The Urban Sherpa - a blog by Christopher DeWan

(Don't worry: I won't off myself till I at least have a book deal...)

Featured Entry:

The Labyrinth, Part 1

Originally posted: May 7, 2011

Picasso Minotaur (cropped)

There was a monster....

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Recent Entries:

Unpacking Home rating=2 new!

May 3, 2012
File under: Housekeeping

Bungalow Heaven

Since moving to Pasadena, I've been in a sort of haze. Maybe since the weather's been mostly cloudy so have I. Maybe the dust, taken to flight from dragging and arranging so much furniture, has been mucking up my brain. Maybe I'm exhausted from all the packing: wrapping up one's memories, boxing them, carrying them and hoping they won't break, and then trying to arrange them into a new place, where they don't yet belong. Trying to find new places for old things takes a toll.

Maybe it's all the latent hope, the potential energy of the bare white walls, the empty cabinets, the unfurnished floors, all the imagining of all the possible future lives that I'll live here.

At what point does the new place become home? Is it gradual, as it's seasoned with our experiences? Or does it happen because we invoke that magic word, "Home," like an incantation, a spell of slow teleportation and wishes-come-true?

Still lots more to unpack....

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Reckoning rating=3 new!

March 25, 2012
File under: Raison d'ętre

Forest for the trees

The first quarter of the year has gone by and I haven't spent much attention on my blog. If you're a reader (thank you), please don't be alarmed: I've spent my attention on a lot of things—hopefully interesting things.1 Since the blog has always been a forum for me to experiment and play and puzzle out the ways in which I'm colliding with the world, I want to reassure you (and myself): I'm still experimenting, and playing, and puzzling. I've been busy, creative, and curious: exactly the way I want always to be.

I think of this blog as a sort of scrapbook where I can experiment with ways of reckoning with my confusions about the world. Sometimes, when I'm not writing, it's because I'm too overwhelmed with those confusions: they feel beyond my reckoning. But other times (like now), it's simply that those reckonings have found other outlets. And thank god, because, as much as I love writing this blog, ... it's just a blog; and it's nice sometimes to think that the sum of my life's work will include more than a pile of pixels on a screen.

I think often about something that novelist Zadie Smith said in an interview for The Literateur:

"It’s not a genre: 'experimental fiction'." The kind of experimental writer I care about is not the kind who sits down intending to write ‘experimentally’ so he can be part of some hipster crowd. DFW wrote the only way he knew how to, which was irreducibly strange. There are as many fraudulent ‘experimental’ writers as there are fraudulent ‘literary writers’. DFW was not a fraud. Kafka wasn’t intending ‘experiment’ as a kind of brand, nor was Beckett. Nor was Djuna Barnes. They were intending to be truthful to their own conceptions of the world, and it happened that their truths were rigorous, painful and difficult.

It's the same, I think, with life more generally: it's not a genre, "experimental living." We do what we can to carve out days that feel true and honest to our understanding of things. We continue to challenge our assumptions and try to steer toward experiences that will help us grow, without wounding us. And sometimes, often, we write about it.

1. Specifically, I've been hard at work writing two teleplays, revising a screenplay, designing two classes for the upcomg spring and fall, and helping to create two new web properties that I think will make the crowded Internet a little bit of a better place. Good times.2

2. Truth be told, I haven't made much headway on revising that screenplay.

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Aesop Wasn't a Drinker rating=2 new!

March 7, 2012
File under: Pithyisms

Slowest and steadiest avoids the race. You can find him at the bar.

 

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Sleeper, Awake rating=3 new!

February 2, 2012
File under: Cogito Ergo, Mythic Proportions, Pithyisms

Last night, I dreamt that I lay in bed, disappointed that I wasn't asleep, dreaming.

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Greek Tragicomedy rating=2 new!

January 30, 2012
File under: Mythic Proportions, Pithyisms, Star Fucker

Aeschylus was offered the screenwriting job because producers misread Agamemnon as Armageddon, and his fear of their inevitable discovery kept him from doing his best work during the rewrite of the Transformers sequel.

 
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