Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then un-hypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.
Anne Lamott (via anthonyking)
Quote
Reply
Author Archives: jeremyrbutler
Image
Last year I had the distinct honor to have my first fiction published by Catherynne M. Valente at Apex Magazine. Cat had an amazing year individually and Apex was Hugo-nominated.
I am deeply proud to have been a tiny part of a great year for the zine and a part of this great volume. Pre-order now available with free shipping.
Baby is healthy. Move is (mostly) complete. Job is (barely) settled. Many new works in the pipeline. So here’s to looking forward, and celebrating great company.
Betamax Memories
When my sister and I were young, our parents told us about a magical, mysterious machine that would allow us to watch movies at home. I remember the awe, the wonder. But today, it’s hard to imagine. Watching movies at home? I’ve long since become inured to any feelings of revolution or amazement.
The opportunity to watch a movie in 3D, while sitting in traffic, that might provoke the same feelings.
Now, my parents purchased the Sony Betamax. As much as the machine would be lauded in the years to come as “ahead of its time,” it lost the war to the VHS, meaning that the local video store stocked a limited (and never updated) selection of movies for our infinite re-rental.
I am reminded of that experience this weekend when I found Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on demand and watched it with my daughters. Growing up, there were only about ten options (if my memory serves) and each must have been at least a monthly rental. So, somewhere encoded in the noggin, are all the lines to the following Mason’s Video Rental classics:
–Pippi Longstocking
–Pippi Longstocking Goes On Board
–Duran Duran’s Girls On Film (aka my intro to pornography)
–Starman
–Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
–Grease
–Cloak & Dagger
-Roxanne
…or so the memory goes. It is amazing to remember a time where laughter wasn’t on demand, but was confined to a few memorized moments, and when titillation only referred to one illicit cassette in a small downtown store. But with limitation comes great nostalgia and cherishing, something I’m less inclined to believe my daughters will ever experience.
Long live the limitations of the Betamax!
Cliche
I don’t write much here about being a psychiatrist. The reason is entirely self-preservative—as much as I yearn to self-indulge, I fear that anything I write could be used against me in a court of law.
And so, until courts of law are done with me, a brief word about cliche. The hallmark of cliche is predictability—the lack of surprise, the expected outcome, the ordinary, the banal.
As a shrink, there are too many days where I’m confronted by the banality and stereo typicality of human dynamics. Labels are legion and well distributed in pop psychology: the hysteric, the borderline, the psychopath, the narcissist. Or, if you prefer others, GAD, OCD, ODD, BD II, MDD, and PD NOS.
I sit in my chair, ask my questions, get my answers, and the brain I’ve been granted does its best to squeeze the answers into categories, diagnoses, labels. It does so, so effectively, that many days I am left with little pleasure in human encounters.
But, I am by no means alone. I could be writing this as a salesman, a stripper, a front desk worker at a cheesy motel, a former Goldman Sachs manager, a cashier, a hostess. Each has a paradigm, a situation, a set of questions, and to each, the interaction can be squeezed into a number of labels, dealt with, and abandoned.
I think the danger in any job is to know when the labels define interaction, and when they define the limitations of experience. That may be conjecture, but I hope not.
On Flying
This passage still lingers in my dreams and the recesses of my mind:
There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Pick a nice day, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy suggests, and try it.
The first part is easy. All it requires is simply the ability to throw yourself forward with all your weight, and the willingness not to mind that it’s going to hurt.
That is, it’s going to hurt if you fail to miss the ground. Most people fail to miss the ground, and if they are really trying properly, the likelihood is that they will fail to miss it fairly hard.
Clearly, it is the second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties.
One problem is that you have to miss the ground accidentally. It’s no good deliberately intending to miss the ground because you won’t. You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else when you’re halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or about the ground, or about how much it’s going to hurt if you fail to miss it.
It is notoriously difficult to prize your attention away from these three things during the split second you have at your disposal. Hence most people’s failure, and their eventual disillusionment with this exhilarating and spectacular sport.
If, however, you are lucky enough to have your attention momentarily distracted at the crucial moment by, say, a gorgeous pair of legs (tentacles, pseudopodia, according to phyllum and/or personal inclination) or a bomb going off in your vicinty, or by suddenly spotting an extremely rare species of beetle crawling along a nearby twig, then in your astonishment you will miss the ground completely and remain bobbing just a few inches above it in what might seem to be a slightly foolish manner.
This is a moment for superb and delicate concentration. Bob and float, float and bob. Ignore all consideration of your own weight simply let yourself waft higher. Do not listen to what anybody says to you at this point because they are unlikely to say anything helpful. They are most likely to say something along the lines of “Good God, you can’t possibly be flying!” It is vitally important not to believe them or they will suddenly be right.
Waft higher and higher. Try a few swoops, gentle ones at first, then drift above the treetops breathing regularly.
Brilliant, Mr. Adams.
Story Rationing
I know that parents fear for their children for many reasons.
Will they have a job? Will they be happy? Will the climate change?
My daughter’s now two. Yesterday I was telling her about Jack & The Beanstalk (or what I could remember of it), and she said “Mommy and Daddy and Nic jump into the story.” So basically, two years old and using metafiction.
Of all the things in the world, this scares me. I probably should bey more concerned about drinking water in the mid-21st century, but instead I worry that, as a culture, we’re consuming story at too fast a rate.
Where does it end?
Unreliable narration by age four? Myth modernization tapped out by age six? The heat death of cross-genre pollination by age ten?
Current media numbers look like what, twenty-five half-hour story lines consumed a day? Add in YouTube punchline story forms, sketches and memes as intermezzi and over the course of a week, what kind of story tolerance will she have built up?
At age twenty, how much plot will she be mainlining, just to keep the withdrawal at bay?
Quote
Creativity is paradoxical. To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder, must work hard but spend time doing nothing as information incubates, must create many ideas yet most of them are useless, must look at the same thing as everyone else, yet see something different, must desire success but embrace failure, must be persistent but not stubborn, and must listen to experts but know how to disregard them.
Michael Michalko (via Advice to Writers)
Quote
Ti-Grace Atkinson pointed out … that there is an enormous gap between what one can do and what one can imagine doing. Humans have what she referred to as a “constructive imagination” which, though obviously a blessing in some ways, is also a source of great frustration. For it provides a constant tease of imagined accomplishments and imagined threats—to neither of which are we physically equal.
Marilyn Frye (via baaadnewsbears)
Westerners or just Canadians?
I’ve been routinely confronted by this experience of late…
I say: ”You seem angry.”
In response: ”I’m not angry, I didn’t raise my voice.”
Alternatively: ”I didn’t swear.” ”I didn’t go crazy.” ”I wasn’t rude.”
The premise is that anger is a behavior, not a feeling. Therefore, it would follow that as long as I don’t believe that I am behaving angrily, I have no resentment, frustrations, or irritations.
Oh, dear. If it were only that easy…
Quote
Don’t expect to get anything back, don’t expect recognition for your efforts, don’t expect your genius to be discovered or your love to be understood. Act because you need to act.
Paulo Coelho (via melizzaaratan)