People often ask, “Where do you get your ideas?” which I always find curious: where instead of how. “How” seems more understandable: as if there might be a method, or a discipline, or a certain mindset that could be acquired; the way one acquires the mindset of a meditator, say, which certainly takes great diligence and patient practice. A person who’s done sitting meditation for twenty years is going to have a very different mind than when s/he first hunkered down cross-legged. So “how” seems very valid.
But maybe “where” is the better question: it’s certainly more mystical, and maybe that mystery brings it closer to the real limbic – or do I mean liminal – state where – yes, where the ideas germinate, or float in, or infiltrate, or seep. So maybe it’s the better, truer, more practical question. Someone asked me the other day, “How come you decided to write a historical novel about a whorehouse?” Where did that whorehouse come from, with its black poppy signage? Where the passionate heroes? Where the silent madam? I had no answer because I don’t know; I never know; I never do any of this consciously.
Desire pulls the strings. Maybe meditation is the best model after all. Where do you get your ideas? Yes.
J.D. McClatchy’s “Mercury Dressing” had pride of place on my workspace while I was writing Under the Poppy, parts one and two: melancholy, erotic, evocative, it’s a beautiful poem that I hope to quote, in part, as an epigraph to the book.
What I didn’t know then but do now is that Mercury is the father of many mad and gorgeous progeny: Pan, Eros, Hermaphroditus, Priapus (are we sensing a theme, here?) and Tyche, or Fortuna. He is polytropos, shape-shifter; messenger, trickster, patron of boundaries as well as of those trespassers of boundaries, travelers and thieves; friend of poets and liars, friend of dreams, god of abundance and commercial ventures, and thus immensely suited to be the patron deity of the crew Under the Poppy.
Plus, he’s hot. [Mercure rattachant ses talonnières, François Rude.]
Here’s what to wear to the Under the Poppy premiere! or an afternoon browsing your miscellany collection, at least until the laudanum man arrives … Don’t you love some of these looks? “The steady infiltration of 19th-century haberdashery into the 21st-century wardrobe. Garment after garment has arrived on the scene that one might think more Gilbert and Sullivan than Bergdorf and Goodman, only to be taken up by the young beards.” Mmm-hmm. Please pass the tintypes. Oh, and don’t miss the slideshow.
So heartening, to see performances like this – this kind of fecund, skewed, delightful conversation between disciplines – in a time where, on the surface, all is stasis, contraction, a cultural hunkering-down. Um, no. Let’s blow the doors off, artists, let’s climb out the holes in the roof and look around, let’s test ourselves, let’s have some fucking fun.
Being a Detroiter is a real asset in this endeavor, or so it seems to this native, at least. We are experienced at making much out of little, we see the gleam in rust, we can operate in the dark, we know our way around. And we can, do, and will continue to make our own fun, out of ephemera, concertina wire, velvet rags, and strings of all kinds.
(OK, this has been the Manifesto Moment of the day. Back to the script-writing …)
… though it could just as easily be “I remember my sin,” and isn’t it a lovely and evocative memory either way? Writing about scent, smell, is very very difficult, much like writing about music (as opposed to writing about musicians, which is an entirely different animal). This sad and loving memory entirely removes the flat grey taste of the news that there will be, or is, a perfume named for Baudelaire (no, no link, no thanks), to which all I can say is wtf.
A scent that, to me, will always evoke Under the Poppy is Nippon Kodo’s gorgeous “Sahara Moon” incense, which I burned daily like the good little obsessive I am throughout the writing of the novel.
But what is the scent of dried-and-bottled weevil? Is that a step too far into the land of verisimilitude? And would a person have to be Chandler Burr to describe it?
… to the new space at the Russell Industrial complex, where a lot of fun is going to get made, had, rehearsed, and distributed. [Space courtesy its new owner, Diane Cheklich; photos KK, feet KK.]