Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

Music to write by

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It’s National Novel Editing Month and I have been dutifully putting in my 50 hours (or thereabouts). Originally my goal was to get the rewrite to the end of Act 2 by the end of March, but I’m not at all sure that’s going to happen now. Particularly as I’m, you know, writing entirely new chapters. (The story remains the same; the plot has changed somewhat.) But I write. I’m a much happier person when I’ve written. Somewhere I’ll put up a sign to remind myself of that.

Wherever I sit down to write, however, I need music. I ripped a couple hundred albums* in November in order to build up a backlog of music and promptly filled up my 15 gig iPod. However, I don’t use the iPod for writing; I use it in the car. When I write, I whip out a pair of headphones and listen to music off my iBook.

I need either instrumental music or music with lyrics I can tune out. For the past several months I’ve been listening to the New Age playlist—Enya, Vangelis, Mike Oldfield, Andreas Vollenweider. It’s a big playlist, and while I’ve heard many of the selections multiple times, I’m sure I haven’t heard all of them, because I keep hitting Shuffle. But I’ve gotten tired of that and have now created the Classical playlist, which has an eclectic mix of Beethoven, Philip Glass, Gregorian chants, and Soeur Marie Keyrouz. I have decided I am not as enamored of Philip Glass as Darin apparently is (since Darin has bought all of his CDs).

I think I’m going to start ripping more CDs and see if I can’t do all of the soundtracks Darin has bought over the years.

My friend Mary says she likes to write to salsa. (She also mentioned another type of music that had, I believe, a Portuguese name, but I can’t remember what it is now.) Maybe I should try that. God knows it’s certainly worked magic for her.

For other writers out there: do you like to write to music? Does it have to be a certain type of music? Or do you come up with music that has a flavor for the type of scene/story you’re writing?

And I am open to any suggestions for music to check out that is mostly instrumental or has singing that preferably is in another language. I have some French jazz that I listen to occasionally, but I keep trying to understand the French, so that doesn’t work as well.

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*All albums I own, for what it’s worth. Can’t believe I even feel compelled to say that.

Transporting goods of the future

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Via Ezra Klein, I found this post on the future of globalization. Emptywheel brings up a point I’ve wondered about for a long time, knowing that the end of Big Oil is approaching:

Here we were, burning up jet fuel so we could arrange to ship goods all the way around the world to a bunch of people, an entire country, who can’t or won’t pay their debts. But the words kept streaming by. THIS FLIGHT CAN’T GO ON ANY LONGER. GET OFF THE PLANE, IT’S GOING TO CRASH, the newspaper headlines might as well have said.

I’ll leave the business end of the discussion to Emptywheel. Here’s my thing: Oil is just going to get rarer and harder to get from here on out. Yeah, hybrids are the wave of the future, but Americans demand “performance” (read: high speeds) so coming hybrids aren’t particularly fuel-efficient. But eventually it’ll hurt enough and we can all move to bikes or buses or whatever. Fine.

I’m wondering about the big machines. The trucks. The planes. The cargo ships. What are they going to run on? Is there some plan afoot to find an alternative fuel for the jumbo jets? I don’t think they run on electricity. Or are my kids doomed to see Paris only from the pictures on TV? How are we going to export and import goods around the world if the cargo fleets are sidelined?

I don’t have any answers for this. Just something I’ve been wondering about.

News of the Weird

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When I was a small Di, I accompanied my mother to innumerable flea markets and second-hand stores, where she would pick through the clothes and merchandise and I, always, headed for the books. And I loved any books having to do with the Weird: witches, ghosts, UFOs, ESP. I don’t know whether this is a consequence of being a kid in the 70s or just my bent or what, but I always asked to buy this or that 5 cent paperback and when we got home my father would look at my haul and just shake his head.

One book I picked up I read over and over again—it had spontaneous combustion and alien abductions and ghosts and people vanishing off the face of the Earth. One stop shopping for the weird. For years I thought it was a book by Charles Fort, but now I think it was Stranger Than Fiction. And of course I loved Holy Blood, Holy Grail (are they going to sue Dan Brown, or what?), which led me down the rose-strewn pathway (ha!) toward not only the Knights Templar but the Gnostic Gospels. And, of course, the gold standard for Weird Thinking: Umberto Eco, whose The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum would be required reading, but you’ve already read them, haven’t you?

As you grow up, though, and real life keeps intervening, you find tangible things to frighten you and make you wonder. Like what makes mothers kill their children or husbands kill their pregnant wives or corporations layoff thousands of workers in order to make their stock move up a point. Sure, there might be UFOs, but fuck that: did you hear about Thalidomide Fen-phen Vioxx? Before I had kids, late-night TV shows about ghosts would still make shiver; now, not only do I not watch late-night TV shows, but who gives a flying you-know-what about ghosts when I have to worry about where child molesters live in my neighborhood?

However, a part of me will always love stories from the Weirdside and conspiracy theories. Which is why one of my daily stops now is Rigorous Intuition. I don’t know how Jeff does it, but several times a week he posts a chapter-long meditation on some “weird” angle to recent news stories. Washington DC gay call-boy scandals (the 1988 version, not the 2005 version—but are they linked?), Project Montauk, Lord Maitreya. Aleister Crowley, the United Nations, John von Neumann! One of the favorite phrases in the comments section is, “Don’t fly in any light aircraft, Jeff.” Because TPTB (if I have to translate, you don’t know need to know) will bump off anyone who reveals these innermost secrets, of course.

Rigorous Intuition is one-stop shopping for all your deepest fears about the assholes running our planet. Check it out.