leftovers

I found this loitering in a notebook. It claims to be from December of 2008.

"A thing is still a thing no matter what you place in front of it."
"Why are people always so happy when they collide with someone from the same place?"

I like to imagine that if I could remember what I was making notes about, it would be clever or, at the very least, deeply felt. I'm almost certain it was not. I use notebooks indiscriminately and unfaithfully, dating entries at whim, littering them with post-it notes, newspaper clippings, and the tattered dregs of fashion magazines ("What Surrounds a Legend?" asks a fragment of the New York Times. "A 3,000-Pound Gilt Frame."). I mostly don't use them, except to write in, drafting stories and essays and interviews straight from beginning to end. I am not a habitual note taker, except in an academic setting (in which case my notes are minute and color-coded), and I rarely refer to the ones I commit to paper once I've finished writing them down. 

From the notebook next to my bed: "DO YOU WANT TO LIVE FOREVER?"

The thought of composing from notes seems romantic. There must be satisfaction in building something from the accretion of thoughts had over a certain period of time. An assurance that what you're working on is strung along a consistent theme, something tested and engraved on your brain by the repetition of picking it up and putting it down again. 

On a piece of Hello Kitty notepaper the exact shape of a dollar bill: "Cameroon, Africa. In 1986, the great lake Nyos (a name that means "good" in Mmen and "to crush" in Itangikom) turned red. The hue was a precursor to an explosion and a fountain of water 262 feet tall caused by pent-up gases deep beneath the surface of the lake. Limnologists (scientists who study lakes) have explained that the equatorial location of Cameroon, with its constant temperatures, enabled the layers of water to remain undisturbed by natural shifting caused by changing water temperatures in places of greater climate variation."

I enjoy making notes. I persist in keeping a piece of paper and a pen tucked into the pocket of my purse that contains inviolable necessities. Lip balm. Cash. Paper. Pen. I like the act of transferring some thought into words, or the comfort of copying down an interesting item in the belief that I will then never lose it to my own forgetfulness. I have notebooks that are composition workhorses and I have notebooks (a very few) that are only repositories. It's a pleasure to pick up those latter ones after abandoning them for months or years to read cryptic fragments, their meaning usually forgotten, or shuffle through bits of paper, whose selection for preservation is usually baffling. But, for the most part, they feel like leftovers, and while the details that piqued my interest may still be discernible, their allure was consumed in the moment of meeting.

A clipping from Smithsonian Magazine: "Another phenomenon of the ballet world that fascinated him was the presence of a number of men in top hats and fur-collared overcoats who were permitted to pay court to the dancers in the foyer de la danse (a kind of greenroom), as long as they took out a subscription for three seats a week."

I've never really been the kind of writer who can reanimate her notes and make them run together in a wholly satisfying collage. I have to worry at something in my head and, if I write it down in notes, it's like the entire thing has already been written, and where's the charm in doing it again? Maybe I'm just out of practice. Maybe I'm just shockingly lazy and the single fell swoop (even if this swoop is achieved in slow motion) is the only way I can fool myself into getting something done--beginning, middle, end.

An inexplicable description of a clown act that I never saw: "He had a long white lance, which he dropped. He had a sleek silver sword with which he skewered little flower wreaths and juggled them until they were sliced all to pieces. His armor, which was made of paper, fell away and all he wore were flannel pajamas."

bodies

Many of my friends have extraordinary bodies.

As a dancer, many of my friends are elegantly muscled and finely detailed. Slim. Taut. Prominent are their ledges of bone, their planes of muscle, their particular and striated curves. They are rarely heavy and never what a sensible person might call fat. They are, without exception, beautiful.

Nalo Hopkinson is a writer. She is a hefty, sturdy woman with wild hair. When I met her, she was teaching my class at Clarion. She was standing in front of a classroom, or sitting at a desk, or walking sedately across a university campus, but it was still so obvious that she possessed an impressive physical spaciousness and an unusual combination of ebullience and gravitas that should drive any dancer to envy. Her body has the gift of bending space toward it when she moves, of being so interesting that she becomes a ravishing pool of motion that eyes continuously slide back to.

Some months ago, I read Nalo's blog post about a dance piece she performed in 1998. She writes about the experience of performing from a body that does not fall in the typical aesthetic range of Western theatrical dance and posts an article from the Toronto Star.

And, for some reason, it just smacked me between the eyes. The physical allocation of beauty plucks at us every day (of course it does). We try so hard to be beautiful, and we try so hard to know what is beautiful so that we can have it. And the funny thing is that, in the middle of trying so hard and wanting so much, we so often forget the substance of the thing that we're looking for.

Two things:

The only time I've seen the Mark Morris Dance Company perform live, Mark Morris himself danced a solo. His curly hair hung past his shoulders. He wore a bright red dress and sensible heels. He was rounded, puffy in the chest. When he moved, he was one of the most beautiful people that my 14-year-old self had ever seen. Glorious. Lovable. He was light, swift, sad. He rode the music and chased it down and was actually funny.

My first thought, upon seeing Jacques Poulin-Denis, was that he was very beautiful. He had a delicate bluntness to his dancing, an efficiency that struck me as truthfulness or daring. He was wearing a t-shirt that was faded and sweated through and long pants that crumpled over the tops of his feet, and it took me a while to observe that his right foot was a smooth beige that didn't bend or attempt to match the other side. And then he took it off. He took off his foot and proceeded to be one of the only dancers who has ever made me actually cry because his dancing was exactly what I needed to see.

monsters

It has just occurred to me that, in the story that I am writing, the character whose head I am sitting in is going to do a terrible thing. I am not writing it now; I am only sitting in my bed, my fingers stained with the scent of a fashion magazine, and thinking about it. It looms ahead, but doesn't move closer. It's like watching someone walk into a darkened room while they're in a horror movie, except that you can't tell them to stop, not even in the hopeless and futile way you might shriek about the Man With the Knife!, because the monster that is hidden just ahead in the dark is the character themselves.

Alice is in a natural history museum. She is going to do a terrible thing.

modern dance, apparently

show!

I am performing in a show in about 19 hours. Our piece is called mid-c. It's choreographed by Christian Burns and we start out with ten minutes of improvisation, so every time we do it, it's something new. Bobbi, who is magnificent, is performing arrow, a piece that she choreographed. She's a member of Batsheva Dance Company and an extraordinary, extraordinary dancer.

You can buy tickets here until 8 AM. After that, they'll be at the box office.

8 PM, Z Space, 450 Florida Street, San Francisco.

See you there?

the difference between getting caught and dancing

Yesterday, we spent six hours in this room. This is the Black Studio at Left Space in San Francisco. It's 3800 square feet, a cavernous cement box with white walls that curve into the floor on one side to create the illusion of a backdrop. There are fans to create the illusion of wind, and lamps that remain disconcertingly dark until the camera goes off. Then the lamps flash, at precisely the right time, and the photograph is flooded with illumination that is completely unlike the stark ambiance that otherwise fills the room. I couldn't get over this trick of technology. I hopped and twisted and flung myself about for six hours in a room that looked like the one in the photograph above. I watched my fellow dancers (the shoot was for a new batch of publicity photos for Liss Fain Dance) do the same. Over and over, a flash of light would go off, but nothing that felt any brighter or more intense than the flash of an ordinary camera.

And then we would look at the photos, beamed nearly instantly to a monitor on a rolling cart, and it was like RJ (Muna) was taking pictures of some other landscape that our eyes were just too slow or insensitive to appreciate. Those curtains, which were beautiful, but ordinary, wrinkled things of muslin or gauze, suddenly became sheets of ink, or paper sails, or strange and buff-colored sculptures, or columns of smoke. The light was golden and soft or so sharp that it sliced into every dip between muscles and bones. And then you looked back at the space and it looked exactly the way it had before, plain and mostly dim with a single strong light to mark the center. You couldn't even guess at how much time had passed since the light stayed exactly the same the entire six hours we were there.

The disorientation was extreme.

 
There is an enormous difference between moving for a photo shoot and dancing. In the former, you face a cement floor, excruciating repetition, and a merciless eye that captures rather than translates. In the latter, you need to deliver more goods, but you have an audience to talk to, a human brain that takes suggestions and applies connotations. In a photo shoot, you have to evoke movement, trying over and over to do something that can have a minute and static piece extracted from it that will remain beautiful or interesting without the before or the after. It was a weird thing to be reminded of, and it made me admire, more than ever, the work of the very great photographers who manage to invoke entire, open-ended worlds with a single shot.

in which I sharpen a pencil

Recently, I started writing a column for Fantasy Matters, a website devoted to the idea that fantasy literature matters. For the longest time, I couldn't decide what to write about. I like fantasy in stories, but I couldn't imagine what I might have to say about it on a regular basis. Fortunately, I have friends who are smarter than I am. Two of them suggested that I write about the magical things you don't expect to see. You're already obsessed with the peculiar and the specific, they said, so why don't you just write about that?

This month, I wrote about the pleasures of slow motion. I urged readers (who are they? do I know them? are they few? are they many? who knows...) to video themselves doing something ordinary. Then, I asked them to slow the video down. As far as I can tell, no readers have decided to embark on this project. Granted, neither did I, until this afternoon.