rootwork the rootsblog: a cyberhoodoo webspace

poetry rewrites: you gotta love them

WEDNESDAY

so ive been working on this brer rabbits tales project, its more than a notion
arent they all, you dig in and you always find the water deeper than you realized

ive been reading the collected works and its daunting, this antebellum guys notion of
slaverylife and the passing on of its cultural treasures and all along my plan was to

reclaim those works as cultural instruments, but ima catch flak for retelling these tales,
and the process of infusing them w/cultural dignity is going to be challenging,

one big problem is that these are clearly address to a plantation culture, how do i make
them pertinent not only to a urban contemporary culture but to future generations, not only

pertinent but critical

im hoping i can get thru this 800 page text and extract what im going to extract by the end of next week

no, i have to focus, it will be far more impo to finish drafting the hoodoo book of flowers

would like to do that before i get on the road to memphis, its just that its such an immense slushwork task
i got to revise the old 400 page manuscript, extract relevant passage from rewritten 200 page mojo rising

and - most daunting -  go through almost 10 years of blogging and extract relevant observations/passages-
from all this im going to have about a 1000 pages of old manuscript/notes to reformat/reconcept into new format

straight out slushwork, hours and hours and hours of it, id say of good month of slush work easy
a month w/no satisfaction because it will be strictly trashwork, moving pieces of old text around

and all thats just to get a draft i can work with, a draft instead of a bunch of notes - thats when the real work starts

okay, i have to switch back to that as primary task, w/this brer rabbit as backburnered
read the text when im trying to decompress at night before going to sleep, i really want to get

thru it and get it done because i dont necessarily want this in my head while im fullcourt pressing

my holybook, but you know the gods of literature often know better than me, and things i think are distractive,
ive generally found in retrospec that my obsessions were what i needed at that stage in the game

ima go w/the hoodoo book of flowers, brer rabbit as sidegame - a luta continua

i had a moving time at louis reyes funeral, as i knew it would it pulled out all the warrior clans
and amiri was presiding, his eulogy turned it out, and once again made it clear, amiri still the king

he such a little old man now, but he still packing power, and just a real good vibe

hes aged well

have not heard from industry about novel, been about a month now, starting to get a little fidgety

focus, rick, soon come - and if it dont fuck them, its a good book

 im out

 

 

 

THURS

that that keep up will note that i deleted the last post about how great i felt about that novel
it was a moment of euphoria about finishing the draft that i soon recovered from

am deeply invested in the hoodoo book of flowers, had this big mess of oldtext & notes
some 500 pages of it, and was kinda overwhelmed, but i got a process now and thats

all i need, going to be great googobs of slushwork, breaking up old text & moving it around, but such is life
in the literary lane - at least i got a grip on what i need to do to turn it into a viable draft, so lets get busy

part of getting a grip on it was figuring out a system for moving text around in a 500 page document
i wont bore you by explaining it but i had to stucture a system for it, often i have students trained to

do shortstories who do a novel like its a string of shorts - and i tell them no - one document, and they are like
how will i move text around in it and i say you get the hang of it by doing it, im tempted to explain the system

i set up for this one but i will have mercy on you and restrain myself, suffice it to say you must have a system

great article here about obamas likely stature as one of americas great presidents
just that the jugdment wont be in for some generations, thats the way it works

talks about how the left considered lbjs greatsociety (socsec etc) a sellout because it was
so weak when it was imposed, sound familiar, but that once it was locked in it evolved

i gotta go, i got so much slush work, every passage i do here is one i didnt do for a Text

also tarabooks asked me to do a brer rabbit collection, so i been working on that too
when i need to take a break from this slushwork - been reading the collected works

of brer rabbit and one thing is clear is that they arent really childrens works, no matter what disney says
or if they are childrens works its more along the lines of grims fairytales than contemporary childrenwork

ie a little more gritty than we put on children these days

how about that brer tyson, i like that this brother on top of the space game, i want blackfolk fully invested in space

i believe space is the place, that humanity has to get off the planet, that accidents happen, rogue meteors, nuclear winters, global warming - one planet is not enuf to insure survival of the species, we got to get off

the planet, spread out, increase the odds of survival

im out, got to get my own contribution to the surival (and illumination) of the species done

 

 

WED

repend/poetry draft took about a week or less, which mean the novel good to go
so its back to the hoodoo book of flowers now - somebody cover me, im going in

to erase or edit your google search history before the new privacy policy takes place tomorrow, type in google.com/history,
you will get google sign in page leading to your history - edit it to your satisfaction, or erase the whole thing

too bad about saint torum, got to talking crazy and blew his shot, i want him to pull mitt so far to the right he cant find his way back to the center in inovemeber, but saint torum doesnt have sense enuf to hide his foolishness

like mitt and the other guys - bummer

 

MONDAY

have totally been unable to catch up w/george, ima have to trek to memphis, soon as i finish this draft

dug into RFTW, again, but im loving it this time, its a poetry rewrite, novels done, you just cleaning up the poetry & muddy passages, when one passage, one word can add layers of meaning to the text, just this morning

i added a line - my work will read better after im gone - just where it could do the most service

okay, some aggregating

ejdionne: rcp: obama hasnt won it yet - saying repub clusterfuck puts him better shape but dont get wobbly,
it will be a hard fight - too bad santarum keep talking crazy, he cant restrain himself, hes pretty much toast

my hope now is that romney has had to go so sharply right that he will not be able to center himself during election

tomasky: tdb: the gops michigan giveaway: dissing the autobailout out of obama hatred will cost them michigan in november

chait: nytmag: 2012, now or never: repubs have bet it all on 2012:

"But by forswearing compromise, it opened the door to a single shot. The Republicans have gained the House and stand poised to win control of the Senate. If they can claw out a presidential win and hold on to Congress, they will have a glorious two-year window to restore the America they knew and loved, to lock in transformational change, or at least to wrench the status quo so far rightward that it will take Democrats a generation to wrench it back."

ok, this aggragating isnt working, i dont have time to troll the internet, i dont mind putting up ones that catch my interest but that aint enuf aggragating - we will see, right now i got redpen to do, im averaging about 20 pages a day, hopefully i will be thru w/this in about a week

 i got to go

 

 

of woodsheds & sabbaticals & life well lived: on states of grace

SUNDAY

hello world, i been buried in the rewrite of RFTW, which is i guess fitting, thats what woodsheds are for
to make your novel the best it can be, call myself going to do a quick redpen and its still rolling pretty

quick but then i run up on rough patches that need work, but im just glad i got woodshed time to give them
i suspect this will be a couple of weeks, but it may take a month, maybe a full court press, ie no limit

i think the newplan is that i will do a 'redpen' rewrite every month, a couple of weeks off to get cold and
work on other projects, then a redpen of rest, it will make it a stronger work each time and there is not quite

the anxiety of before because its basically a finished work and im doing what i call poetry rewrites, which i
love - where you working the poetry and one word, one phrase, can add layers of meaning to the text

its kinda funny, that holybook was stressing me so i turned to novel as a kind of break,
in the past its been the novel thats done the breaking

still pulling for santorum, because he would lose epically in nov and i believe that the repubs not only
have to be defeated, they have to be thoroughly repudiated, totally discredited, then they might just

transform themselves into a viable party again, probably not but lets repudiate them anyway, i been hearing
where dailykos asking democrats in minnesota to vote for santorum, im down w/that, lets stir the pot

otherwise we get more folk like this banker who left a 1% tip on a $133 bill to express his disdain for
the 99%, and a tip of his own - get a real job, this is what we get if we elect mitt, the machurian candidate

a fig leaf for the kind of rightwing antipeople policies they will implement

you know what i think ima do, ima start aggragating again, not a lot, maybe 3 or 4 articles a day
that i think worth reading, did it once before and it got to be time consuming, but now that i been

freed of that novel i think i will try it again, try to keep it minimal maintenance

nyt article on crackup of republican party

"A Santorum nomination would be seen by many liberals as a scary and retrograde proposition. . . But in the long run, it might do a world of good, compelling Republicans to return to their senses—and forge ahead into the 21st century. Which is why all people of common sense and goodwill might consider, in the days ahead, adopting a slogan that may strike them as odd, perverse, or even demented: Go, Rick, go."

maybe more later, as i do my hourly newscrawl, right now im feeling fidgety, 9:21 am and i need to get to work

im just as stressed about taking maximum advantage of my woodshed, i got to use every day, every hour, every day, as i am about my schoolhouse obligations, but here the workload is my my own, my literary legacy

my books - thats what i live for, thats why im on the planet - making books

 all my love

 

 

WEDNESDAY

hello world, so im dug in on the hoodoo book of flowers, the graphicswork on mojorising took the whole weekend
and im so caught up in it now i cant stop till the phase is done, what im doing now is trying to do a real outline

of hbof, ive got about 60 pages of outline options, and do the 1st two movements (of 81) that will give me
a feel for how that book is going to work, lets say this week hopefully no more, then my rewdpen of RFTW

still havent decided if it should be one book or two (mojo & hbof), i see it as 1 book but i dont know if that works,  also i see
im going to have to do another, i keep being tempted to go universal w/it, but this will be a black book, a black holybook

i will think of it as 1 book and see what happens, right now hbof is about 400 pages, i hope to cut that by half
even still with my spatial stylee & fact that mojorising already about 200 pages the combined book will

still be fat, still asking folk about process w/publishing project, still dont know enuf to kick it off

started working on an article this morning off line and thought i should do it on rootsblog
might as well get some daily digital wordage out of it:

sometimes i question the time i spend on this blog & socialmedia but not only is this blog the venue where i can be
who i really am w/o industry or cultural gatekeepers but also it has influenced both my fiction and nonfiction style,

narrative licks i do here because they come natural to me i refine in my books and its always in the final
analysis about the book for me, even though im about to recalibrate my idea of what a book is

so anyway, this article: why the republicans have to be repudiated

whats my progression:

that obamas coalition trying to bail on him, im constantly takling fellow liberals down who been disappointed

in him but times are just too perilous for frailty, look at where we are

the republicans have gone stark raving mad, they encouraged that yahoo behavior in their base and now its come back
to bite them on the ass, the base has rejected the electable romney because its driven by ideological bloodlust

damn near theological bloodlust

the republican establishment are a bunch of cowards afraid to rein in their radicals,
for fear of being punished in primaries like the one romney flailing thru

its political suicide for a republican to be reasonable - but the current situation is brutal

in states where they republican have won unilateral power theyve gone hogwild

gunlaws, personhod laws, defunding planned parenthood and assault on public health and education, hogwild

they are overtly stealing elections by supressing democratic support blocks

they whole orthodoxy on tax increases are designed to defund america and make it incapable of living up to its domestic and foreign policy responsibility, make it so that it cant offer health care to its citizens, so it cant fix roads and librarys and hire cops and firefighters and teachers, so it cant afford to educate its children and train its citizens for the 21st century

to defund america so its weak enough to be drowned in a bathtub, our current debt and governing crises is an aberration, it was planned,whats the difference between what the repubs want and what the taliban wants

a weak america, unable to provide for itself

and republicans come up with policies designed to further weaken america because not only are they caught up in a taliban ideology but because they caught up in their bases rapid hatred of even the idea of obama

if the republicans win we will have more of them imposing their fundamentalist religious belief on the rest of us, dismissing science, womens reproductive health, women working outside the home, birth control, it

beggars belief, they are no better than some islamic fundamentalist bunch attempting to impose their
religious belifs on their society, it beggars belief

they have to be no only beaten, they have to be repudiated, they gon stark raving mad

and consider:  there might be 2 more folk appointed to the supreme court in the next 4 years, this one we got is the one that gave the election to bush, that gave the elections to the rich, to the hgest bidders w/citizens united

i see where 5 billionares have given 1/4th of the repub superpack money, money that is clearly swinging
elections from south carolina to ____________, and all these billionares are rightwing ideologues

basically american power has been given on to the highest bidders, legally

right now weve got a choice of taliban rick or raider mitt as president presiding over either a raid on american culture or a president who thinks hes running a theocracy

they not only have to be beaten they have to be thoroughly repudiated

its the only way the republicans will come to their senses, even though we thought buses loss would do it, the tea party rabid response to obamas election (wonder what that was about) mislead them maybe

okay, so much for this, i got to work on that outline today, this is the rough progression

will have to write it out in my customary style then conventionalize it, will send it to nyt op ed, failing that the washpost, if neither take it, as is likely i will place it here and on fb and keep on pushing, maybe approach that online magazine i did that guest blog for, i wouldnt mind establishing an online base, i liked their vibe

okay, rick, back to this after ive done a good days work, all my love

 

 

SATURDAY

so im working all day on matching prayers to the african highgods with george hunts imagery
but i got more imagery than i got prayers/highgods so them i start using them w/certain prophetic statements

of my own & babajohn & in multiple calls to the conqueror as deity - then im thinking i should deify some other folk -
im thinking martin and malcolm and harriet and gullah jack and ida b wells and zora and babajohn etc so now im coming

up with prayers to the deifiable of the ancestors, im in the groove, might give one more day to this process

and the huntworks looking really really good in the text, this will be a work of narrative beauty

old boy rickydoc in the groove

 

 

FRIDAY

so im dug in on my political chapter, its the biggest, clumsiest, most topical (ie dated) chapter
im cutting out huge swaths of it, redpen is more precise than keyboard, and what this makes me

realize is that ive got to redpen rest for the weary, i didnt, i keyboarded it and turned it in because i was
on deadline, and tired of it, it will survive it because its a more mature text, but a good redpen will take

it to higherground, lets say im thru w/this phase of mojo rising this weekend, i will set up the hoodoo book of flowers
then i will see if i got it in me to invest a week or two redpenning rest, still might not be able to stand reading it again

but i sure would like to redpen it before i invest the next two or three months into the hoodoo book of flowers
have it be all that it can be, in case something untoward happens to me in the interim - you never know

sometimes thats all my life seems to be about, a battle to get my work done to my satisfaction before i die
final analysis i got to come out of this w/a strong rest for the weary - 1 redpen, coming up, hot from the griddle

then i can schedule 1 more major hit, say june july aug - note the passage that will need extensive
work while im at it - can think about them while im hitting the hoodoo book of flowers

god i love this freedom thing

im out

mojo rising: confessions of a 21st century conjureman: take two

 

  THURSDAY  7:07

 
redpenning political chapter, came up w/this graphics thing yesterday thats really cool
so, plan is repen political chapter today, spend tomorrow weaving graphics innovation thru text

start hoodoo book of flowers saturday

basically what im doing is using georges works, i got a bunch ive downloaded off the internet
and ive got these passages that are prayers to various african highgods interspaced thru the text

they already set off to themselves - so i thought about putting them in boxes & play w/the graphics, i did so
and it still didnt have the pizzaz i was looking for, so i thought about matching them w/images and its - bam!

looking good! - so now i got to trek to memphis, convince george to go for it, then arrange to get photos of
better images than these low pixel internet babies, which in a pinch still might work because im using them

small in the text, but id much rather good quality photos, meantime i will use what i got so i can show him how it works

once again this blog is acting as a template for my printed work, now that ive started thinking about this
book graphically i hope to come up with other innovations to make it a work of art, i was reading a little while

back about publishers making their printed books works of art so that people will want to own an undigitized
copy - that appeals to me, sacred texts that are in themselves beautiful works of art, that will work

also im being influenced by my affiliation w/tara books - books as works of art, that will work
but this also contributes to it being a media work - maybe one of my hypertexted works

hypertextwork doesnt really get it, cause i want to go beyond hypertext - maybe call them hyperworks

i am so enjoying being a full time writer, but there is a certain deadening sense about it, you just sit there working, hour after hour, day after day, and its like the world is just going on w/o you, & you bored out of your skull, but still you sit there working, step by step, word by word, buiilding your little edifice - at least i got a reasonable expectation of being published

i really feel for those that dont,

this is a link to the writing dept reading last week, they did alright by me - it embarrasses me to actually
watch myself in performance, but i do appreciate them chronicling me, its all part of shaping your legacy

thinking about dana spiottas riff in stone arabia - self curate or die

im out, got about 40 pages of redpen got to be done today, im outta here

WEDNESDAY

hello world, im in a good space, down with a cold but whats a cold when you on sabbitical, just more work time
whats cool is that im working on a major project and as long as im working on a major project ( a book) life is good

this makes me realize i got to start preparing for retirement, i love being a full time writer, thinking about
starting up an old dream, rootwork press  -  finishing that novel (some touchup rewrites dont count) frees me up

now i can knock off some projects been waiting to roll, also the digital version of my novel
need to start looking for a digital artist to work w/me on that, another log on the i gotta pile

mojo rising rewrite going well, cutting out dated stuff, like i had a whole riff on khalid mohammed,
who at the time seemed to be a player but history has passed him by, im seeing whats stood the test of time,

hopefully making work more timeless, more sigifnicant

going to be a good seque into the hoodoo book of flowers because next chapter is divination chapter (6)
which is a prototype for hbof, ima extract it, put the hoodoo book of flowers there, and dig in

also im thinking about a project w/george hunt, me n geo been talking about doing a project for years
but it wont happen unless i cajole and harrass him, jesus, what else art, too many projects, too little time

so mojorising rewrite: reformatting now, looks more like my blog, a much less conventional narration,
more lyrical, then i want to cut it to the bone, less explanatory, more magical - then a redpen and im done

lets say done w/formatting by end of week, redpen over weekend, then chap 6, ie hoodoo book of flowers

& setting up rootwork press got to be ongoing from this moment on, do a 5 year plan, start building a team

okay, some quick commentary and im outta here

kinda slick how obama outplayed the repubs on the ss tax thing, set them up so they looked like
they were against middleclass tax cuts and only in favor of wealthy ones, exposed them

forced them to basically ok another stimulus - when they much rather the economy tank before the election

mojo rising section im working on now is about the political dynamics of black america and
the black world, kinda boring even to me - gotta cut it to the bone, tune it up, make it sing

so many projects, so little time, i got to go

all my love, i got to go

 

 

SATURDAY

dug into rewrite of mojo rising: the political stuff is easy, its the personal stuff that gets dicey
did my last reading for feb yesterday, frontloaded them all but it was kinda wearing, im dead tired

and it disrupted my flow for a moment, but im back in the production groove now, may have to cut back
10 pages a day is pushing it, but thats the only way i will be thru w/this thing by the end of the month

and im way too desperate to get onto the hoodoo book of flowers; just have to cut off judgment and do it

 

 

TUESDAY

so im working on the rewrite of mojo rising, not as bad as i feared, mostly cutting out excess wordage
kinda deep reading old memoir, revising it, wish i could do it w/my novels, im enjoying it right now

kinda interesting because basically what im doing is seeing whats stood the test of time

we will see how i feel about it a couple of weeks from now, also doing some redpen on novel when it cross my mind
wish i had held onto it now, cause this redpen, also called a poetry draft, is working the poetry and making it stronger

nice having that novel on the market, dont feel as panicky about life, like, okay, one good one on my record
and i will love mojo rising once im thru w/rewrite, actually feel like it will be component of my holybook so

its all good, ima give it the month of february, then its the hoodoo book of flowers: the great black book of generations

built me a babajohn fetish yesterday, will take a photo and put it on here but cannot do so at

the moment, serenity kitty is in my lap and not inclined to move, and i dont want to disturb her

ws just thinking about my holybook, how much the odds are against me pulling that off, but if i do,
a viable africanamerican holybook, shaping generations like the bible, the koran, the iching, et al

an african american way

wouldnt that be a wonderful thing to pull off in my life time

finishing that novel mean its time to get busy on that, im ready, and this will inform
that last rewrite or two that i still have to do on REST - damn, life is good

im sure the hammer is waiting to fall somewhere, best i enjoy productivity while i can
only thing stopping this show is family, health, or an act of god

later