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High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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![]() Saturday, September 04, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Dirty Dancing meets The Plague Dogs! There's a warm breeze blowing in through the open window. I'm listening to Modest Mouse's latest album, Good News for People Who Love Bad News, and I like it. It's growing on me, to the point where I tried to listen to it at home a few times this week only realize I had left it at the comic store. I was saddened, despite it being a deeply annoying album. The lead singer is growly, yowly, hollery, and there's a sort of sing-along quality to the albums that can either seem anthemic or annoying (or both). Parts of the album try to make up for that by sounding like songs were built around a recording of skittles being spilled on a floor (parts of it are a very Talking Heads type album, I just realized). But, thanks to the wonder of the Miracle Meme-Melding Machine (known by some people as the radio), I liked 'Float On' enough to buy the album and still like it enough to put this album on and play it over and over. I think that's the best part of albums, listening to them over and over until meaning starts to rise from them. Or listening to them until you start to really hear what you've been listening to. I've listened to this album at the comic store maybe half-a-dozen times, and I never caught the line at the end of a song where the singer yelps, "You wasted life, why wouldn't you waste the afterlife?" Yikes. That re-ups the album for another half-dozen listens, at least.I'm trying in my half-assed way to do research for this year's Nanowrimo, which sounds like an accomplishment maybe, but is really just a cheat. I want to pick up the Nanovel I wrote but didn't finish two years ago and finish it this time around. So I've been reading books about syphilis and fanzines devoted to pulp writers (the fanzines themselves threatening to become a topic) and I guess I need to figure some things out about, you know, Greyhound riding and plots and stuff. Timelines. If I wasn't a lazy type, it'd be terribly exciting, like one of those big class projects where they give you an island, and make you research what kind of animals and vegetation you'd put on the island, and craft the tools your imaginary tribe would have, and the best part is trying to figure out where you're gonna put the dinosaurs. I'm not sure I ever finished that class project. In fact, looking back on my big class projects from elementary school, I'm not sure I ever completed any of them. Which may not bode well for this particular imaginary island but we'll see. I find I stick with things a little bit longer now that I'm grown up. However, I can only read non-fiction for so long. And so, just as I returned to the old sin of video games, I returned to another vice this week: old Don Delillo novels. I'm about fifty pages in Americana, and the flaws in it, his first novel, are very, very noticeable. And yet there's also that wonderful Delillo ability to sum up: We went back to the office. In the early afternoon it was always quiet, the whole place tossing slowly in tropical repose, as if the building itself swung on a miraculous hammock, and then the dimming effects of food and drink would begin to wear off and we would remember why we were there, to buzz and chime, and all would bend to the respective machines. But there would be something wonderful about that time, the hour or so before we remembered. It was the time to sit on your sofa instead of behind the desk, and to call your secretary into the office and talk in soft voices about nothing in particular--films, books, water sports, travel, nothing at all. There was a certain kind of love between you then, like the love in a family that has shared so many familiar moments that not to love would be inhuman. And the office itself seemed a special place, even in its pale yellow desperate light, so much the color of old newspapers; there was the belief that you were secure here, in some emotional way, that you lived in known terrain. If you had a soul, and it had the need to be rubbed by roots and seasons, to be comforted by familiar things, then you could not walk among those desks for two thousand mornings, nor hear those volleying typewriters, without coming to believe that this was where you were safe. You knew where the legal department was, and how to get a package through the mailroom without delay, and whom to see about tax deductions, and what to do when your water carafe sprung a leak. You knew all the things you wouldn't have known if you had suddenly been placed in any other office in any other building anywhere in the world; and compared to this, how much did you know, and how safe did you feel, about, for instance, your wife? And it was at that time, before we remembered why we were there, that the office surrendered a sense of belonging, and we sat in the early afternoon, pitching gently, knowing we had just returned to the mother ship.(pg. 20) That's this guy's first novel, twenty-three years ago, and he nails so much of what I find striking about working in an office, and have been trying to figure out how to sum up for so long. And it's right there. Things have changed of course (the gender lines between executives and their secretaries have blurred considerably) and there's some unfocused preciousness--I bet Delillo can't look now at this paragraph without the phrase "to buzz and chime" making his stomach hurt--but yeah. That addictive ephemeral feeling of love one can have on those down periods at work: that's it, damn him. An attorney came up and gave me a tape while I was writing this, and I should go transcribe it now. While she filled out the form, I surreptitiously eyed the crosshatching her mesh sweatpants had left across her pudgy tan belly. How can I not be grateful, at least sometimes, to be paid for this? posted by Jeff Lester | 4:31 PM | |
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