Erica Lorraine Scheidt's Blog, page 3

The book comes out a week from today and it's been thrilling and odd and intensely unsettling. Lots of bloggers and reviewers got the book early, including this sixteen year old reviewer.  Bloggers I know from my four years here at RQD have been kind, unbelievably kind and supportive. I'm grateful. If you're in the Bay Area or Portland, I have some readings coming up and a launch party with my friends at Green Apple Books. I'd love to see you.
Photo: Olivia Bee "The Magic Hour," Rookie

The process of writing books is somewhat akin to a very long police interrogation in which the detective leans over the table littered with the butt ends of cigarettes and cold coffee in Styrofoam cups and says for the 87th time, "Now let's go over this again." It is a study in repetition, the ability to read the same page, paragraph, sentence until it could be recited backward and in French in hopes of figuring out which detail is missing, which idea is false. What my days lack in being touched by the muse they make up for in the steady picking of the miner's ax, chipping out a tunnel that may well lead to nowhere. Ann Patchett in the Washington Post 
Photo: Lee Miller and Tanja Ramm in Miller’s Paris studio, 
wall hanging by Jean Cocteau, by Theodor Miller, 1931 via the gf

Daily Beast: Describe your morning routine.
DH: Wake, shower, shave, dress, put music on, double espresso, fresh-fruit smoothie, oatmeal, read the comics in The San Francisco Chronicle to the child, readThe New York Times to oneself, agree to show the child one YouTube video in exchange for the vigorous brushing of teeth (current favorite: Of Monsters And Men, “Little Talks”), vigorous brushing of teeth, kiss just-waking wife, walk child to school, small talk with other parents in schoolyard, put on headphones (current favorite: Fire!, You Liked Me Five Minutes Ago), take bus, walk to Jewish Community Center, swim 50 laps, take bus, arrive home to begin working day.
LB: My husband nudges me at what I feel is the crack of dawn—after he has already gotten up, showered, prepared breakfast for himself and our kid, and made me coffee. Then I say “five more minutes,” and he comes back in five minutes and I say “five more minutes,” and he comes back in five minutes and I say “five more minutes,” and he says no, and I say “pleasepleasepleaseplease” and he says “you are pathetic,” and I go upstairs and drink my coffee and kiss the kid, and my husband takes the kid to school, while I slurk around the house, pretending that I will go to the gym. I eventually get to my studio, post some stuff on Tumblr, tweet a bit, and then it’s really not anything close to morning anymore. From How I Write Husband and Wife with Lisa Brown and Daniel Handler in The Daily BeastIllustration: Masks by Lisa Brown (2010)

All the books are now 60% off, but Andrew McKinley, among the kindest and most generous bookstore owners on earth, will still try and make you pay even less. Peter Orner on Adobe Books in The Rumpus Photo: Adobe Books by Chris Cobb

The right structure and the right question is: “How do you make your family hungry?” from A Simple Way to Create Suspense by Lee Child in NYT via Jessica Stanley. 
Photo by Leslie Williamson (Pic of the Day 12.18.12) 

Another recent encounter has been Joyce’s “The Dead,” which I’ve read many times. It needs to be considered as a novella, the perfect novella, entirely separate from the rest of “Dubliners.” An annual winter party; afterwards, a scene of marital misunderstanding and revelation in a hotel room; a closing reflection on mortality as sleep closes in and snow begins to fall — I’d swap the last dozen pages of “The Dead” for any dozen in “Ulysses.” As a form, the novel sprawls and can never be perfect. It doesn’t need to be, it doesn’t want to be. A poem can achieve perfection — not a word you’d want to change — and in rare instances a novella can too.Do you have a favorite literary genre?The novella. See above.Do you read poetry?We have many shelves of poetry at home, but still, it takes an effort to step out of the daily narrative of existence, draw that neglected cloak of stillness around you — and concentrate, if only for three or four minutes. Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist. I last felt that in relation to a poem while in the sitting room of Elizabeth Bishop’s old home in rural Brazil. I stood in a corner, apart from the general conversation, and read “Under the Window: Ouro Preto.” The street outside was once an obscure thoroughfare for donkeys and peasants. Bishop reports overheard lines as people pass by her window, including the beautifully noted “When my mother combs my hair it hurts.” That same street now is filled with thunderous traffic — it fairly shakes the house. When I finished the poem I found that my friends and our hosts had left the room. What is it precisely, that feeling of “returning” from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger — then it fades, but never completely. Ian McEwan, By the Book, New York Times
Photo: Zeynap Kayan on FvF

A gift guide from the gf. Photo: Taco vs. Falafel, the T-shirt from Wendy MacNaughton

Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love PoemHere’s what I’ve got, the reasons why our marriagemight work: Because you wear pink but write poemsabout bullets and gravestones. Because you yellat your keys when you lose them, and laugh,loudly, at your own jokes. Because you can hold a pistol,gut a pig. Because you memorize songs, even commercialsfrom thirty years back and sing them when vacuuming.You have soft hands. Because when we moved, the contentsof what you packed were written inside the boxes.Because you think swans are overrated.Because you drove me to the train station. You drove meto Minneapolis. You drove me to Providence.Because you underline everything you read, and circlethe things you think are important, and put stars nextto the things you think I should think are important,and write notes in the margins about all the peopleyou’re mad at and my name almost never appears there.Because you make that pork recipe you foundin the Frida Khalo Cookbook. Because when you readthat essay about Rilke, you underlined the whole thingexcept the part where Rilke says love means to deny the selfand to be consumed in flames. Because when the lightsare off, the curtains drawn, and an additional sheet is nailedover the windows, you still believe someone outsidecan see you. And one day five summers ago,when you couldn’t put gas in your car, when your fridgewas so empty—not even leftovers or condiments—there was a single twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew,which you paid for with your last damn dimebecause you once overheard me say that I liked it.
by Matthew Olzmann from
Rattle #31, Summer 2009  via oh (for M)
Photo: 10:59 by Brian Ferry of the blue hour 

If you had to give on piece of advice to people in their twenties, what would it be?
To go to a bookstore and buy ten books of poetry and read them each five times.
Why?
Because the truth is inside.
A conversation with Cheryl Strayed in Tiny Beautiful ThingsPhoto mine

How like an island we are in love encouraging
moss & like an island we are barely moving Just
to exist takes much concentration & like an island
in love we have a house in our two imaginations &
they intersect It strengthens the house & our feelings
Unlike an island we wake up An island never sleeps
That is its duty & ours to remain in love barely moving
We do not want to disturb the house Do not want it
to fall into the ocean that is always so nearby It surrounds
us & is moving Like an island the ocean does not see us
or care why though we persist in loving it at one rate
or another & are waking close together in the dark
from How Like an Island by Heather Christie via the Rumpus Photo: Margaret Kilgallen on view at SFMOMA