Tonight’s blog entry will likely be brief – I have been out with coworkers for a few drinks, and then ended up talking to my friend in Poland for a while. I’m listening to Hammock, who are a post-rock band that create these immersive soundscapes and songs that make you feel incredibly small and alone, and yet happy and peaceful at the same time. Listening to Maybe They Will Sing for Us Tomorrow is like getting out of your car on a pullover, looking out over a vast open landscape with cloud-shrouded mountains in the distance, whistling tunelessly, and feeling a stiff breeze bring the edge of a chill around your well-worn jacket.
If I had any skill at fine arts, drawing, painting, or otherwise creating images, there’s a whole world that I have never seen yet I have experienced in my mind that I would share with people, however imperfectly. Even writing the word “imperfectly” I can still feel the shrill crack of the one professor, Trudy Grimes-Holman, who demanded that we never use adverbs in her Introduction to Fiction Writing class. Also taboo was any use of genre elements, and any discussion of complex or abstract topics that detracted from a very narrow sort of realism. I did learn quite a bit about technique, but the scars from that class as far as muzzling my imagination have been long and deep.
Dictionopolis 