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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Monday, December 08, 2003 The Pitch: It's like The Prophecies of Nostradamus meets American Beauty! I just started reading Delillo's Players, which so far is haunting in what can only be considered an entirely accidental way. In the first chapter of the book, seven or so people on a jet sit around a piano bar and watch the movie showing in the next cabin. The piano music becomes an accompaniment to the action on screen. The action on screen shows a bunch of golfers being ambushed and attacked by terrorists. In the next chapter (and almost the very next scene), a woman, Pammy, bumps into an old friend on a lobby--of the World Trade Center. The two discuss the problem using the elevators in the WTC, the difficutly getting from one place to another.The woman, Pammy, works in an office in the WTC called the Grief Management Council. "Grief was not the founder's name; it referred to intense mental suffering, deep remorse, extreme anguish, acute sorrow and the like.[...] It was her original view that the World Trade Center was an unlikely headquarters for an outfit such as this. But she changed her mind as time passed. Where else would you stack all this grief?[...] To Pammy the towers didn't seem permanent. They ramined concepts, no less transient for all their bluk than some routine distortion of light. [and then a mention of how the office space is contantly being reapportioned] [...] It was as though they'd been directed to adjust the amount of furniture to levels of national grief." Players is copyrighted 1977, and it's no wonder people on the East Coast started mumbling about Delillo in the days after the 9/11. The mood here is perfect for the ominousness with which we look back at those days. And yet it was written twenty some-odd years earlier. That blows my mind. As if some medium had told Delillo in 1976 or so, in a showboaty wavering voice: I see people on a plane...terrorists...then people in the World Trade Center...they're concerned about the difficulty getting in and out of the building...there's a tremendous amount of grief centered in this building...levels of national grief." And this is what Delillo went out and wrote as a result. Of course, there's the age-old problem of false positives--I threw out all the other stuff that didn't fit in. The piano bar? The golfers? A man standing outside Federal Hill holding a sign. Pammy's other half, Lyle, is first seen (before Pammy and the WTC) standing at the door of a restaurant "cleaning his fingernails with the toothpick he'd lifted from the little bowl when he paid the check." There's also a great bit about turning channels and watching public access porn, and frankly, I'm only on page 16. God only knows where it's going to go from there. Maybe it'll return to terrorism and the WTC, maybe it won't. Ugh, I had all this other stuff I wanted to say about my writing, but too late for that now. It's a super-zoo here at work so (maybe) more later. posted by Jeff | 12:47 PM | Saturday, December 06, 2003 It's like Outbreak meets The Banana Splits! Hola, Amigo! It's Saturday night, around 7:00 p.m. and it's dark and wet outside. Not as much so as at 5:00 p.m., where the sky was so dark and drained of light, I expected the Rapture to kick in. Now it's just plain ol' dark and wet.I finished Nano--finished a bit early, in fact. Wrote over ten thousand words in two days, called it quits at 51,000 plus (I did 20% of that in two days? That kinda creeps me out, for some reason....) and managed to get kookily feverishly ill. Called in sick to work for a few days, finally felt better, then went and sold off 17 boxes of books. All these numbers, I hope, are doing something to convey how, um, extreme my life still feels. Getting rid of seventeen boxes of books (somewhere between half and two-thirds of my entire library) was alternately horrifying and ecstatic. I had to do it, though, because I'm moving in with Edi at the end of the month and I just got too much CRAP. Can books be crap? Oh hell, yes--particularly if you don't read 'em. Right before I got sick, I had managed to go through the first fifteen boxes and cull out about five. Then, while I was feverishly sweating all over myself and my bed, I stared at those boxes like, "Do I really need those Ionesco books? I collected them eight years ago and I haven't read them yet. Am I ever really going to, or am I just deluding myself?" It's the most sensible fever I've ever had. I went back through the ten boxes and cut another five, and then I just kept going. I could go on and on about that long Thursday--spending the six or so hours just pulling it all, then packing the seventeen boxes in my car and driving (during a rainstorm) down to Fremont because it had the only bookstore I knew that would take almost everything (and let me donate the rest), the long cautious drive surrounded by hundreds of pounds of my own possessions, knowing that they could crush me quite easily in any kind of collision--but what really stays with me is, at the end of it, how similar it was to getting my tattoos way back when. I was exhilarated and shattered, hyper and exhausted, cranked full of adrenaline and pain. I had lost something of myself, willingly. Tattooing had made me feel, for once, in control of my body, rather than vice-versa. Something similar happened with those seventeen boxes of books: if I started thinking about how much money I had spent on those books, how many hours, how much space, how much potential, I would begin getting depressed. But when I didn't dwell on that (just like you try not to dwell on the ink that is now on your skin, no fooling, forever), I felt so much more light. All those damn books! The people who bought the books went from surly underpaid bookstore employees at the beginning to enthusiastic book browsers in the forty-five minutes it took the three of them to unload, sort and stack everything. Two of the people didn't say anything to me directly, but I came back a few minutes early and I got to hear one of them say, "Wow, look at this!" And another person reply, "Yeah, I know. Doesn't that look great?" And after, one of the guys, the one who looked a little older, with the glasses and the gut and the dark hair, looked at me and said, "This is a really great selection of stuff. You really must have spent a lot of time getting some of those books. If you don't mind me saying, you appear to have really great taste." That man will never know how much I wanted to leap over the counter and embrace him. "Yeah, well," I said. "Well, thanks. Honestly. It makes it easier letting all this go knowing that it'll be appreciated. I mean--not that you're the one who's going home with it, but you know what I mean." "Well," he said. "Actually, there's a bunch of stuff in there I'll probably be buying. But yeah, I know what you mean." "Well, Cool," I said. "Cool." My books were going to go to someone who appreciated them--who hopefully wouldn't keep them in boxes in his bedroom for the next twelve months. My books had been freed, too. posted by Jeff | 7:26 PM | |
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