getting meta with Julie and Julia

I just finished reading Julie and Julia (which made me very, very glad to no longer be in my twenties, and since I'm at the stage at which the prospect of going out to hear a great band has to be counterbalanced against whether I'm going to have to stand and deal with aching knees at the end of the evening) and am thinking about what kind of writing can emerge in different sites - I know, this is all meta since we're trying to figure out how to best host our little project.

The genius of the original blog -- which I never read, first heard about by reading the New York Times article on her, which is yet another sign that when I finally catch wind of something, it is officially OVER - is the shape and frame of it - cooking through all the recipes in Julia Child and Simone Beck's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a calendar year.

I appreciate the fact that the book seems to be something quite else -- what was speaking most clearly to me where her ruminations on marriage, filtered through her blow by blow (by blow by blow) recaps of her friends' torrid affairs, with specific experiences cooking particular recipes functioning as temporal markers. And she is quite insightful on that thrill that one gets when one realizes that folks out there - folks not related to you by blood or obligation -- might care about the words that you send into the world.

Paule Marshall is the bomb. That's all.

Paule Marshall is the bomb. Her first collection of short stories was published in 1969 and she is still publishing novels to this day. She is associated with the renaissance of black women writers that began around the time of Alice Walker's Publication of In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens in the late 1970s, but she actually preceeds Walker, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, and most of the other great black women writers that we associate with that incredible moment of renewal and rebirth. In the last thirty years, the idea of black women writing has become less of a novelty in the public imagination. And it's a shame that Marshall's role in paving the way for people like Edwidge Danticat, Zadie Smith. . .

that dang first word!

I have Charlotte Gainsbourg’s “Voyage” playing on my ancient boombox to see what I can get typed out over the course of the 3-4 minutes of this particular song. First off, maraming salamat to Stafford for the Tagalog vibe with “isang daang words”; I like the fact that I immediately mistyped it as “isang dang” which would be Taglish for “one dang word” which is what often seems like the insurmountable obstacle to getting this kind of practice off the ground.

So – what I’d like to flesh out in the context of this project are the ideas for what may be a book – I’ve been thinking about conversion narratives, which in the context of Autobiography lit and crit foundational texts (think Augustine’s Confessions, or old Puritan treatises) insofar as it was supposed to trace an individuals fall into sin and ascension into grace. In conversation with my friend Pato last year he noted that the issue of sero-conversion – when one goes from being HIV- to being HIV+ is a kind of axis of identity in his work in AIDS education, so thinking very generally about these questions – a way of thinking more generally and actively about transformation.

Okay, my stats are telling me that this was actually 203 words. Hey, that wasn’t so painful after all - T

September 10th (or when things were normal) 248 Words

Wish I'd gotten up/

When my alarm first went off/

And gotten started/

#haiku

 I really like the fact that my morning tweet can be part of this whole writing thing.  The "poem" above is a remembrance of when I would wake ridiculously early and work on my dissertation.  I would get up at 4, write for two hours and then run around Albany Bulb.  In some ways, those were the best days of my life.  Ideally I think I would be doing something like that again, though with school the kids get up earlier and I have more responsibilities for my children now.
Yesterday was a wash! I spent too much time doing nothing, though a lot of it was for this project, and a good foundation could make 2010-2011 a more productive year.  Today I would like to take care of some errands and do some prep for my two ENC classes (I want to type in the text from Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics so that I can have a diagnostic exam that covers both their class content [comic books]) and the new basic writing test the CAT-W CUNY Assessment Test in Writing: CAT-Wah.  We'll see if that gets done, and if it will put it on any of these 100-wordy things.  I am going to try to write initially in one each, today here on "isang daan words," tomorrow the Wiki, and then who knows, because I know I like googledocs as a writing medium.

Above this red river is 248 words (I just cut it and pasted it into my word version) and this proves to me that I will have to not just come here and thing, but have a journal, a "writing journal" (redundant, I know) from which I edit out 00 words to share with everyone.

Exercise, organize, clean, chauffeur to soccer, and remain civil are today's goals.

9-9-10: Cut and pasted from wiki

9-9-10 The house isn't much cleaner, there are piles of laundry all over, and lists on every one of dozens of envelopes that bring address labels and charity requests.  Now, some of the laundry might get washed, and ONE of the stores might be visited, but realistically, today is -at best- treading water. 
What I would like to do is

1. Exercise more
2. Get control of my eating
3. Write personally every day
4. Write academically every day
5. Edit previous creative writing.
6. be kinder to my family

Not necessarily in any order.

autoland

1. "Autoland," Modern/
In the same way that "World's Fairs"/
Have missed the future/
#haiku

2. Sanctimonious/
Urbanites with their subways/
Ain't American/
#haiku
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Testing from sms "I prayed for 20 years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs." Frederick Douglas (44 minutes ago)