Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Tuesday, October 21, 2003 The Pitch: It's like The Secret Sharer meets Back to School! So, yes, no updates here for a while, about which I'm sorry.Weirdly, I've been logging in to blogger every day, and thinking about what anecdote I'll pass along--lord knows there are plenty of 'em, and I've also wanted to write about Chuck Kinder's Honeymooners, an odd book easily ignored unless you're walking one down one or more different literary ley lines. Kinder seems to be the inspiration in some ways for the character of Grady Tripp in Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys--Kinder is a big bearish professor of writing at a university of Pittsburgh with a never-ending novel he'd been working on for years that tipped the scale at several thousand pages. Thanks to a great interview with Kinder I found while researching Chabon's book on Teh Intarweb, I found out about Kinder and his book, finally published in 2001 as a sleek 358 page book. I picked it up not just because of this ley line, but also that of Raymond Carver, who was one of Kinder's closest friends, and who is the thinly veiled rascal Ralph Crawford. Carver's shadow looms large over Humboldt County--many of his early stories were set there, and he had spent his time as a student and a writer and a drunk there--and so I have a half-assed interest in the man, just as I do his fine literature, of which I've read not nearly enough. So Honeymooners sounds, in it way, like literary fanfic: Raymond Carver and Grady Tripp raise hell in the Bay Area in the '70s. What's not to like? Some 182 pages in, I'm still trying to answer that question. Some sections are very funny, and some sections are beautifully written and sad, and some sections fearlessly peer into the hearts and motivations of characters closely modeled on actual lovers and friends. And yet, still not liking it that much, and I only have some half-developed theories why. One of them may be, honestly, that the form of the book--men behaving badly, and speaking without quotation marks--is the form I had picked for NaNoWriMo this year. (In other words, I picked the "laziest way to write a novel" form.) And Honeymooners shows just how lazily that approach can read, I think--maybe I'm just seeing in Kinder's achievement, my upcoming month-long pratfall. In any event, hopefully more news about me in some point in the future. A lot's going on. posted by Jeff Lester | 10:21 AM | |
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