(no subject)

So, this morning one of the publicists came in with about a dozen poster frames, all purchased from the same place, to use in a lobby display they're putting up. Each poster frame had an insert that announced in enormous red letters "24x36" and had, incongruously, a random image of the Statue of Liberty beneath it. As I walked through the lobby I couldn't help myself.

Me: So our next new smash hit show is going to be 24 by 36?
Publicist: Starring the Statue of Liberty!
Me: In her Chicago debut!
Publicist: You've seen her in films, you've seen her in New York, but you've never seen her like this!
Me: We're gonna put her out on the lake, get her a little island, it'll be just like home.

When I came back to the box office after my errand, I found the rest of the staff had overheard us and was discussing the concept of what kind of "Statue Of" would be in the waters off Chicago. I suggested, given its history, Chicago would have a statue of Commerce, or possibly a tribute to Architecture.

I think the final decision was that it would be a woman holding a beer in one hand and a paper tray of hot dogs in the other, wearing a Bears jersey and a Cubs hat.

(no subject)

I'm home!

Rather late, as I had to run by the library and renew my book or it would be dollars and dollars overdue. I also thought I would pick up Twenty Years After, the sequel to The Three Musketeers, but it's like a conspiracy. No bookstore I've been to (all four) has stocked it, and the Chicago public library system only has two copies that aren't missing, neither of them at the central library that I consider "my" branch. I have the etext, but it's hard to read all that history he crams into the start of it on a computer screen.

Anyway, as I was leaving I saw a biography of Edwin Arlington Robinson, so I picked that up instead. And that's where my evening dips deeply into the well of weird.

Lots has been said about writers being asked where they get their ideas. It's not actually that hard to answer, at least for me -- I get my ideas from reading, from watching people, chance happenstance, methods of looking at the world. The problem is that sometimes my ideas get me.

I don't know where Ellis Graveworthy comes from. I know where "Ellis" comes from, Havelock Ellis, a poet that one of my friends wrote a play about in undergrad (I designed the production). I know that his first incarnation as Ellis was in the Ellis Erdmore Digressions, a long-unfinished germ of a novel you can find somewhere in my Memories if you look. But I don't know where I got him. I can see him echoing up through everything I've written, right from the first short story I wrote when I was thirteen, which came from a dream. He's not in every story, but in many, in various forms, in various stages of development.

That's not so spooky. What's weird is that I see him in places I haven't been. I claim his heritage in CC is at least in part the heritage of Federico Garcia-Lorca, a poet who died in a Spanish war, but the truth is that I wrote his story before I knew Garcia-Lorca's. (Even now I'm not sure I've spelled his name right. It is Fed and not Fred, yes?)

I cracked open the biography of EA Robinson this evening and halfway through page four of the introduction, there was Ellis.

Robinson did not use his time to join organizations, and he was never drawn into the squabbling of literary factions. All his life he remained very much his own man. [...] What he could easily forgive in others, Robinson could not countenance in himself. He cared deeply for his family and friends. As troubles threatened to overtake them, Robinson came to their aid with sympathy and understanding, money and counsel. Time and again he served as a fixer, one whose insights helped relieve those in distress. [...] Robinson was one of the most private persons who ever lived. With a secretiveness that went beyond the customary Yankee standard, he concealed himself behind barriers and rarely spoke of the most important events of his life. Despite the silence and withdrawals, Robinson had a gift for friendship.

It seems pretty general, sitting there with all those ellipses in it, but it resonates in a way I can't really articulate. "Win" Robinson is an ancestor of El Graveworthy's. And while I've loved his poetry for years (you can find Robinson's "Flammonde" quoted as a header in alternate chapters of Amid My Solitude), I've never read anything about the man until today. Garcia-Lorca and Robinson aren't the only times I've encountered this, either.

I honestly don't know where Ellis comes from, or why he crosses through the work I do so cleanly, with such omnipresence. I half-believe I'm being melodramatic about some ideal writer my subconscious vomited up, but you know what? No. I'm not, really. I like him immensely and thoroughly enjoy writing him (and his books, and his poems...) but he is just a trifle unsettling, too.

In other news, I hummed six notes of the theme song to the Andy Griffith show, and by the end of the day everyone in the box office had it stuck in their heads. I win at annoying. :D