Nadia Larissa Trousdale

Due to the combo of time constraints and internet availability, the first issue of Sporadic Panic won’t be made available until the 30th.  My apologies to writers and readers alike – I was really hoping to get it all together by today but things are running a bit slower than I’d planned.  So I’m thinking the end of the month would be a good release date for every issue, to simplify things.

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I got a most distressing email today, from a friend of mine whose writing I hold in unspeakably high regard, and whose contributions for Sporadic Panic would be, I knew, an enjoyable thing to read, and would require almost no editing at all, because she’s just that damn good. Imagine my sadness and surprise when I opened up my inbox today to find this:

“Hi.
I will definitely endorse the webzine and count on me for anything you need, but I haven’t been able to write anymore. It’s driving me nuts. I’m sorry.
Love,
E.”

Young lady, explain yourself immediately! No, really.

A writer’s greatest weapon is their pen, and their greatest responsibility is to use it, often – not always wisely, but always with the sort of grace and intelligence that seemed natural to this friend of mine, almost effortless. Reading has been a big thing for us as friends, but writing was even bigger, a reason to exist. It was giving the gift of Expression to all the ghosts we call muses, and E., I daresay our friends The Romantics would be disappointed in you. Byron wrote to keep himself from going mad – I can’t say that the method worked for him, but I’m simply saying that a writer convinced they’re leaning towards madness is nothing new. All the best writers were batshit insane by today’s standards, and it’s just part of the territory. Words and ideas are any writer’s burden, and their coziest solace. Why would you purposely distance yourself from something in which you’ve taken immense pleasure, and pride? Hell, your work’s half the reason I began this zine to begin with, because I felt it was beautiful enough to be shared with as many people as possible.

I’m not sure I believe you, when it comes down to it. Yes, I’ve gathered from your emails that you’ve had a fuck of a rough year – I sympathize. Some of the things you’ve been through, I can’t possibly begin to understand. Maybe they’re beyond the aid of Writing As Therapy, but even if writing can’t help you, I can’t see how it could hurt you, either. I think in time, once the raging tornado lessens to a tickling breeze, you’ll feel it all come back – how the pen in your hand is not a bad anchor to the world, and if it’s your only anchor, well, it’s a good place to start. Byron, Keats, and that sexy bysshe Shelley will call you back to the writer’s salon in your heart, and get you so blasted on claret and literary certainty that the only limb you’ll be able to move is your hand, as long as there’s a pen in it. Otherwise, you’re pretty much fucked, paralyzed by every notion that wants to kamikaze itself onto the page in an explosion of homesickness and ink, and can’t. Yes, I’m convinced – take a sabbatical if need be, but I’m not gonna see you fall to such a sorry state as quitting writing entirely. You have such a way with words, and inevitably, words will have their way with you – and I don’t think it’s wrong of me to say that I look forward to that day with great anticipation.

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Actually, they’re just to disguise the hangover.

I finished my journal today, one day less than a month after starting it. 186 pages in one month, and surprisingly, not all of it is about men or music or madness – most of it is, in fact, ideas for my writing. I’ve kept a careful log, more or less accidentally, of my musings about new directions for my poetry, plans for the novel I’m starting today, the analysis of various influences and why they’re positive or negative at my current stage…It would seem slightly self-involved to the outside observer, but I’m proud of myself in that I have something about which to write than men, music and madness. Granted, de-compartmentalization of my idea notebooks makes for one very scattered and slightly confusing journal, but I do hope I’m the only one reading it and it therefore doesn’t matter.

I wonder at the influences this, my new apartment, will bring. After a hectic week on Rockwell, I’ve moved into my brother’s studio, and feel very at home. A sunny outlook and the usage of my Tetris talents in regards to interior design made organizing the place an easy task. It’s hard to anticipate how this apartment will influence my writing, but I’m excited to find out. Everywhere I’ve lived in the past year has given a different flavor to my poems – the old wooden floors of the west side roach den gave me the voice of antique ghosts, the high-rise downtown gave me a bout of sterile lunacy, and the garden apartment on Rockwell wasn’t without its (fleeting) moments of peace. As far as I can tell, all of the energy currently swarming around in the new place comes from good things: sunlight, two very fat and happy kitties, always-open windows, family, full hours to myself, close proximity to gorgeous college boys, and my brother’s bacheloriffic spirit of youth. There are, you see, too many mini-muses to be ignored, but they’re not yet speaking to me – that, or I’m just not listening hard enough.

The debut of the literary journal will be April 25th. I’m still enjoying the mask of Editor, and am viewing my side project (a new novel) as playtime, as opposed to the work going into the zine. I’m not even allowing myself to begin said novel until I’ve emailed everyone back about their submissions, as I do not wish to get burned out on the novel before it’s finished. I look at it as fun, and should – writing is the most fun one can have by themselves without taking their clothes off. I had a very successful job interview on Friday and may be gainfully employed after the second interview tomorrow, so writing the novel will also be a happy refuge from the eight hours of reality that must be endured in order to maintain a cabinet full of ramen, not to mention my status as a world-class chainsmoker. Throughout the duration of those two major projects, I’m still formatting Two Seasons, and capturing as many mini-muses in my butterfly net as possible and smearing their wings onto the pages of my composition notebook in a pretty manner. It seems like a lot of work to take on at once, but nothing I can’t handle, and nothing I didn’t bring onto myself. “Buy the ticket, take the ride.”

At the moment, I’m surrounded by a room of full-grown adults having a wonderful time with Legos. I should cease the work talk and go be social amongst my kin: those madly in love with life’s simple pleasures. Yes…Sundays were made for Legos.

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My caffeinated state makes me worry about the morning.  I intend to beat the roomies to the shower, which should be a challenge given that we’re all job-hunting tomorrow and intend to all wake at the same sane hour.  (It seems normal society’s definition of sane is not two PM.  Perhaps our apartment should be its own country with its own rules.  I should design a flag.)  The idea of morning in general still intimidates me.  We’ve never quite seen eye to eye, and a coffee cup being hurled against the wall or tears being shed over a single strand of hair not being where I want it to be, are events not entirely impossible in my up-before-noon routine.  On the right morning (if there is such a thing!), I could be granted a Melodrama degree on the spot.  Especially when the only things on the To-Do list are job-hunting and cleaning the house.

But!  I have received a LOT of submissions for the literary journal so far, and am still going over them.  So, that’s a good distraction from the hell of getting up and actually having to do things.  Distractions are to be savored right now, whatever form they take – even the occasional headache that comes from putting on my Editor hat, is a blessing.  Between the house in a curious state of We Don’t All Know Precisely Where We’ll Be Living In A Week, and other intriguing situations about which I have eighteen conflicting but heartfelt opinions at any given time, my own head’s a fairly loud place to be right now.   As Jess said earlier, talking to yourself is one thing – losing arguments with yourself presents a whole new slew of problems.  It’s nothing a good cup of coffee and a soothing Roger Daltrey ballad can’t fix, to be sure, but at present, I feel rather claustrophobic about it all.

It’s all fabulous for poetry, though, which always leads me to see any situation in a brighter light.  When life hands you a pile of crap, make poetry.  Unless it hands you that crap before noon, in which case life can go fuck itself.  Which reminds me, I greatly need to invest in a bottle of melatonin.  That stuff is just beautiful.

I finished reading Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas today.  I’m sort of glad I didn’t know Hunter S. Thompson in any way personally, because my dumb ass would’ve fallen totally in love with him if only for the sentence, “The room looked like the site of some disastrous zoological experiment involving whiskey and gorillas.”  He appeals to my capacity for mental imagery in a way that most writers cannot, and like a lot of poetry, is very vivid and descriptive but with a gauzy sheen (or cloud of Marlboro smoke) blurring the lines, diffusing the bombs.  He’s a pleasure, all in all, and I can’t wait to read everything he’s ever done, and hopefully someday party with him in the Afterlife.

Still winding my way through the Nietzsche – treacherous waters, ones I’m not sure I want to influence me in any particular way.  It’s got me writing strange maxims in my head, which just seems unnecessary with all that’s happening in there already.  My next read will be, I hope, compelling in storyline but embarrassingly mindless in content.  Maybe a romance novel.  Or Pat the Bunny.

Bands and musicians that are rocking my life right now:

-Kate Nash

-The Dresden Dolls

-The Mountain Goats

-The Killers

-The Real Tuesday Weld

One of my favorite feelings in the world is walking down the street, blasting the iPod and really letting the music take me over, change my pace, make me dance down the street.  It’s like Buddhist Pizza: make me one with everything!

I think I shall now scamper off to the land of sleep.  Be well, all!

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I was loaned a copy of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, and for the last twenty-four hours it has been a good friend to me, and I appreciate and am impressed by what I’ve read thus far. I do, however, have a bone to pick with one of the maxims. I recognize that my argument comes a century and a half too late, but bear with me.

“Poets,” Nietzsche says, “behave impudently towards their experiences: they exploit them.”

If this is true, isn’t all art exploitation? An artist of any kind takes something personal and small – an idea, an emotion, a nightmare – externalizes it in a bigger way, and calls it art. No matter the media of any particular outpouring, it remains the same concept. Journalism can sometimes be exploitation – all else is expression. If such expressions are marketable, it is not because they are an exploitation of the emotions of the writer, or the reader; they are marketable because they are universal. Ideas, emotions, nightmares; poets write to make sense of these things, and readers take similar comfort in the finished product. Poetry is an interpretation of experience, and often brighter and more magical than the experience itself. Poets kill nothing in the telling, and take pride in removing the stains from everyday life, and making it shine. All poetry pays a tribute of some kind and serves to deepen the intensity of all emotions, not to cheapen them.

Oscar Wilde in his divine cynicism once wrote, “They [poets] know how useful a passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.” While it seems he’s agreeing with Nietzsche on the intentions of poets, I imagine he’s also mourning the fact. Oscar watched with the rest of the Victorian era as poetry moved away from being the work of poets alone, and became the household hobby of affluent men and bored housewives. It’s intriguing, then, that it was around this time that poetry lost popularity as an Art, and could be then looked at as a Career. Ironic, that those who often describe themselves as poets, make very little money at it. Does that not prove that poetry is written for the sake of poetry alone, and not as any calculated exploitation? To imply that poets exploit broken hearts is a sort of vicious cycle of superfluousness, as love is free – and perhaps that is why it makes such good currency amongst those with empty wallets and ever-moving pens.

It’s possible that Nietzsche, like Oscar, was simply bemoaning the fallen state of a beloved art form. He felt comfortable saying, “We talk so abstractly about poetry, because we are all bad poets.” This is perhaps why he is better known for his philosophy, than his poems. Despite not always agreeing with him, I can’t ignore him, nor can I argue against his relevance in today’s world. After all, he did say that “only sick music makes money today,” and one has to wonder if he was merely a philosopher, or a prophesier who saw the Jonas Brothers coming a mile off. Now there’s someone worthy of accusations of exploitation – pester them, and leave us poets to our renaissance of Art For Art’s Sake. The attempt may be financially futile, but worthy of expression all the same.

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