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Trip Report
Aug. 28th, 2008 11:11 amI spent almost a month on the West Coast, reading, writing, experiencing, and socializing. I did not write as much as I had hoped (though between writing a number of good scenes and taking a large number of notes, I count the trip a partial success on that front nonetheless), and one thing I want to do is think about why that is. I've been reading bell hooks's _Art On My Mind: Visual Politics_ and she talks about the difficulty that women, especially women of color, have creating a space in which they can work as artists, undistracted by the rest of the world. Women, she says, are penalized socially for such devotion to artwork, while men are rewarded --- and this how many years after Virginia Woolf? For my part, I think fear of such penalties does influence my creative process, and in a negative way, though it is also an interesting force to work against in creating the room of my own, both physically and psychologically.
(the below will likely work its way into a first-coming email in the next week or so, as well)
Artistic working space has actually been one of the themes of this trip for me: early in the trip, I was trying to find physical places that I could work and collect information that I needed for my novel. In the Bay Area, I worked to find places that were simultaneously inspiring and comfortable for writing; I found spaces of inspiration and spaces of comfort, but they were never the same space, which led to my writing process feeling disjointed. There was one exception, the train, where I placed Katherine in myself or maybe myself in Katherine and wrote a chapter that I am rather proud of the first draft of. Or maybe most of a chapter, I will figure that out when I integrate all of my writing this trip and produce a new novel build.
In the last third of the trip, I found myself steeped in music rather than writing, spending large amounts of time in the Los Angeles public transit system or walking around East Pasadena listening to music and appreciating it as a solitary person in a densely populated environment: thousands of cars, hundreds of houses, a lone pedestrian. On my last night in LA, I attended a Matthew Sweet concert. Matthew Sweet, apart from being someone I admire tremendously and had the biggest crush on when I was 12, is someone who has created a musical working space for himself and uses that space to produce art. On his newest album, he even devotes one track, ``Room to Rock,'' to this space: ``I need a room to rock in,'' he says, and the learned Sweetie knows that Sweet has travelled all sorts of places to record music in search of that room, ultimately constructing not only a room but a musical community in which to hone his skills and talents. The new album demonstrates the value of this in its merger of historical production and technical aptitude, but that's neither here nor there.
I read a book on the plane home named _Chamber Music_ by Doris Grumbach that I picked up in the dollar rack of a used bookstore on Valencia because its title was a Joyce reference and the copy for sale was a printer's proof. While florid, the novel is absolutely brilliant and cuts surprisingly deep on issues you do not expect to read about from the novel's introduction. This surprise only deepens its emotional impact --- and of course, the locations of the book are all the working spaces of musicians, to keep it in theme for this voyage. The main character, a woman, is prevented from having a room of her own in which to practice music or a musical community by her husband, who is a famous musician and cannot tolerate her feminine and ``amateurish'' presence in what he desires to be _his_ working space. I may teach from this book in the spring; to say more would be to do too much of the author's work for her. In no uncertain terms: Read this book. Now.
For my own part, I have more of a space to work than many aspiring creators do: a separate room in my home where my desk and books sit, flexible if demanding employment, no children, multiple cafes where I am comfortable sitting with my work for eight hours and the staff are happy to let me. These are all privileges for which I am, and should be, grateful. At the same time, I am threatened by a number of things: Does taking time out to work on creative endeavors threaten my social life? Does expressing my interest in the arts hamper my chances for promotion at work? Where exactly am I going to find the time to sit for eight hours in a room and do nothing, as bell hooks says is crucial to the work of the artist? The answer to the first two questions is possibly, but I should do it anyway; the answer to the last question is that, if I want such a space, I need to carve it out for myself aggressively and unapologetically. This trip was an experiment in such carving, and while it was an absolutely wonderful trip for a myriad of reasons, I was insufficiently bold with the knife. Next time, I am cutting myself the biggest slice of time, and I am eating it.
I also learned something about how my creative process relates to the location I am in on a neighborhood/city scale as opposed to a room/building scale. When I am traveling, I am free of one set of expectations, and have another put on me: that of The Traveller. That set of expectations is one that I can much more easily throw off, because it is one much farther from what I wish to be, and so I am more free to construct my own expectations when traveling than otherwise. I've also figured out one of the things that draws me to Los Angeles, though I will explain it in reverse.
In Boston, I am comfortable. The local norms for my age group and chosen activities are pretty close to who and what I actually am or want to be, and this makes it very hard not to be normative for those norms, behaving in ways that fit those patterns because they fit the patterns and not because those patterns fit me. Now, I think the normalcy of various things I hold dear in my communities is awesome: the existence of a place where vegan biker dykes are just ``one of those'' makes me very happy. But is the Camberville community, specifically, just creating a new normal, if a broader one, and pushing people to behave to that standard of normalcy, rather than trying to decentralize societal expectations entirely? I think sort of, yes, and the fact that the norms are close to me makes it easy to get comfortable with them and not notice the ways in which they are problematic.
I hardly think Los Angeles is a place with no societal expectations or definition of what is normal and expected. However, the norms there are very different in a way I don't feel bound by. I am an outsider in more ways, and while the position of outsider is often restrictive, it can also be freeing: while I am not sure I actually like LA, I love who LA allows me to be. The feeling of walking around a city where people don't walk, while it was sometimes frustrating while I lived there, is also very inspiring. Walking there, in the areas where almost no one walks, I feel very much free, and when I see others, I smile, and they smile, and we have kinship even across the many boundaries (race class gender &c.) that we have otherwise. [1]
I am excited to bring some of this attitude back with me, and hope that I can stick to it and maintain my awareness of the ways in which I have grown complacent. I hope to carve out time and space for creative pursuits, especially writing and music, not just despite but also because of my busy work, school, and social schedule. I am always trying to do more than there is time for, and I often succeed; this means that there is time for more than I think there is, not that I have some superhuman abilities. I hope to use the space I make for myself to help others make space for themselves as well--- while I am thinking first of Cassandra here, as she is my partner with whom I explicitly share space, I want to do this for all of my friends in general, and in fact for everyone, inasmuch as my individual actions can do that. I am also very very very much looking forward to teaching in the spring; I read a number of related books this trip that only continue to excite my passion for the subject, and I hope to be able to share that enthusiasm with my students come February.
...wait a minute, when did I start taking LiveJournal seriously? :) I also have a bunch of reviews I mostly-wrote that I will post eventually. Probably.
[1] This idea of kinship with the other is something I need to explore more. What does it mean to feel kinship with something explicitly because it is other? How is this related to and different from appropriation and ``eating the other?'' I am confident that they are not the same, but it may risk becoming those things, and understanding it more may help me see if and when that process happens.
(the below will likely work its way into a first-coming email in the next week or so, as well)
Artistic working space has actually been one of the themes of this trip for me: early in the trip, I was trying to find physical places that I could work and collect information that I needed for my novel. In the Bay Area, I worked to find places that were simultaneously inspiring and comfortable for writing; I found spaces of inspiration and spaces of comfort, but they were never the same space, which led to my writing process feeling disjointed. There was one exception, the train, where I placed Katherine in myself or maybe myself in Katherine and wrote a chapter that I am rather proud of the first draft of. Or maybe most of a chapter, I will figure that out when I integrate all of my writing this trip and produce a new novel build.
In the last third of the trip, I found myself steeped in music rather than writing, spending large amounts of time in the Los Angeles public transit system or walking around East Pasadena listening to music and appreciating it as a solitary person in a densely populated environment: thousands of cars, hundreds of houses, a lone pedestrian. On my last night in LA, I attended a Matthew Sweet concert. Matthew Sweet, apart from being someone I admire tremendously and had the biggest crush on when I was 12, is someone who has created a musical working space for himself and uses that space to produce art. On his newest album, he even devotes one track, ``Room to Rock,'' to this space: ``I need a room to rock in,'' he says, and the learned Sweetie knows that Sweet has travelled all sorts of places to record music in search of that room, ultimately constructing not only a room but a musical community in which to hone his skills and talents. The new album demonstrates the value of this in its merger of historical production and technical aptitude, but that's neither here nor there.
I read a book on the plane home named _Chamber Music_ by Doris Grumbach that I picked up in the dollar rack of a used bookstore on Valencia because its title was a Joyce reference and the copy for sale was a printer's proof. While florid, the novel is absolutely brilliant and cuts surprisingly deep on issues you do not expect to read about from the novel's introduction. This surprise only deepens its emotional impact --- and of course, the locations of the book are all the working spaces of musicians, to keep it in theme for this voyage. The main character, a woman, is prevented from having a room of her own in which to practice music or a musical community by her husband, who is a famous musician and cannot tolerate her feminine and ``amateurish'' presence in what he desires to be _his_ working space. I may teach from this book in the spring; to say more would be to do too much of the author's work for her. In no uncertain terms: Read this book. Now.
For my own part, I have more of a space to work than many aspiring creators do: a separate room in my home where my desk and books sit, flexible if demanding employment, no children, multiple cafes where I am comfortable sitting with my work for eight hours and the staff are happy to let me. These are all privileges for which I am, and should be, grateful. At the same time, I am threatened by a number of things: Does taking time out to work on creative endeavors threaten my social life? Does expressing my interest in the arts hamper my chances for promotion at work? Where exactly am I going to find the time to sit for eight hours in a room and do nothing, as bell hooks says is crucial to the work of the artist? The answer to the first two questions is possibly, but I should do it anyway; the answer to the last question is that, if I want such a space, I need to carve it out for myself aggressively and unapologetically. This trip was an experiment in such carving, and while it was an absolutely wonderful trip for a myriad of reasons, I was insufficiently bold with the knife. Next time, I am cutting myself the biggest slice of time, and I am eating it.
I also learned something about how my creative process relates to the location I am in on a neighborhood/city scale as opposed to a room/building scale. When I am traveling, I am free of one set of expectations, and have another put on me: that of The Traveller. That set of expectations is one that I can much more easily throw off, because it is one much farther from what I wish to be, and so I am more free to construct my own expectations when traveling than otherwise. I've also figured out one of the things that draws me to Los Angeles, though I will explain it in reverse.
In Boston, I am comfortable. The local norms for my age group and chosen activities are pretty close to who and what I actually am or want to be, and this makes it very hard not to be normative for those norms, behaving in ways that fit those patterns because they fit the patterns and not because those patterns fit me. Now, I think the normalcy of various things I hold dear in my communities is awesome: the existence of a place where vegan biker dykes are just ``one of those'' makes me very happy. But is the Camberville community, specifically, just creating a new normal, if a broader one, and pushing people to behave to that standard of normalcy, rather than trying to decentralize societal expectations entirely? I think sort of, yes, and the fact that the norms are close to me makes it easy to get comfortable with them and not notice the ways in which they are problematic.
I hardly think Los Angeles is a place with no societal expectations or definition of what is normal and expected. However, the norms there are very different in a way I don't feel bound by. I am an outsider in more ways, and while the position of outsider is often restrictive, it can also be freeing: while I am not sure I actually like LA, I love who LA allows me to be. The feeling of walking around a city where people don't walk, while it was sometimes frustrating while I lived there, is also very inspiring. Walking there, in the areas where almost no one walks, I feel very much free, and when I see others, I smile, and they smile, and we have kinship even across the many boundaries (race class gender &c.) that we have otherwise. [1]
I am excited to bring some of this attitude back with me, and hope that I can stick to it and maintain my awareness of the ways in which I have grown complacent. I hope to carve out time and space for creative pursuits, especially writing and music, not just despite but also because of my busy work, school, and social schedule. I am always trying to do more than there is time for, and I often succeed; this means that there is time for more than I think there is, not that I have some superhuman abilities. I hope to use the space I make for myself to help others make space for themselves as well--- while I am thinking first of Cassandra here, as she is my partner with whom I explicitly share space, I want to do this for all of my friends in general, and in fact for everyone, inasmuch as my individual actions can do that. I am also very very very much looking forward to teaching in the spring; I read a number of related books this trip that only continue to excite my passion for the subject, and I hope to be able to share that enthusiasm with my students come February.
...wait a minute, when did I start taking LiveJournal seriously? :) I also have a bunch of reviews I mostly-wrote that I will post eventually. Probably.
[1] This idea of kinship with the other is something I need to explore more. What does it mean to feel kinship with something explicitly because it is other? How is this related to and different from appropriation and ``eating the other?'' I am confident that they are not the same, but it may risk becoming those things, and understanding it more may help me see if and when that process happens.