Listen to this playlist: mercury retrograde

mercury goes direct

but not before my personal retrograde arrived. . .

do you know you have a heart murmur? yep. mmhmm.

my heart is so meta. it's saying something subtextual beneath the ostensible beat. that is all.

pt. 3: delving deeper into the narrative: finding the unexpected

it can't be forced. most movements and phenomena are only labeled as such after the fact. usually, you don't know you're in the middle of a zeitgeist while it's coming into being.

for months now, my intellect and my instinct have been sparring.

i am not someone who does this.

what is this? well, i've gotten into it a bit already, but more specifically, amidst the thesis making and dissertating on youtube clips, friendships have begun to emerge. i noticed that there were a handful of people whose thoughts i was especially keen to read, who i hoped would comment, whose perspective on the narrative snippets i trusted more than others'.

we were beginning to interact with a braided narrative structure: the content itself, the recasting of that content into a new context that allowed for textual commentary upon the visual, and we were also bringing our memory of watching these scenes in real time, twenty to twenty-five years prior.

We were kids when these dramas first played out, and we could see that in many instances we really didn't know what was going on then--and our adult minds were being a little bit blown by the implications we missed as young girls who simply wanted to see frisco & felicia kiss and make love.

to have the chance to go back and not just reengage the narrative, but to reengage who we were when the narrative first unfolded for us--in various parts of the country--has forged a bond i did not count on.

i am not someone who makes friends online.

soon the comments boards weren't enough. i began writing two of my yt friends via personal message--still not going beyond the parameters of the site--but we found there was just more to say than the 500-character comments limit would allow.

it was delightful. i found that i couldn't wait for the notifications to my g-mail account telling me that there had been some activity--a new comment, a reply to a comment, an upload, or a longer note waiting for me in my yt inbox.

lately, things have gotten even more meta. we've been dissecting some interviews and writings about the show and the actors, and sometimes you need to process from a more visceral place than a keyboard will allow. . .

one of my two main yt people wrote me in a note recently that after reading one piece i'd passed along that she wished she could call me to talk it through because her thoughts were going in so many different directions.

i sent her my phone number.

she gave me hers.

we didn't talk that day, but she called me last night. i'd already put her number in my phone, so when i looked down at the display and saw who it was, this whole thing became imminently more real.

greeted by her warm and cheerful voice, i knew i was in for one of those long, deep conversations that feels like finally finding a friend at camp, the first sip of a hot cup of coffee, and a breath of fresh air all at once.

there were no awkward moments, just a good, old-fashioned gab fest. we talked fast and animatedly about our feelings and memories about the characters. i was so happy, i was tripping over words, laughing, and saying things like "yes, absolutely," over and over again like some sort of babbling fool. and i didn't care.

i can't wait for the next conversation. or the effort that i and two other yt'ers are mounting. we're just letting the situation organically unfold.

whatever this is, i am someone who does this.

Co-opting the Soap Opera Narrative: dissertations in miniature part 2

I always know when I really love a book, because before I even finish it, I begin to dream in its syntax. I dream the narrative structure—beyond the page—extrapolating it to greater depth and distance. I conjecture the visceral, essential element of the words.

It is said that fluency in a language is hallmarked by dreaming and counting in that language. When you are able to co-opt a linguistic structure , to elegantly violate that structure if you wish, you have become entitled to call it yours.

It's the same reason poets are afforded license to verbify nouns, doff punctuation, and to privilege sound over meaning if they see fit to do so within a given poetic space.

Without fail, when a narrative place (book, song, poem, life-experience) becomes sacred, two things happen: there is first the ardent devotion to committing it to memory through repetition, and the inevitable desire to put it in relationship to one's own existence and understanding of the world. Part and parcel of the second step is theory-making, the commenting upon. Shortly after that, inference-making and the solidifying of opinions on the implications of the narrative—writers' intentions, ostensible meaning vs. subjective meaning –all come to the fore.

Narratives heal.

As I said in part 1 of this exploration, when I found my beloved supercouple construct's narrative footprints alive and well on YouTube in the summer of 2010, I was in a singularly terrifying place. I was desperate for some way to be tethered to the earth again. I'm an avid reader of books, but there were no physical pages I could worry with thumb and index finger at that time that would do a tenth for me what finding Frisco and Felicia again did to ground and reorient me to my life.

I started off passively. I simply viewed clips completely oblivious to what the comments said. Oddly, happily, I remembered much of the dialogue word for word, but in this new context, the experience created a sense of déjà vu. I knew what would happen, but it was still unfamiliar to navigate the serialized material this way. The serialization was happening on two levels now: as a soap opera, the stories unfolded in a recursive, clipped fashion anyway. But on YT, I had to determine which posters had posted the continuation of the stories, whether or not they had, or would, and where storylines crossed in one person's playlist with another person's clips. I was becoming a sleuth. I had to internalize the various naming conventions, comb my own memory for the year that certain narrative strands were in play, and search accordingly.

I was also a researcher. User handles made it clear what characters were privileged more than others in certain groupings. So I watched many videos on fast forward until I caught a glimpse of something or someone who interested me.

Then, it happened. I suddenly wanted to interact with the material. I wanted to talk to someone about it. I yelled at the clips. "Oh, Shut Up, Character I Don't Like!" or, "You've got to be kidding me, this is bullsh*t!"

I started to read the comments. Some of them were staggeringly astute, or simply said exactly what I'd been thinking. They were by turns funny, invigorating, enraging, or just plain stupid. I wanted to talk back to these people—whoever they were—but some of them had left the comments 1 or 2 years before. I worried, too, that it might be presumptuous. I could detect certain threads of relationship among the recurring commenters. They had a clear vibe going, and I was a newbie—someone whose understanding of F&F in particular, and of soap opera idiosyncrasy, in general was untested.

It also meant that I would have to get an account—commit to the idea of myself as someone who not only watched these clips, but who was invested in them—and play for real.

Something fairly significant was afoot. But how to explain this to my sister, who is also my roommate, and my best friend who were increasingly worried about my seemingly obsessive proclivity?

More to come in part 3.

the new spinsterhood

waking up next to a bottle of melatonin and your vibrator. seems like a girl just needs some sleep these days. . .

mercury retrograde 2

on march 30th--two days ago--mercury entered its retrograde phase just as my book of the same name was going to press. astrologically speaking, this is somewhat inauspicious. even less auspicious, perhaps, is that i actually sent the files today, april fool's day. but i choose to focus on this: the first photos of the planet emerged on 3/30--after 6 1/2 years of NASA's satellite hurtlling through space--photographs became available for the first time ever.

is it a coincidence that on the same day the planet begins to give us the illusion of its backward winging through space, is the same day that my book is being finalized? well, i'm a sucker for kismet things if that's not obvious by now. i like to think that mercury is feeling the love its always wanted to feel, and so is ready for its close up. my book was not always going to be called mercury retrograde. it was the first title that suggested itself to me, but i didn't even acknowledge it. it seemed too easy. nice to know that sometimes you get a moment back.

i hate to think of it now, that some other words came thisclose to living on my cover, but the truth will have its way. the right thing does tend to win out. in any case, my first experience of this retrograde (they really can be quite lousy with communication snarls) happened today, two days in.

it began when my contact at the printer's headquarters didn't confirm receipt of the files. given the import of all this, and my general impatience, i called them. i should say here that this printer has been fairly responsive up to this point. it was weird that no confirmation had come by the 2nd hour.

anyway, i called them. they had received the files. i was informed that production would start on monday, and that an invoice would be sent. good enough, right? then the e-mails from them started coming fast and furious. it seems that the estimates the printer has been supplying up to this point did not factor in color on every page. and this printer does C-M-Y-K, not Pantone, so that's a 4-colour spot everytime, not 1.

on march 7th, i sent an e-mail. note: this is a good 3 weeks before the retrograde began. that e-mail said that i wanted an estimate that assumed a bleed on every page. so, that's what i thought i'd been getting. no.

i was always taught that "bleed" automatically translated to mean "colour." not so, not so. so, the estimate nearly doubled when the actual specs were factored in. and because this book is so beautiful, and because the subtle, slate blue-grey and white palette i've chosen is so central to the design and connotative integrity of the book, i could not, in good conscience, tell the printer to print the guts of my manifesto in black and white.

tremendous miscommunication potential was realized in that moment. here's hoping this is as bad as it gets.