Pincushion Queen

i’ve been storing all my brain droppings and subconscious organizations on Pinterest. i just realized that looking at the boards, they’re pretty cohesive and i can spot exactly what piece of my brain i’m storing each picture for – and anyway, they’re pretty. when i’m too tired to write or read and it’s almost bedtime i spend a lot of fifteen minute spurts going “ooooh,” click, “ooooh,” click…

anyway. here’s a link to the page itself and to a few of the boards. they’re purty.

Main Page: http://pinterest.com/mandajunemiller/

Cipher Sister: http://pinterest.com/mandajunemiller/cipher-sister-a-collection-2013-thunderdome-press/

Brain: http://pinterest.com/mandajunemiller/brain/

Beauty in People : http://pinterest.com/mandajunemiller/beauty-in-people/

Ghosts : http://pinterest.com/mandajunemiller/ghosts/

Nefarious :http://pinterest.com/mandajunemiller/nefarious/

Bucket List: Justin Townes Earle

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo VS. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

yes, yes, i realize everyone’s already done this, and most are more well-informed since i haven’t even read the book – but i don’t really want to talk about Rooney Mara’s ass or Daniel Craig’s inability to seem vulnerable when judging the American version against the Swedish version.

just want to talk about Lisbeths. just want to talk about Noomi Rapace vs. Rooney Mara. just want to talk about something very, very different in these two performances that i haven’t seen mentioned yet (and if it’s all over the place and i’m regurgitating, forgive me):

Noomi Rapace’s Lisbeth: sociopath

Rooney Mara’s Lisbeth: psychopath

both women play the role admirably, but the interpretations are sooo different. Rapace’s Lisbeth is a coiled snake – a tightly wound ball of rage and vulnerability and intelligence. NEVER does she seem to be anything other than in complete control and completely aware of what she’s doing, be it testing her attraction/feelings for her male companion or carving a bloody tattoo in a rapist’s chest. there’s never a snap or a click when you feel she’s floated away and given in to her rage and it is driving her.

The opposite is true of Rooney Mara – in the same scenes (mainly the violent ones, of course) Mara goes distinctly different behind the eyes and seems absolutely consumed. She’s a different Lisbeth when she commits these acts, she is Rage, she is Not There. you see the blink and suddenly smart and guarded Lisbeth has become the creature that carves names on people’s chests and asks permission to kill, because she’s incapable of making such a decison.

for this, i respect Rapace’s performance, as well as her Lisbeth, more than Mara’s. I don’t know if it’s an American preference – we want people (especially a female we want to like) to lose it before they do horrifying things so we don’t have to blame them? i don’t know.

it’s Lecter vs. Gumb for me – the Aware will always be more compelling.

 

The Batman Ring

Messes with my head when I’m up so much earlier than everyone. Kiddo got leapt upon by 3 lbs of black fur at around 3:30 – now kid, dad and aforementioned ball of fur are all nicely settled together in the big bed. Me? Im wider than a stick of gum and had to slip away.

My toenails look fabulous, I want to photograph them, but that’s the same part of me that just spent too long looking for a plastic batman ring I saw shoved on the cat’s ear last evening.

Lets see. What, what? Fourth of july weekend was all the stuff it is supposed to be, more “classic” than any we’ve had so far – kid games at the park, dunk tank with the mayor, swimming, grilling, sparklers, fireworks. Maybe adam’s best holiday to date; Lily really brings out the satyr in him. (Photos in a later post)

There’s a lot of fog.

My stories are getting more compact – working on this thing, thought it was about a whole night, got interrupted, back to it later and I realized it needed two more lines. What, maybe 400 words? But sometimes you WANT something to be sex but instead it’s about moths and alcoholism. It’s voice work, I think. Anais Nin crisis – I go back and forth between Henry & June and her erotica, and try to figure out what she was trying to figure out – the journal voice turning to the writer voice. Henry figured it out, or maybe he just said fuck it. Maybe this is about form. Don’t know. Just know that things that come from scribbles and journal scraps and bundled thoughts fallen from the sky (tied together with cigarette string and stored near the X-files trivia but not too close to the D’inofrio box) shine up into a lot more like my voice than my “this is the story” planned tales. It’s like I put on my fancy writing hat – I dont write anything fancy, but the voices are distinctly different… bridget’s voice is the only narrative voice I like, and its just (to paraphrase andrea speaking of something different) the out loud version of me. We’ll see how all that pans out.

these are good thoughts to have while it becomes daylight and the fog refuses to burn off.

If i had the batman ring, perhaps the answers would feel closer.

Too many books on the side table, but I guess it’s good –  I can say Fuck it to the voice earwhig and listen to other voices for the moment. Ahem, allow me to catalog : Knockemstiff, By the Time We Leave Here We’ll Be Friends, Clown Girl, Henry & June, Sexus, Erotica by Anais Nin. Thats an impressive table. If the PBS schedule and One Fish Two Fish weren’t amongst the pile it would be downrigh hip – and no doubt a calculated lie of a pile.

But this is not about the table. This is about the Warmed & Bound Release Party, isn’t it? No, maybe it’s about the Booked podcast that terrifies me to no end. I shall ramble in new and horrifying ways, and I am AFRAID. Big mouth, more nervous = more talking.

But the release party is exciting shit. Why? Shoes. Shoes and the 1920s and meeting all these people – I want to know what these typed voices sound like out loud, I want to match faces to stories, I want to hit on waitresses dressed as flappers.

I want a pink bandanna for my pirate costume, and to FIND THAT BATMAN RING!!!

 

for him

Poem 50 (“I lost my way, I forgot …”) by Leonard Cohen

I lost my way, I forgot to call on your name. The raw heart beat against the world, and the tears were for my lost victory. But you are here. You have always been here. The world is all forgetting, and the heart is a rage of directions, but your name unifies the heart, and the world is lifted into its place. Blessed is the one who waits in the traveller’s heart for his turning.

~~~~~

The Phoenix Bird

by

Hans Christian Andersen

(1850)

N the Garden of Paradise, beneath the Tree of Knowledge, bloomed a rose bush. Here, in the first rose, a bird was born. His flight was like the flashing of light, his plumage was beauteous, and his song ravishing. But when Eve plucked the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, when she and Adam were driven from Paradise, there fell from the flaming sword of the cherub a spark into the nest of the bird, which blazed up forthwith. The bird perished in the flames; but from the red egg in the nest there fluttered aloft a new one—the one solitary Phoenix bird. The fable tells that he dwells in Arabia, and that every hundred years, he burns himself to death in his nest; but each time a new Phoenix, the only one in the world, rises up from the red egg.

The bird flutters round us, swift as light, beauteous in color, charming in song. When a mother sits by her infant’s cradle, he stands on the pillow, and, with his wings, forms a glory around the infant’s head. He flies through the chamber of content, and brings sunshine into it, and the violets on the humble table smell doubly sweet.

But the Phoenix is not the bird of Arabia alone. He wings his way in the glimmer of the Northern Lights over the plains of Lapland, and hops among the yellow flowers in the short Greenland summer. Beneath the copper mountains of Fablun, and England’s coal mines, he flies, in the shape of a dusty moth, over the hymnbook that rests on the knees of the pious miner. On a lotus leaf he floats down the sacred waters of the Ganges, and the eye of the Hindoo maid gleams bright when she beholds him.

The Phoenix bird, dost thou not know him? The Bird of Paradise, the holy swan of song! On the car of Thespis he sat in the guise of a chattering raven, and flapped his black wings, smeared with the lees of wine; over the sounding harp of Iceland swept the swan’s red beak; on Shakspeare’s shoulder he sat in the guise of Odin’s raven, and whispered in the poet’s ear “Immortality!” and at the minstrels’ feast he fluttered through the halls of the Wartburg.

The Phoenix bird, dost thou not know him? He sang to thee the Marseillaise, and thou kissedst the pen that fell from his wing; he came in the radiance of Paradise, and perchance thou didst turn away from him towards the sparrow who sat with tinsel on his wings.

The Bird of Paradise—renewed each century—born in flame, ending in flame! Thy picture, in a golden frame, hangs in the halls of the rich, but thou thyself often fliest around, lonely and disregarded, a myth—“The Phoenix of Arabia.”

In Paradise, when thou wert born in the first rose, beneath the Tree of Knowledge, thou receivedst a kiss, and thy right name was given thee—thy name, Poetry.

~~~~~

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

by e.e. cummings

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
  

nymphish stories at Nefarious Muse

here we go!

three short pieces, the first auto-biographical (and therefore borderline vomit-inducing) work ever to be exposed to eyes other than mine… bit of a departure from the blood and guts, faithful to the dark, as always….

http://nefariousmuse.com/2011/05/06/three-stories-by-amanda-gowin/

happy rainy may (shootin’ some guns)

rain rythm

they say there will be twisters and hail and mayhem and sideways wind and monsters and flash floods and families of bigfoots (don’t believe that’s the correct pluralization? please check out this awesome documentary by Jay Delaney, Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie, now streaming on netflix – if they don’t know about Bigfoot in Portsmouth, OH, then who does?? the fish glow in that place) forced to relocate to higher land, forming a long line of chewbacca-like silhoettes in the distance – but no one will see any of this, due to the STORM and the twisters and the witches and cows in trees…

so they say. i just hear steady spring rain, that dictates the tv and radio be OFF.

turns out i like doing ten things at once, provided they all involve a keyboard or an ink pen. i’m a happy clam. between the movie, some shorts i fixed up for Nefarious Muse, a brewing thing at Thunderdome, random dancing every time i think of the Velvet Anthology, my little brain feels tingly right behind the eyes.

adam fell asleep in under 4 seconds. the last puppy found a home. i love my husband. i wish i could be the receptionist at dollstar. my kid picked up ten very mundane then extraordinary rocks once he explained to me what they like and when asked by mike what was up, adam answered “it’s mommy’s collection.”

nyquil and exhaustion are making me contemplate a 6 dollar pink alice in wonderland t-shirt far longer than it need be pondered. that’s my cue to sign off for the night….

pertinent links:

Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie: http://notyourtypicalbigfootmovie.com/

Nefarious Muse: http://nefariousmuse.com/

Thunderdome: http://thundadome.com/

Warmed And Bound: http://warmedandbound.wordpress.com/2011/04/14/authors/

the best of april (photos)

gratuitous visual post

Muscle Brain

i think i like writing sci-fi. i think i like it a lot. beth and i are just getting rolling on a screenplay for martin, and jesus it’s fun. no boundaries. and i LOVE working with her. it’s like boxing and synchronized swimming all at the same time. i don’t what the hell that even means, only that working on this project makes my brain tired and happy. i’ve been working on a lot of shit lately that makes my brain tired and happy.

eric reeeeeally wanted to see jackass 3, and he said it was because he thought it would be super funny, but i know that at least some of it was motivated deep down to make me STOP seeing  johnny knoxville as a dirty sex machine. see, i don’t like jackass. not interested in seeing  johnny knoxville or anybody else for that matter do that stupid shit. i remember when my love for him solidified – it as that damned poster.

black and white poster, shirtless, low-slung jeans, elvis glasses, and fucking taser cords attached to his chest. i didn’t care who he was, i just knew i wanted to be holding the gun… i stick to his movie appearances – that one with the Rock, and the spectacular John Waters’  ”A Dirty Shame.” oh, Ray-Ray.

i’m not saying i wouldn’t spend the morning after a Fun Night with mr. johnny knoxville in the shower with a scouring pad and a bottle of bleach while my sheets burned in a dumpster, i’m just also not saying i would turn that night down if the opportunity presented itself.

so, the recurring  johnny knoxville dreams are back. i just turned away from the gross stuff and focused on whether he looked better in black or red chucks during the other scenes.

my brain is tired. gonna watch the Fighter. 

Day 3

2nd shift is a bitch to get used to. harder than i thought. the mornings are great, but adam is adjusting to daylight savings time and resenting the hell out of me for being not-daddy at bedtime, so it’s rough. strange and rough. i don’t have any sort of pattern yet. it feels like saturday morning then eric LEAVES.

no writing to speak of, but that will come. i’m cooking two things – one is for heather and the other is a more appropriate continuation for chapter4, bridget’s backstory is falling around her in bits and pieces and snatches of overheard conversation – i’m nearing a split that is not going to be nearly as complicated as i was trying to make it. forget the fancy tricks, i’m just going to tell the story and move things around if i feel like it once it’s out.

kiddo is singing lady gaga to ponyo. it’s 10:30. gah.

i nap with him, i’m spoiled siesta-wise. 

i dreamed i had sex with justin timberlake and got pregnant, and all of this was happening in sort of a 50′s-era surf movie, and he was very “i want a baby, i’ve been ready” (who knew??) and i was standing on a beach in a pink two-piece and had a really fabulous ponytail. i was 3 equal parts divided: ”oh no! social mores, out of wedlock,  just one time and i’m pregnant, what a 50s PSA i am!”  and one third “i am fucked. is eric going to kill me, or is he going to be very joseph to my mary with this whole having justin timberlake’s baby thing?” and one third “what a bullseye. what a good-looking kid this will be. one night stand to lifetime of involvement, this won’t be bad.” i think i’m kind of a bad person in my dreams. anyway, i woke up during the sunset beach conversation feeling very weird about the whole thing as my 3 yr old was still asleep next to me…

the trees are budding, the birds are back, the grass is greening.

lonely.

love song for my (not that) faraway love:

zombie stomper

i have danced many a dance and texted many a midnight text this week – i think 2011 is becoming just a bang-up year.

there’s this thing that makes me dance, and this other thing that makes me dance, and then there are people that make me dance, and then there’s that familiar foot-jiggle that’s beginning, the first sure sign of a writing jag. the jiggling foot makes me dance.

i’ll elaborate on the dance reasons later. of course all the dancing is done to Gaga because that’s what the little man wants. and at this point i’ve got the volume cranked and am belting “GONNA LOVE YOU WITH MY HANDS TIED!’  all by myself in the car.

i should probably be doing more to spread this around. depending on the rain/ice situation in the morning, little man and i may head to guhl’s and buy up some fabric for zombie monkeys and other homemade gifts for the list and also just because i have a new list of people that i just want to do SOMETHING to make them smile. i think for some monkeys i’ll do stuffing brains, and for tamer versions there can be dangling button eyes. this should be fun. mail is fun.

i got to talk to my sister for like a half hour last night which is a wonderful miracle in itself – 2 hours of regular-people talk at top speed with over-lapping and sentence-finishing equals a half hour for us, and makes me feel very firmly rooted on the same planet as that girl.

eric starts his new job on monday – seriously things are crazy happy good. and i don’t have the cloud with this. there seems no reason to be peering at the sky constantly for the very vague edges of the jar. don’t think it’s close, anywhere close at all.

that’s what happens when spring is close enough to taste. the rain stops hurting and “cold” becomes “invigorating” and all the old skins start to flake, and out we shimmy.

oh, the title. the zombie stompers. i was really happy about certain developments involving a project that uses words like “cover,” paperback,”  “printing” etc. and we can blame my impulses on barbie, whatever, but i thought that a riduculous and fabulous pair of shoes that i would keep forever would be an excellent way to commemorate my name in connection with the word “print.” enter the Limited Edition Glow In the Dark Zombie Stomper … or at least the wait list. someday, someday.

and how better to say goodnight? the cheshire cat is mewing sleepy happy under the house, the rain is drumming, and i have lovely photos of my son(sun) dressed in a tissue paper lady Gaga costume, and a shoe that will one day be mine.

i love the world.

birds

there were nuthatches on the birdfeeder when we woke. that’s the best thing i’ve seen in a long time…

things are coming awake. i’m coming awake. eric is coming awake. adam is… well, poor thing is benefiting from the end of hibernation.

job change on the horizon for mi esposo very soon, his eyes are bluer and he sleeps better as a result. and i sleep better as a result. and adam sleeps better as a result of the bluer eyes – if daddy is happy, adam is happy.

yesterday was library storytime, there was a valentine’s day party. i had my first taste of primal animal protectiveness when i left him in an entirely different room on a rug with 15 strange children. he is large. he is grown up. he attends storygroups. he gets valentines from little girls, in a little paper sack covered with stickers and his name written on it in magic marker. he gets approached by little girls from the group in mcdonald’s. little girls with blond hair dart from unknown places to tell my son hello.

seriously, at one point he didn’t have teeth, i swear.

birthday party on sunday. i forgot to send the invitations, i’ve been frantically soliciting RSVPs via email. looks like i squeaked by again, everyone seems to be coming.  what a fiasco the party will be- i hate this sort of thing. oh well. not about me.  adam will have an awesome time – there’s a “bouncy bean” so it’s bound to be a success.

taken some rejections, they sting less and less. my confidence grows. got a non-answer from a lady whose opinion meant more than the story rejection that came moments after her email, and i was able to read the rejection with a huge smile and a “what the hell do you know?”  attitude.

SPRING IS IN THE AIR, MOTHAFUCKAS!!!!

and on the heels of that horrible language, here are some photos adam took this week on his playskool camera:

doom

i have a very cliche sense of  foreboding, accomanied by a very cliche lump in my throat (but that could just be sleeping sans cold pills and the difficulty in that). woke up all the way with eric this morning, had much conversation and um, yeah, so we talked for awhile and i told him i didn’t want him to go – i don’t know if it’s because i was awake with him and that caused a sense of gravity for the 5am time, or if i was awake because of the gravity of the sense of foreboding. i told him as much but he said he just had too much to do. it occurred to me that the delay of him could not only have offset the schedule of real/imagined doom, but may have in fact SET OFF the schedule of real/imagined doom.

i fell back to sleep hearing him taking out the trash and thinking what an awful last thing that would’ve been to do at your home if you never came back, and wondering if he’d looked in on adam before he left.

then dreamed. dreamed i was scully, and mulder and i were investigating murders at a trailer camp rental motel type place – we got there at night and got seperate trailers (seriously rancid little boxes with no water or bathrooms) in the mulder and scully style, and i inspected the whole place – dark blue dirty curtains in a square sort of habitat, with a kitchen-like area to one side with gold/yellow dirty linleum counters and an unconnected sink, empty cabinets, and a living room area to the other side, with a foot wide strip of brown shag and yellowed curtains above a tv that didn’t work, the kind with rabbit ears on a tray. but it was all just indications of seperate rooms to give the illusion of an actual suite – it was really just an unmade bed in the center of the small place with the purely decorative “other room” areas flanking the unmade bed in the couple feet of space on each side of the bed. the door to the bathroom opened to outside, to a field behind the trailer park.

i undressed and got into bed (with my gun on my chest) – the sheets were green flannel and the pillowcases were faded pink flowers – it occurred to me after i was already in that the sheets were probably dirty and i wondered what in hell had made me get down to my skivvies and into the damned bed in the first place, but a lucid me-voice inside my scully-head reminded me that i was in the x-files and mulder was in the next trailer and the episode was probably constructed in a way that mulder would see me in my white undies at some point. i was lying there on the dirty pillow contemplating the pros and cons of getting back up to dress (i had already touched the sheets) and trying to remember if i’d deadbolted the door, and was thinking the door should have a chainlock instead of a deadbolt, when i started hearing noises under the trailer. i got up and dressed quickly, pointing my gun at the floor and doing other scully-like things, and there was pouding on the door and i yelled asking who but couldn’t hear through the door, was afraid to open it with no chain lock, more pounding under the floor, and at the door, i finally opened the door and it was mulder, and we immediately began yelling at each other about the ridiculousness of no chain locks being on the doors.

there was some sort of transition that was very spooky, walking across the field and there was fog, a few fireflies scattered, and a big house. it was unlocked and sort of hotel-like, very modern functional, browns and tans that don’t show dirt. we immediately became seperated.

i ended up at the top of a long staircase and knocked on a door, and when it opened it was billy c– and i was me again, but still had a gun. he was surprised to see me, but told me about some sort of event going on that i don’t remember now that made it not THAT odd to run into each other.  he was playing a game on a huge flatscreen and had an open suitcase. there were photos in it, and he said he’d brought them to have copies made and wanted to know if i wanted copies as i was in all of them. they were candid group shots, and i didn’t recognize anyone in the photos, and didn’t see myself OR him in any of them, until he pointed me out in the corners or between people or behind people, just a shadow or fraction of me, like in every movie that the killer is discovered in a stack of photos. above his bed was a row of photos, all of girls we went to highschool with, all in the same position, stretched on their backs with their ankles folded and one arm up by their heads, face toward the camera. all the pictures were of the bed and sheets in my trailer (i know- dunh dunh DUNH!), and i asked billy where they came from and he said they were up when he got there, and i became immediately certain all the girls were dead (and not necessarily SAD about that, there wasn’t a lot to lose in those photos, just to be perfectly honest about my internal shrug in the dream about the deaths themselves) but i was already changing back into scully, and i turned to billy very dramatically and yelled “WHERE’S MULDER?” and he cracked up.  i ran into the hallway and was pointing my gun left then right down the hall when i heard adam say “mommy, it’s time to wake up.”

still the lump in my throat, and no email back from eric but that’s not odd if he is where i think he is and there are no computers or time to check them.

i blame jane s– for the dream but not the foreboding. the dream was just a very interesting and layered manifestion of dread feelings and many X-files conversations over the last few days.

i wish eric had stayed home. i’m off to make more coffee.