After a day off

[mrissa]

The point of me taking a day off each week was not actually to help my writing. It is to help my mrissa. But it turns out that it works fairly well with the writing, too: after I finish my Monday morning "ack ack ack, will you look at that list?" mode, I settle in and do strange and cool things with the current project. That kind of writing where you put down a sentence and think, "Oh, I didn't know that," and then you put down the next without stopping, and you think, "How interesting, I guess I set that up ten chapters ago," and then you write another sentence and think, "Really? Wow." So then you just keep writing sentences, even though you intended to stop half a page ago and put the laundry in the dryer, because who knows where this is going? Well, apparently you do, but you didn't know you did.

Poor Lisved. "Something was finally going to be a metaphor!" she protests, but it isn't, it's a river-elf in winter. Easy mistake to make, for a Southerner. I am wallowing and gnawing. Gnarrr.

I also realized that one of the "obvious" rules of this world that appeared to spring fully formed from my poor splitting head is actually lifted sideways from "Uncle John's Band," which is the second time that song has done something similar to me in the last fortnight, and I'm about done now, I think, and can move on to a different song getting sneaky on me, maybe.

Also, timprov's Pandora station is giving us yet another example of why songwriters shouldn't always sing their own songs. Ai yai yai. Pick that tempo up by about half, mister! You didn't write a dirge, so don't sing one! People, remember, you do not have to listen to people talking about what their art means or how it should be interpreted, because we make all this up, and we do not always have a clue what we're talking about or why it works. We try. But sometimes we're just wrong, and if you have a choice between listening to the artist or the art, for heaven's sake, pick the art.

timprov: "Pandora is being the White Witch: it's always folk and never Tom Paxton." We are also playing "second-guess the lyricist." It's a good game, very amusing to people with a large rhyming vocabulary. Play at home!

Comments

[poeticalpanther.livejournal.com]

My feeling on art has always been that it is a two-part process, and that it is completed again and again by each new viewer. The artist can only present the art, and then cede control of interpretetation to the viewer, who then completes the act by taking it in and understanding it, perhaps being affected or changed by it even.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

Dateline 3:24 am: finally some Tom Paxton. I tried to add "The Ballad of Aslan" to play next, but Pandora doesn't seem to know that song.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

It was followed by Phil Ochs' "Draft Dodger Rag" which is quite nearly more Paxton.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I almost forgive it for not knowing "The Ballad of Aslan," then. Almost.

(I would forgive any of you for not knowing "The Ballad of Aslan," but none of you claims to be a big music providing thinger.)