Would I like to report that I’ve been so busy and preoccupied with my writing recently that I’ve skimped on blog posts — and comments on your blogs — for the last couple weeks or so?
Boy, wouldn’t I. But no. I’ve been so busy and preoccupied with everything else that I’ve been cutting corners online. Still, I thought you might appreciate a couple of items in the meantime, not that you need me to entertain you:
First, I’d never have guessed that enough “backwards music videos” have been made that someone reflecting on the matter could actually come up with a list of the top ten of “all time.” (By the way, the backwards here refers to the direction of motion — people running in reverse, fruit falling up into trees, and so on.) So I was surprised that Jason Newman, at the Urlesque site (“Exposing bits of the web”), could post just such a list. His number one selection interested me, all right: a “champion eater… unstuffs his face,” over a song called “From Your Mouth” by a group called God Lives Underwater. But my favorite — the only one I wanted to watch more than once — placed only third in his estimation:
Cibo Matto’s “Sugar Water”
One of Michel Gondry’s best videos involves split-screening Cibo Matto members Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori, running one member forward and the other backward before they meet and switch positions halfway through. Yeah, it’s complicated. Just watch.
What they said.
Alternatively, if you’ve got a little more time available, I highly recommend this hilarious (and ultimately sobering) account by Jo Walton of an entity she calls the Suck Fairy:
The Suck Fairy is an artefact of re-reading. If you read a book for the first time and it sucks, it’s nothing to do with her. It just sucks. Some books do. The Suck Fairy comes in when you come back to a book that you liked when you read it before, and on re-reading — well, it sucks. You can say that you have changed, you can hit your forehead dramatically and ask yourself how you could possibly have missed the suckiness the first time — or you can say that the Suck Fairy has been through while the book was sitting on the shelf and inserted the suck. The longer the book has been on the shelf unread, the more time she’s had to get into it.
For those of you who are writers, I don’t have to point out that your personal Suck Fairy especially loves exsanguinating your own work.
DarcKnyt says
The Suck Fairy also does movies, FYI. I hope I have no Suck Fairy, and I hope she’s deathly allergic to my books.
Please…
marta says
I hope the Suck Fairy chokes on a q.
Miss you when you’re gone, by the way. Makes me worried the Suck Fairy has been sucking on blogs.
Nance says
The Suck Fairy takes a sentence-by-sentence interest in my work: I write one, it sucks, I delete and write another one, etc. I must have gone badly wrong on paper somewhere back there in my life to have earned such devoted attention. Be careful what you write!
John says
Darc: Note, per the description Jo Walton offers above, that the Suck Fairy thrives on re-reading. The solution is obvious: re-read our own work as seldom as possible, ESPECIALLY once any significant time has passed. ;)
marta: Funny you should mention the miss-yous, a sentiment I’m all too familiar with. I feel awfully disconnected from the bloggish world I entered a couple years ago, especially thanks to recent machinations of the efficiency gnomes in my employer’s I.T. department — which prevent me from commenting (during that critical 40+ hours/week) on so many of the blogs I visit regularly. If I ever get cut off from RAMH during that window of time, I’ll probably sink into an irrecoverable depression.
Nance: I know it feels tedious — and it’s frankly difficult to believe you’ve got to edit THAT much — but it’s all for the greater good, y’know. In another year’s time, even less, you may be surprised how little you’re throwing away… and no, not because you’re simply tired of editing.
Yesterday was Elie Wiesel’s 86th birthday, as I learned from The Writer’s Almanac. Among other information which the newsletter offered about him was this:
Because I am a relentlessly self-centered writer, yes, that is what I took away from the whole fascinating (and simultaneously heartbreaking) story: that he threw or revised away over 85% of his first draft.
Tessa says
Ah yes. My good friend, the Suck Fairy .. I know her too well. My problem is that she starts her evil work before I even write the words …