took another nap, and when I woke for real, I began writing some more, and then, well…

Well, I’m on a writing high, one of those heavy flows. I wrote about 30 pages today that were good and usable, including one of the first things in this novel that made me cry while I wrote it. (Curiously enough, it’s where I’m discussing Korean old-fart music, except really it’s a springboard for talking about the history of Korea leading up to the time when, post-nuclear-exchange, post-second-korean-war, one of my characters is sitting in a bar in a reconstruction camp up north, surrounded by foreign refugees brough in for the cheap labour, listening to the music. I don’t know how to explain it, so I guess you’ll just see it when you do, and you’ll know what I was weeping and blathering about.

It looks like I have maybe 70-100 pages left to go in this book. All the major stuff is done except a couple of sections, and then there are some interstitial interviews. That, and the first section *desperately* needs a total rewrite, to be more in medias res (I tell WAY too damned much in that opening part, trying to flood my readers with this future, when the best way to do that is drop them into some inexplicable moment that encapsulates the future, instead… which, luckily, there are enough of in the opening section.) I only stopped today because my bnack and especially my backside hurt from sitting still for so long, and because I realized I would need a dinner more substantial than a peantu butter sandwich if I were to get through all the other writing I have ahead of me for today. When the cleaning lady, Sala, showed up to tidy, wash my clothes, and wash the one dish I’d left in the sink, I wrapped up what I was doing and decided to get out of the house, which brings me here…

I’m less sniffly than yesterday, which is a good sign. I’m hoping some hot ginger and some soup will make up the difference so that when I get home I’ll be in fine health and ready to run off another 20 pages. I intend to take advantage of this state I’m in if I can at all. But, I need to get out of here and do some walking around, if my back’s to hurt any less than it now does. Besides, daylight’s a-wasting.

One last thought: living in a little house alone for a while does funny things to you. One of them is that it makes you more reflective about things. I can see how it would have affected Thoreau, and to be honest I think it could make a much finer poet out of me if I did it for a few years (and managed not to go mad…). I wonder if I shall ever have the chance to do that. Hell, even just for a month at a time would be good for my verse-production—quality, I mean, not quantity. Well, maybe quantity, too. We’ll see. I’ll have to look into it when I am a little older and ready to write real poems.

I’m grinning, if you hadn’t guessed.

Cold and Smoky and Lightless and But Quite Miserable (And Most Decidedly Not Dead, By Some Strange Stroke of Luck)

It’s been a few days since my last update. On Thursday the power cut out sometime in the afternoon, so I decided to go into town and pass the time. Usually it cuts back in during the evening, so I figured it would be okay. I ran into my Kazakh-American friend and we had some chai and dinner, and then I headed back to the house. Luckily, the power was on that night.

Friday was a different story: the power cut out in the morning, but I just stayed in and read some Don Quixote until I was too chilly (from not moving) to stay in the house any longer. Then I took off for town, figuring the power would cut back in sometime Friday evening. I got back to the house around 9pm, climbed the icy stairs—for all Friday it had snowed—and then found all the lights out in the house. Meaning: the power hadn’t cut back in. I guess when the poower cuts due to snow, it takes longer to come back on.

A lot longer. Saturday was freezing, the slush falling from the sky, and all day, no power, and very little effective heat from the sawdust burner. I was sneezy and grouchy so I stayed in bed in full clothes, wrapped in wool blankets. I read maybe ten pages of Dox Quixote, maximum, and the rest of the day I just slept slept slept. The power came on about 7pm. Whew!

So I set into writing, which meant moving. I wrote for a few hours and decided to fill and light the sawdust burner because it was getting too chilly in the house, even in front of the (slow, not very powerful) bar heater beside me. So I filled it, and lit it, and what do you know? It took three tries to get it actually going. When it started, I turned back to my writing, which due to the power-outage I’d been away from for a couple of days. I was at one of those pivotal moments where something has to be implied, without being announced outright, and so I was concentrating on what was being sad between different characters, those in the know and those who aren’t.

And then I coughed. Lucky thing, too, because I breathed in hard, and coughed again. And then my nose started to run, my eyes watered, and I turned around. Now, I don’t know what was wrong with the way I’d placed the top on the sawdust burner, since it was set down tight, but whatever it was I’d done wrong, there was smoke pouring out from two sides at the lid. I freaked out, of course… the room was filling up with smoke, and I ran outside to check the chimney pipe on the burner. It seemed to be working okay, a steady stream of smoke pouring out of it.

So, why the flood of smoke indoors? Now, for those of you with sawdust burners of your own, don’t try this at home. I put on my winter gloves and removed the lid from the thing, which resulted in a nice faceful of smoke, and some ashen cinders to go with it. I replaced the lid, to find it still leaking smoke. I slammed my hands down onto the hot lid to force it down airtight, but this didn’t work (of course). So I yanked it off again, and again, rotating it about 10 degrees each time, and on the fourth time, it finally sealed. Bloody annoying, that one, especially since the whole time I was coughing, my eyes and nose running, cinders falling onto the floor, and all the while my mind is still bent on trying to figure out what the bloody hell Drs. Baek and Shin are going to say to young Jin Hee about her thesis and about the… er, never mind, that’s a secret plot twist I’m not gonna spoil.

My nose was running all night, and all morning too, but I got a substantial bit of writing done. (And, happily, Sangpo finally got the toilet in the house here fixed for real.) I decided to cut Alonzo completely, as he’s not integral to the plot, but we’ll see if there’s room, or a need for him later on (should I need to show more of post-collapse America from a crasher perspective, or should I find some comic relief is really necessary).

This afternoon I’m wandering around picking up supplies—I think I shall try stay in tomorrow all day just writing—and trying to get the whole conference section of the novel clear in my head. Synthia and Jin Hee have to be at certain places at certain times, and they have to have enough to chatter about for Dr. Baek to stumble onto a major discovery that’s so important the plot in the last part of the book turns on her reaction to it. So of course I’m a little blocked, needing fresh air anyway, and so I’m out and about in town.

For those inclined to worry, please don’t. I’ll pay more attention to the sawdust burner next time, and anyway, it’s not as bad as the smog in Old Delhi… Heh.

And for those who haven’t yet, and want to see, I have some older pics from this trip available on my Photo Blog. I also have a schwack of newer pics, spanning Koko’s birthday, a trip to Connaught Place and environs, and my time in Dharamsala so far, but I’m trying to organize the files so that my uploading process will be easy. Maybe in the next day or two I’ll come into town with my laptop, backup my writing and upload the new pics.

Absent Friends

This week’s F5 question is Morgaine‘s.

Well, I’ve been thinking about absent friends – the people you just aren’t in contact with any more, for whatever reason. Maybe it was intentional, on either of your parts, maybe there is something unresolved between you, maybe you just lost a phone number or address and you would be in touch, if only you could! – so:

Who are the five people from your past you would most like to be able to see, speak to or simply communicate with, by whatever means? Why did you lost touch? What would you tell them if only you had the chance – without fear of major repercussions, especially if that’s why you haven’t been in touch already!

Well, mind you, I have a funny definition of out of touch. Some people I don’t have contact with for months or even a year or so, and then we contact again. And those people I don’t consider I’m out of touch with. So these are people I actually miss.

Secondarily, I am on holiday, which is a weird experience in a foreign country, alone. It means you feel out of touch with almost everyone, and you think about your life and the people and places in it in a different way. In some respects, the answer I give now is likely to be something quite unlike what I might say were I typing it in my flat in Jeonju.

But I’ll give it a go, just the same:

  1. My grandfather. He died when I was very young. I’d ask him to tell me stories about his life. I remember him vaguely from visits when I was a kid.
  2. Mike Babb. He was my best friend in high school, and into Uni; when he came out, and got this life in club-culture, we drifted apart. I never got along too well with his boyfriend, mainly just because we’re such different people; not a case of antagonism—I remember times when Wade was very nice to me—but it made things awkward sometimes. Anyway, I last saw him a about two and a half years ago… on, yes, THE September 11th. We went for sushi in Toronto. If I could talk to him now, well… I have his email on some backup disc of my old emails; he’s a popular DJ so it’s his private email that I have lost, and I’ll have to look it out. It’d just be us catching up on lost time.
  3. Someone will probably kick me for this, but I’m missing… should I say her name? Would she be embarrassed? I’ll just say, someone in Seoul. We used to talk almost every day, and she’s close to my heart, and I have called a few times from India, but she’s having a kind of hard time now and I wish I could be more supportive. So if we were in touch, I’d just listen. Well, and of course then eventually talk, and it’d be one of those long conversations. Which is why I’ve only called a few times.

  4. I miss my old friend Charlie. We’ve gotten out of touch lately, we have chatted a little but I have no idea what’s going on in his life. Partly the change my schedule in Korea, partly my being a lot busier and home less, and maybe the fact I flaked out on him a few too many times about stupid things, and we are now, well, I feel it keenly. We’re apart in a way that didn’t used to exist despite living on opposite ends of the earth.

    It’s especially sad for me because he fought so hard to help me through some ridiculously bad times. He was patient, he gave me so much, he showed me, really, what a friend can be. I think more than anyone before him, Charlie showed me that. I know I was good for him too in those times, but I feel likeI got so much from him, and now, I’m whole—as whole as anyone ever gets—and more than anything I want to thank him. I want to get him drunk on all the beers I owe him, a debt I accumulated making stupid bets with him; I want to hear his voice across a table; I want to laugh at him demonstrating for me that, yes, his sandwich press is the best invention ever. I want to cheer at a football game beside him. And I guess I want to say thanks to him, even though he doesn’t want to hear it. He knows I miss him. He maybe just doesn’t know why, or how much. Hmmm. Something to make sure he knows, once I get back to Korea.

  5. Erin Thurber. She was the girl I was crazy about in 5th grade, and the only thing I want to know is, when she broke up with Ryan Bandet and then she took Carla, Gregg, and Colin aside to tell them as a group, but didn’t include me in that group, why was that? Because I could deal with the girl I liked being someone else’s girlfriend, but I thought we were friends, and she kept me out of that group, even though we always, always cycled around town as a group of five. I didmeet her later and ask her why, once, and she said she’d wanted to tell me herself… but I never clarified whether she meant what what it seemed or, if it was for some other reason she wanted to tell me personally and alone. It’s not really the subject of longing or lingering feelings, just curiosity. One of those weird childhood mysteries… But then again maybe it’s best left that way.

By the way, we have some new F5ers: Mojave Sixty-Six, Roganda, and Spidra. Their links are strewn among the other Friday Fivers on the right. Enjoy!