Who goes there? Please leave comments so (An Aries Knows)!
Once again having computer/Internet issues here at Houndstooth Hall. Hopefully this will get resolved sooner rather than later. It’s getting tiresome.
Hope you’re all doing well. Here’s a photo of petals on one of our ruellia (“Mexican petunia”) plants.
Fixed this button ’cause I can’t fix the Internet.
Question 548: Facebook or Instagram (and why…)
It’s no secret I’m not a Facebook fan. After the 2016 election, I unfriended everyone except my writing partners, and the only reason I kept the account is because Tim and I share a writers’ page on there. I never close the door on editing another anthology with him, should the opportunity arise.
Please note, I didn’t unfriend everyone because of the people whose views differ from mine, including friends and family members who voted for Trump. I didn’t want to read anyone’s views on politics after that election. If I want that, I go to Twitter in very limited doses, mostly to find out what people are talking about, then I go elsewhere to get a more in-depth story.
The only thing I miss about Facebook is the posts of my nieces and nephews and grand-nieces and grand-nephews. Most of them ended up on Instagram, where I’d already had an account.
As for Instagram, even though I know it’s owned by Facebook, which I have distanced myself from even further over the last four years, it’s about people’s photos and not about their text. Some of the accounts I follow are very political, but I only follow the ones that won’t agitate me. I think I probably got an Instagram account because Aaron had one, and he introduced me to the app.
What I most enjoy are the photographic glimpses into their lives that people provide. The stuff that bores some people doesn’t bore me. I like their animals, their meals, their homes, what they see on any given day, their art, their kids, their music (both what they compose and what they listen to), the books they read, the places they travel, their lives. I like the visuals and appreciate their willingness to share. Plus I have fun with my own account on Instagram. I practically stopped using my camera when I was taking several hundred rescue animal photos a week, so the phone camera became a quick and easy way for me to record what I’m doing. The same way this blog has served as a kind of memoir since 2004, Instagram has provided a visual memoir since 2012.
I think this is my first Instagram post on April 14, 2012, Pixie and Penny on our bed at The Compound.
This is going to be meta, I guess, but what made me happy today was getting up to date on several different projects of one type or another. They included updating my Tumblr account. I’d begun putting these #100happydays posts there with that hashtag, but I was, oh, about 43 behind. All caught up now!
This is always a touchy subject with me, because Aries are known as idea people and great starters but poor finishers. I’ve been disproving that theory for a couple of decades, but it’s still a criticism that stings because it contains a stupid grain of truth.
For example, tonight I talked to Marika on the phone and told her an idea I’ve been kicking around for a novel.
“WRITE IT!” she demanded.
“Oh…I had the idea…why don’t you write it?” I suggested.
Aries are also great delegators.
Marika declined.
I think a lot about technology and how writers use it. Cell phones and the Internet, in particular, have changed the way many of my favorite authors write romance, mystery, and suspense. In young adult fiction, teens and twenty-somethings of the new millennium have very different access to one another and to information than did those of, say, the 1970s. Sometimes technology drives the story, sometimes it’s woven into it, and sometimes a writer has to account for why it’s not working so a character can’t make use of it.
Even with all our technology, all the apps available to us, all the connection and the wealth of accessible information that cell phones, computers of all shapes and sizes, and social media seem to provide us, writers and our characters still grapple with the same human concerns. The desire for love and companionship. Feelings of loneliness or isolation. Fear of failure or irrelevance. Anxiety about growing old or impaired and how that affects our physical and emotional security. Wonder about why we’re here, whether we matter, what we should be doing with our lives and our talents.
In his story “Symposium,” Andrew Holleran deftly allows writers–and by extension, anyone, as we’re all writing our own life stories–to laugh at ourselves (gently) as we navigate our way in a world that’s speeding up while many of us are slowing down (or want to slow down). Two writers, the narrator and his longtime friend Maroney, are sitting by the pool of a Fort Lauderdale guesthouse with other writers and a publisher following an event discussing the past, present, and future of gay books.
But there does come a time [Maroney says] when you really have to ask yourself why you have ended up alone.
Why have you? says our host.
I don’t know. But last night I was lying in bed, wondering, Who do I love? I mean whom.
That’s what I want you to write about, says the publisher. Even though gay men seemed to have stopped reading. Even though the mainstream publishers have given up on us, the bookstores have closed and the gay audience has gone elsewhere.
You mean movies and computers, says our host.
Yes. Before gay books, there was no place to read about yourself or your life. Then came “Will & Grace”—and all its spawn.
The publisher puts down his cocktail and says, “Will & Grace” killed gay publishing.
Everything in your country, says the British scholar, seems to end up a sitcom.
You’re right, says the publisher. How I hated “Will & Grace.” It was so L.A.—so vacuous and bitchy. It had nothing to do with our emotional lives.
But you have to appreciate the challenge they faced, says the young man from Miami. They had to satirize gay stereotypes they knew homophobes would take literally. They had to instigate a discourse within a heteronormative hegemony.
So not what you write, says the publisher to Maroney.
If you’ll forgive my ignorance, says the British scholar as he leans forward, but then I’m a historian, what is it that you do write?
Wistful longing, Maroney says.
Every writer has a tone, says the publisher. Maroney’s is regret.
But, Maroney says, regret is out.
Oh, says the scholar, and why is that?
Gay life is about different things now, he says, it’s about marriage, service in the military, adopting kids, “Will & Grace.” It’s post-gay.
And is wistful longing, says the scholar, pre-gay?
Yes.
But surely homosexuals have as much right to be wistful as anyone else, says the scholar.
Not anymore.
The wistful longing in Maroney’s books is about being homosexual, about the impossibility of love between two men, says the publisher.
Which is now considered retrograde, says Maroney.
Then why, the British scholar asks the publisher, do you want to start this company?
I want to start this company, says the publisher, because I like wistful longing and regret! Won’t you give me something, he says, turning to Maroney, a book of essays, your collected book reviews? I’d kill to have anything from you on my fall list!
But I don’t have anything, mumbles Maroney against the plastic weave of his chaise longue. I’m dried up.
I’d give you cover approval, says the publisher.
Thank you, says Maroney, but I just don’t have anything…to say, about love or anything else. I’m post-gay.
But your readers need something from you, says the publisher, your readers want to know what you’re thinking. Gay people need someone to describe this hopeless longing, this demented search for love!
Maroney lifts his head like a plant responding to sunlight.
We’re starting to receive reader reactions to the stories in Foolish Hearts: New Gay Fiction. It’s exciting to hear how the work of these writers is being praised. Tim and I aren’t surprised, though. We’re not just the stories’ editors, we were their first audience and fans. Now that the anthology is available from booksellers everywhere in trade paper and ebook format, you can join us.
Excerpt reprinted with permission from Cleis Press. All rights reserved.
This happens to me on Twitter about a lot of things. Also on blogs when the conversation turns to technology.
When these words circulated around the Internet a couple of years ago, they tickled me for several reasons. My ongoing distaste for many facets of Facebook has been documented so I won’t get into it again. But even though there’s a lot of criticism for the way we use social media to record the “banal” parts of our lives, that actually appeals to me. I like knowing about people’s daily lives and the things that are occupying them. Maybe sometimes those things seem boring or predictable, but what a nice counterpoint that is to the grim realities we get in the news. Especially when people share details of those things that make them happy–the music they listen to, books they read, friends they saw, time with their families, projects they’re working on, fun they’ve had–these things make me happy to know. When they share their challenges or worries, it provides me a chance to offer encouragement or gives me perspective about my own.
However: Would I like to read people’s minds? HECK NO. Our thoughts are still our sacred and private space, thank goodness; we need that. And speaking as an avid reader and a writer of fiction, think of the stories that wouldn’t exist if we were all mind readers. No mysteries. No romances. No suspense. Fiction depends on the secret threads of our lives to weave compelling stories.
Misread signals and misdirected messages are used to humorous effect in Mark G. Harris’s short story “The Green Sweater.” After enjoying a flirtation with a stranger at a party, protagonist Jay becomes the unwitting recipient of too much information.
Jay washed his hands and contemplated his luck. He didn’t have a conceited bone in his body. To his mind, it wasn’t the magnetism of a winning chin, but more likely a kind shove of luck that had propelled him into sublime collision with Doug tonight. No other power besides luck could have dropped Jay within kissing distance of the golden lump of that Adam’s apple above the silk purple knot of Doug’s safety-pins-studded necktie. They’d hit it off. An hour’s conversation was sufficient to make Jay want to mate socks with Doug at a Laundromat years from now. He wanted to steal bacon off of Doug’s breakfast tray. Though modest, Jay was in love with the unfolding idea of Doug and himself getting immodest. He corrected himself; he was in lust with the idea and hoped it might unfold days from now, instead of years, but he was prepared to wait it out.
Jay’s laryngeal musings at the sink might have continued to curlicue unchecked had he not discovered something.
Beside the soap dish stood a folded piece of paper, arched like the roof of a house, or a sawhorse, or a displeased eyebrow. It read, HELP ME!
He opened the note.
If you are reading this you have to help me. This boring guy who is really, really stupid has latched on to me and WILL NOT LEAVE ME ALONE. I’m at this party on my own. I don’t know anybody, so you have to come up to me and pretend you know me and RESCUE ME FROM THIS FREAK. I need a ride home, too. You can’t miss me. I’m the VERY CUTE BOY being tortured by the JERKOFF in the GREEN SWEATER.
Jay placed the note against his chest and examined the hole he’d just noticed in his sweater, near the collar. He also noted, as if seeing it for the first time, that his sweater was the jarring, unnatural color of TV- dinner peas, or golf courses in wintertime.
“So…” Jay said, not really knowing where to go with the word.
You can read the entire story in Foolish Hearts: New Gay Fiction, available now from booksellers everywhere in trade paper and ebook format.
Excerpt reprinted with permission from Cleis Press. All rights reserved.
My mind is a constant storm of should be/should do/should think/should go. Sometimes that translates into action, sometimes not.
Often I impose structure by using this blog: for example, the year I wrote a poem each day from randomly drawn words; the year I used a family photograph each day to inspire me to record memories or events or observations about my relationships and life. This past year, I opted not to attempt a daily anything here, though I missed very few days of posting something, even if only a photo. Some months I participated in Photo A Day. Throughout the year I also featured books: favorite books, books authored by people I know, books that have meant something to me, books that I found fun, interesting, or insightful.
Also over the past year, I consciously cultivated an attitude of gratitude. For a while, I made daily entries in a gratitude journal (a real journal, not an online journal), and then I realized that I’d stopped because gratitude became ingrained in all my thinking–I no longer needed to write it to remember to feel it. I think that was, too, part of healing from the losses of 2012–and by that I don’t mean there is no more grief or sadness or yearning. Just that it is not as consuming. There is more breathing through it and accepting that it will ebb and flow.
Each year since I moved my blog here from LiveJournal, I’ve let the masthead reflect my purpose. A pile of Magnetic Poetry words. Old family photos scattered on the table. My take on My Ideal Bookshelf. For the past few days, I’ve been wondering what “theme” the new year will bring and how my masthead might show it.
The phrase that stays in my mind as I think about all this is “mindful living.” I keep stumbling over this concept with people I know or meet and with things I read or see. I’ve always believed a message or a lesson comes when you’re ready. But what makes this particularly challenging for me is that I feel it’s a journey I took in the latter half of the 1990s, and it led to a flowering of creativity. Then my energy and focus went in other directions. I don’t see that as bad or good, although certainly there will always be other people willing to tell me–to tell any of us!–You’re doing it wrong. (Tip: This is an ineffective way to motivate an Aries.)
I’m not sure what any of this means. The title of this post is my attempt to make myself feel that I have a deadline. To come up with a masthead. To come up with a purpose for keeping this little bit of the Internet alive. To come up with a plan to live mindfully. That seems a little silly and counter-intuitive: mindful living means being in the moment. Yet here I am trying to take on a whole new year. Maybe I won’t have a new masthead by January 1. Maybe no master plan will have unfurled in my mind.
And maybe that’s okay. Maybe it’s enough just to be. And to know each day may bring a new way to be that I should welcome.
Photos: Sun catcher gift of David and Geri. Book gift of Brad. I’m grateful for both the gifts and the people.