The Book of Flying

The Book of Flying by Keith Miller

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
I finished it few days ago. Having allowed it to sit in my head for a bit, I think it is safe to say that this is my favorite book. Yes, my favorite.

The writing is the most superb combination of prose and poetic language I have ever seen. It is a pleasure to read and to speak out loud. The characters are beloved and entrancing, the world beautiful and fascinating, Pico's journey perfect and poignant. It is a story about stories, an ode to journeys, dreams, love, and flight in every form.

I loved it so much. Read it. You won't be sorry.


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Odds, Bobs, and Tidbits.

I was supposed to be working on my Genetics essay. Instead, I was sifting through old files, things from high school I had forgotten about. I was expecting to shudder a lot. I didn't. A lot of it, I don't remember writing it. Most of the time, when I looked at my writing from high school in the past, it was much worse than I had thought at the time. Not so today. Did some of it need polishing? Duh. Were there mistakes there that I wouldn't have made now? Of course.
Nevertheless: it was actually quite good, a lot of it. Even with the hyper-unpolished stuff, the ideas were still solid. I had all sorts of tidbits floating around on old Sheila, scattered streams-of-conciousness and little pieces of prose.
It was cool.
Here is a tidbit I found. There file's name was Darkness.doc. No title is stated in the text. I can tell I wrote it, but don't remember doing so.

Wasn’t your usual absence-of-light sort of darkness, wasn’t nearly passive enough. Existed in its own right, like sun beams, but wasn’t as direct as light, coiled around everything, sought to fill as much space as possible, seeped into the marrow of things. Was alive. Could smell fear.

The girl stared at the wisps of shadow winding themselves around her ankles. Think of them as a blanket. A nice, soft, protective blanket. Keep moving. She closed her eyes, found her own darkness, took a deep breath, and slowly blew out her own smoky trail of dark. This one, warm and human, comforted, similar to the darkness of the womb or a deep sleep, but with a life of its own. Spirals moved around her, reminding the greater dark that she was not theirs.

The deeper dark moved in on the spirals, coating them, but not suffocating, like a large, dangerous dog deciding that you had it’s approval. Frightening but harmless, so long as she kept her head straight.

Not bad. I wonder where it came from.
Another tidbit, this one rather priceless and not in the least written by me. The file's name is Letter to Carla.doc. When you open it, your eyes get a nice shock, as the blank parts of the page, usually white, are now neon blue. The text is as follows.

Hey Carla it’s me Armand I just want to say I love you and am so happy that you're coming back!!!! You’re the best sister I ever hade!! Do you want to whach I am legend with Danielle and my Friend and I? IL never ferret you when your gone Carla. Has any one told you that you’re beautiful? Hi Yoshiro what’s up? Take care of her; don’t make her sad our some thing is going to Happen to you. Am watching you.

I like the fact that Happen is capitalized. Also, I love my little brother.
In other news, I actually did get work done today. Yay.
Also, I've realized why, even though I'm not going through a dry spell, I haven't had much to report to Kailyn. Sure I get lots of ideas, but unless I'm actively doing something with them, they drift off. I could try to formulate and plan my stories out, but that always makes for the stiff stuff. I mean, obviously that's important, you can't write a novel as you would a spontaneous scene. But. Butbutbut. All the good stuff I write... I just write it. I won't say I don't think when I do it, cause I do, but only as much as is necessary.
So, I'm just going to make things, and not worry about the fact that I don't have much to say at the story-telling pow-wows.
It's not like when I stopped working on my comic, because I am still storytelling.
The play felt good, and I can feel more stirring from where it came from.
Things are going to be picking up speed soon.

Snow

Transcribed from a journal entry:

12/7/08, 3:30ish am, bed, home
Outside, everything is dressed in a thin mask of snow. It reminded me of that one Christmas we spent in Great Neck, where it started snowing a few hours after we got there. I stepped out the front door and stood, arms out, face and palms up, watching with the purest breed of joy. It was a miracle. Soft, fragile, enveloping. As though the sky were raining dreams. After a while I got cold, and went back inside. It was already night when the snow had started falling, so the scene I woke up to still held awezen*. I must have woken up early, because the streets were deserted. Or maybe people simply didn't want to be out in the cold. I don't know. But I remember the thick carpet of quiet bundled around everything, the trees, the pavement, the broken telephone cord calmly bisecting the street, as if it had every right to be there. The lampposts, the rooftops, but most of all the willow tree. Each tendril had its own delicate coat. The snow had preserved every perfect intricacy of the willow in pristine white. Like something out of a fairtytale. I remember explaining it to Nick last year, on that perfect afternoon where we sat at the window and watched the blizzard swirl, whirl, tumble, and flow about. Right after it snows, when everything is still carpeted in quiet - it looks like someone's face when they are sleeping.


*awezen - that which inspires awe

During the Wine-and-Cheese Party

Presenting: A text message written and sent by Carla while drunk to one Adam Bass.

If I were a day, I would contain every sort of weather, my clouds would flow though a myriad of forms, each more fantastic than the last. My winds would plays songs on leaves and lakes and would whisper a thousand inspirations into the ears of poets. My sky would end in flames, followed by a chorus of rain. All would sigh away in a starry night. How is your evening going?

I am a geek, and god do I enjoy it. Being a geek, I mean.
I also like wine. And boys named Adam. And conversations about secrets that break into song in the deep hours of the night.
I should get ready for bed.

Carla Loves Autumn

Written on the Yoko Ono, 10/14/08:
There was piano in the background this morning. I think it may have been coming from the Canon, but I'm not sure. The really impressive thing about it was how far it spread. All around main campus, people were cocking their heads at the sound of plinking keys. There was an actual piano. I know it, because the music was louder in some places than others. Unimportant.
What is important is that it was beautiful. No, it'd be more accurate to say that it made other things more beautiful. There is a difference, you know.
Today is one of those beautiful (a word I know I know I over-use) days one sometimes finds in September or November, but really belong to October. Just cold enough to feel awake and autumnal without being frigid. A tilting breeze caresses the trees, carrying away their leaves. As each of them falls, I imagine they are notes from the mysterious piano, gently plinking down.
The breeze swirls back around again, taking with it a whole new flurry of notes. Its melody teases my hair and explores the contours of my face. An ink-wash sky glows on my back, just for a moment, as I breathe in and take the music with me.

There. I've been meaning to transcribe that for a couple days now. The Octoberness of everything is almost making me dizzy. This is my favorite time of year. I can see the lovely, old, slightly eerie lamps that dot their light along the paths from my front window. The wind is even more talkative than usual, buzzing with the ghosts of a thousand leaves as it sweeps its way across my room. An enchanting trumpet tenders its way through my side window, the shyer of the two. I hear crunching footsteps from who-knows-where, and a series of curled, crinkly, little memories tumble against my screens during their descent.
There is a reason Halloween happens in October.
It's a good thing study-days have arrived, because Autumn is tugging at the running, beating core of me, and I really don't think I can sit still for much longer.

When I close my eyes, I am covered in tattoos. They are a mix of stylized images and tribal markings and odd symbols (some of them I know, others I do not) and it all comes together as one giant expression of me. I wish everyone was covered in tattoos, so that I could read them as they walk by. I have been on edge today and wish to calm down.
I wish I could get that damned Dr. Horrible song out of my head.
Meg did a tarot reading for me last night. It was cool. And highly positive. Apparently, I'm doing pretty well for myself. I guess that's true. It all felt true, which is kind of funny, but I guess that's why people believe in fortune-telling in the first place. It's interesting at any rate. She said something to me that meant a lot. She said, "Carla, you can't help but live a wonderful life. It would be against who your are." Actually, I don't remember if she said wonderful, or extraordinary, or what. Hm. But yeah. I wish I could remember exactly what word she used.
I think I should get out of my room.

For the moment, this blog will remain a secret. I type faster than I write, and I don't feel like saving a bunch of silly rantings to my computer.
So, in reading past journals of my life, I have gotten frustrated with myself for being fixated on boys. They are not all I write about, but I really wish that they were a smaller percentage of it.
That being said, I'm going to talk about my current fixation with a boy. It started out as the teeniest of crushes, and now, like an untended stress fracture or an unpruned blackberry bush, has gotten out of hand. It is not an issue of taking up too much pen and paper, it is an issue of taking up far too much of my though time. I could be doing homework, or getting a brilliant idea for a story, or noticing the way the light in the theater building cause cloud patterns to be reflected on the tile floor in an unusual and mesmerizing manner. But no. I have to be thinking about him. And I mean, he's nice to think of to a certain extent... he makes me smile, and then hide my face in my jacket. But there is a such thing as too much. We are getting into pining territory here! I hate pining. Also, I'm out of alcohol.
Flahargablarg!
People are being all social-like outside my room. I think I will do that tomorrow. Maybe if Emily and I see a movie we can invite Taylor and Gowri, and if we invite Taylor and Gowri, maybe we can invite him.
Bah!
A sane person would just ask him out to coffee or something. Let me rephrase. A person who actually had some balls would ask him out to coffee or something.
Why is playwriting only once a week? Why?!
On a side note, I wish playwriting was more than once a week, regardless of the fact that we know have a patter of sitting together and making faces at each other. That class is just made of awesome. Stuart Spencer is my hero.
See, and what's scary is, this is a REAL crush. Like, I had a pretty bad crush on Calder I guess, but... in retrospect, I wonder if it was only because Calder seems like the sort of person who it would make sense for me to have a crush on.
Lukas on the other hand...
He took me on an adventure! What was I supposed to do? And he likes whimsy, and oral story-telling, and macabre stuff, and gets people to act like the children they are, and writes well, and sings well and often and without shame, and has eyes that flash a really bright green when the sun hits them right. And he smells nice.
He adventures!
I... see, I think it's bewildering because I think he might have been showing interest in me. BUT I DON'T KNOW BECAUSE I'M BAD AT THAT SORT OF THING.
Man, it's two in the morning, but I'm not really tired on account of the giant nap I took.
Everywhere I go, I keep looking for him, hoping we'll run into each other. That makes me feel like a creeper.
You know what? I'm probably just extra cranky cause I haven't eaten or done my homework. I think that having done both of those will make me feel better.