madison capitol and height/high standards

Testing the new flickr account.

word laundry has created a flickr account, in which we will post pictures taken around the Madison area, our sweet home, city of a thousand coffeeshops and more restaurants per capita than any other city in the states. It is also home to the only capitol ever built on an isthmus.

Regard this lovely mad-glowing picture of the capitol at night. Our capitol is described by the Wisconsin government website as glowing “like a beacon, accenting the Madison skyline.” This picture certainly demonstrates the building’s beacon-like qualities. It’s practically blazing its head into a fuse. Probably a malfunction of the camera (and my lack of photographic sensibilities).

The skyline, I might add, is rather squat. We have a law prohibiting any building in Madison from being taller than the capitol. It’s a cute idea. Wherever you are in Madison, you’d be able to see the capitol, which makes getting lost not as frightening of an experience.

But I feel that this entry needs some kind of tie to word laundry. How? Well, in the practice of creative writing, one should set high standards. Actually, one should set impossible standards. Have you ever written something you liked, (I mean, really liked), that you were so proud of, that you were afraid that you’d never write anything as good again? Here is my cue for an anecdote. Every time I write something that I think might be decent, I am seized by a chill in the throat. It’s like a weird aftertaste after eating a $100 meal. This unpalatable sensation is a little voice telling me mona, how did you that? that wasn’t you. you’re not really a writer. that was an accident. you won’t be able to replicate that! And then I am overcome with the irrational belief that nothing I write proceeding said piece will be as good. It’s all downhill from here. That’s the tallest point of the skyline. Yup, that’s the attitude.

I’ve come to realize that the panic was not unfounded. The cause of that disastrous brick in the throat / cramp in the hand was actually the subconscious knowledge that I was a lazy writer, passionless, a fraud. I call it subconscious because I would never have admitted to it. But I was lazy. When I say that my successes were accidents, I mean that literally. I’d wring out a poem in less than an hour, possessed by a brief spell of inspiration budding from a traumatic college life event (i.e. another maudlin heartbreak) and then set it aside, unjustifiably complacent about the final result.  The nagging guilt would stick to the back of my throat, where I’d swallow it. Then I’d melt back into the mystical experience of being a writer, which consisted of brooding most of the day, and sometimes writing a poem in a fit of urgency. It was still an identity to fall back on. I didn’t feel like a writer. I still felt like a student with an intense phobia of decision making. Months later, I would grow perplexed at why those same poems, which I’d been so secretly and unstintingly proud of, seemed so amateur and clumsy. Read the rest of this entry »