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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Saturday, February 28, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Pootie Tang meets Lost in Translation! Well, hello dere.End of February, more or less. "Leap year" seems like such an outdated, unexciting term--I think they should call it something like SUPER HAPPY BONUS YEAR! You'd think we'd have learned something from video games and Asian restaurants by now--who wouldn't rather go to DOUBLE BOUNTY JOYFUL HOUSE as opposed to THE CHINESE JOINT DOWN THE STREET. The second set of wisdom teeth got yanked on Wednesday--almost exactly two years to the day after the last set got pulled. I don't have to worry about cleaning those little bastards any more, and thank God for that. And just like two years ago, I got vicodin and pudding and Edi taking care of me, so there's part of me a little sad I've got no more inessential teeth to get yanked. Of course, I'm a little low overall--a mix of distant throbbing discomfort on the right side of my head, and a sleepy haze from too many vicodin and Advil--so I'm a bit sad about everything at the moment. Yesterday at CE, I finally finished the 14th and final volume of Love Hina which probably came about three volumes too late. It was a good couple of months reading romantic comedy manga, tho--particularly in the early volumes when the artists gleefully and carelessly contrived endless romantic triangles. By the end----ehhh. Even I couldn't get into potential goth girl incest. Let that be a lesson to you: when even Jeff Lester isn't interested in potential goth girl incest, you've made a serious wrong turn somewhere. Particularly a shame since Love Hina's set-up of a geeky guy working at a girl's dorm (endless panty shots, endless Three's Company-esque situations) was so dang...I dunno. Effervescent, I guess. I'm still reading Gravity's Rainbow, and still at a leisurely pace. For the last week or so, I was reading it mainly on the toilet, appropriate considering I just got through the infamous "Slothrop/Kenosha Kid" sequence. Amazingly, Pynchon just manages to keep spinning the book weirder and weirder--Katje is introduced in a sequence that then flashes back to her "enslavement" by Blicero, back to Katje, Pirate Prentice and Osbie Feel a second later, then back to a long sequence about Katje's ancestors wiping out the Dodo, and then back to Pirate and Osbie that evening (I think), wondering what's going to become of Katje, who's already left for the "White Visitation," and the sequence ending, with the scene from the opening being shown, via film projector, to Grigori, the giant octopus..... If I think about it too much, I'm filled with despair--the other day I opened up my Nanovel of '03 to check it out, and it was a humbling experience, even without comparisons to the masterpiece being re-read. Pynchon jammed more character, more event, more luminous prose and more thematic resonance in his twenty-some-odd page sequence than I stingily spooned out in my two hundred. It makes me just want to skulk out of my job, go home to my girlfriend and throw the blankets over my head for three weeks...even though it'll mean missing out on the extra day of SUPER HAPPY BONUS YEAR! posted by Jeff | 6:19 PM | Thursday, February 19, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Clockstoppers meets Runaway Train! It's newsletter time. Seems like every month I (along with my ol' buddy Bad Scheduling) come up with another reason to try and get the newsletter done in even less time. In the past, I've tried to write the new comics on one day and the Fanboy Rampage on the next. But I dawdled away most of the day yesterday (and found myself at the mercy last night of installing the new Norton Systemworks on my kludgy, mangled system--and which installation I gave up on at about midnight rather than continue to work through it).So as Edi headed out the door this morning, I realized I was going to have to be strong and focused. I felt confident as I had spent about an hour and a half lying in bed going over the framework of the Fanboy Rampage--something that always makes the writing go much faster. Five minutes after Edi left the apartment, she came back looking worried. "The maintenance guys decided that our bathroom window doesn't fit with the rest of the redesign they're doing in the back of the apartment." I was completely baffled. The maintenance guys have been in the process of ripping out our back storage room, and pulling the back wall off the apartment building generally, after their year-long odyssey to replace the back stairs uncovered dry rot. "The bathroom window?" "Yes," Edi said. "You know, the bathroom window they replaced nine months ago? Now they're saying they need to get into the bathroom today and take it out." "But...but..." As I said, today was my day to be focused and strong. Edi went off to work and I took an empty box and filled it with all the stuff from our shower and bathroom. Then I put on pants. Then I started to make breakfast (and run Norton Systemworks) when there was a knock from the storage room door. I opened it and a cheery construction worker stood there. "Hey," he said. "I've got to get into your bathroom." And there he's been for the last twenty minutes, hammering on sledges and pounding out boards. I'm in the bedroom with the door closed, writing on the laptop. I think if I start in on it now, I can still get through the Fanboy in pretty good time. But you know what? I've got to use the bathroom. And the more I know I can't, the worse it seems I have to go. Now it's like something feral is clawing in my guts. There goes the industrial strength drill in the bathroom, vibrating the length of the walls, across the floor and through my bowels. I have a sneaking suspicion I'm going to be writing the newsletter from the cafe across the street. I may even end up writing from the bathroom of the cafe across the street. Pray for me. posted by Jeff | 10:21 AM | Tuesday, February 17, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Khakee meets The Crying of Lot 49 At work again. It's quiet at the moment and is likely to be for the rest of my shift (knock on crappy particleboard countertop). Today was one of those quiet zenith/nadirs in my Pynchonalia, as I read, finally, Jules Siegel's "Who Is Thomas Pynchon...And Why Did He Take Off With My Wife?" the Playboy article from 1977 that's the gossipy Rosetta Stone of Pynchon info. Why it only took me, oh, eight years or so to come up with the idea of putting the title in a search engine, I couldn't say.On the one hand, the article is a great read, filled to bursting with the sort of info I wanted to know (what his bedroom in Manhattan Beach, where he wrote and re-wrote Gravity's Rainbow, was like; what kind of student he was; likes; dislikes; lovers. On the other hand, the article reads, without too much effort, as an attack on Pynchon by the author, a friend since college, for committing adultery with the author's wife. It is an attack on one of the few things Pynchon holds dear--his privacy. (Similar motives might be attributed to Pynchon's former agent, Candida Donadio--and one of the things that always boggles me whenever I learn any details about Pynchon's life is how often those people have the kind of names you find only in Pynchon's books--auctioning of letters from Pynchon. Also, kind of a depressing read, although I was kind of gratified to know that Pynchon, like me, had tried to become a movie critic and had gotten shot down. And like a dream I've woken from and barely remember, there are parts in those articles that also relate to my life, albeit secretly. After months of quiet, the great grey coincidence turbine is winding up again, beginning to once more send fluttering whorls of unconnectedly connected facts and events into my life. In my more languid moments (like now, thank particleboard), I imagine trying how to pull apart one of the great literary puzzles of our day--why writers interest readers at all--a puzzle I'm inspired to solve by my restless interest in Pynchon's silhouette which I find myself straining to see more clearly even as I turn my eyes away in humble shame. There's got to be more to it than the simple idea--simple now, anyway, in our post-postmodern era--that the reader lives a glorious fantasy not just in the lives of the characters on the page, but in the imagined life of the character who creates those characters and puts them on the page. I want to imagine Pynchon in that bedroom, on that bus heading into the hills of Mexico, on that stretch of Santa Monica Freeway, hanging out at the appropriately named Either/Or Books, staring in post-dental pain at the waves as dusk pulses at his vision in a narcotized rhythm. I want to see him so I can imagine him, and I'm ashamed at how selfish the urge to love can be--that loving something will speed you in your rush to defile it. And that decency, not love, stays the lover's hand, makes the covetous, finally, avert their eyes. posted by Jeff | 7:01 PM | Saturday, February 14, 2004 My eyes are all squinty from sitting in this office all day doing nothing but staring at the Internet (Yeah, I know: boo hoo hoo, right?) and I know my wrists are going to hurt like hell later because surfing the Net, with its reliance on mouse usage, fucks with my hands far worse than regular ol' work does. I'm (re)reading Gravity's Rainbow and it's just a fucking knock-out. I first read this book when I first got out of college fifteen years ago and my reading:understanding ratio was seriously unhinged. Seriously, pages going by and me comprehending jack shit but being so in love with the style, I didn't care. My reading comprehension has improved somewhat (it helps that for a long time, I had not one but two copies of Steven Weisenburger's A Gravity's Rainbow Companion that was first published in 1988 but reviewed after I finished the book in early '89--and there was also a conversation with a scary-smart coworker who finished GR a few months back and wanted to talk about it) but I'm still staggered--positively floored--by the prose in it: "Behind you, long, night-long queues of men in uniform move away slowly, kicking AWOL bags along, mostly silent, toward exit doors painted beige, but with edges smudged browner in bell-curves of farewell by the generation of hands." God, that image of the bell-curves! And the repetition of the word "long"--obvious at first and then buried--or the rhyme of "bell" and "farewell." (A-and bell-curves being an integral metaphor to GR to boot--to say nothing of his background in math, science and technical writing that allows him such comfort with such metaphors). It reminds me of what Delillo had to say about Pynchon: "Somebody quoted Norman Mailer as saying that he wasn't a better writer because his contemporaries weren't better. I don't know whether he really said that or not, but the point I want to make is that no one in Pynchon's generation can make that statement. If we're not as good as we should be it's not because there isn't a standard. And I think Pynchon, more than any other writer, has set the standard. He's raised the stakes." Re-reading Gravity's Rainbow makes me wonder what the HELL I've been doing these last fifteen years. I should have just been re-reading this book every year, and learning how to write. In other writing news, I'm sure everyone and their dog has read this article on Mary Sues (hell, I've read it twice in the last three months by following different links) but I find it endlessly fascinating. The Mary Sue, for those of you who don't know, is, well let me just quote Pat Pflieger's opening paragraph: "She's amazingly intelligent, outrageously beautiful, adored by all around her -- and absolutely detested by most reading her adventures. She's Mary Sue, the most reviled character type in media fan fiction. Basically, she's a character representing the author of the story, an avatar, the writer's projection into an interesting world full of interesting people whom she watches weekly and thinks about daily. Sometimes the projections get processed into interesting characters, themselves. Usually, though, they don't." As Pfleiger goes on to analyze and pull apart the culture of the Mary Sue in fanfic, I find myself horrified and mesmerized. The Mary Sue is naked wish fulfillment and ego gratification...and yet, what are most characters in a writer's repertoire but variants of such needs? What really is so embarrassing about a Mary Sue, other than that need being so unsubtly disrobed? The protagonists of nearly all popular fiction, when you get down to it, are just Mary Sues. Pflieger acknowledges this (a little too briefly for my tastes), but the questions, half-formed, remain for me: are there Mary Sues, and "real" characters created by "experienced" writers? Or are most characters merely better rounded, more complex Mary Sues? (And the questions I know that is underneath that: am I an experienced writer? Or just a writer of my own personal fanfic?) posted by Jeff | 4:23 PM | Saturday, February 07, 2004 The Pitch: It's like The Song in Casablanca meets The Song in The Graduate! Hola. Gotten behind on my blog-writing and my blog-reading (just read Nancy's blog for the first time this month and was like, Holy Shit). Sad to say, my brain runs like a badly programmed computer: I feed in only a few programming commands; the commands instantly contradict each other; the whole system locks up; rinse; repeat.For example, I know that part of the reason I'm not reading blogs is because I'm not blogging. And I'm not blogging because I'm not doing any of my other writing. But I'm not doing any of my other writing because I swore I wouldn't start writing anything new--rather, I would tackle one of, ahem, five big writing projects I've got going that are completely unfinished. And I'm not doing that because I have to get them cleaned up to read and figure out which one I should start in on. And so I've spent the last month sorting out the novel I was working on between 2001 and 2002, my most productive and disorganized year, and I'm only about a third of the way through proofing and organizing over 110,000 words. The novel that's buried in there--under stream of consciousness journal entries, plotless free-for-all dialogues and endless digressive patter--and the three characters buried with it, is what I really want to be working on. And so, fuck, maybe I'll have to, before finishing the unending clean-up: Just draw up a rough plot based on what I remember happening and get to it. It's frustrating how quickly I can see my writing atrophy in just the two months of not doing it consistently, and it's driving me nuts. This year is my deadline for writing every day, and I'm incredibly squirmy about not having done it yet. Of course, me being me, I went out and got a PS2 Thursday night before taking Edi to the airport. An act of supreme self-sabotage? Or self-confidence? If I'm still not blogging/writing by the end of the month, it'll probably be more likely the former than the latter. posted by Jeff | 4:15 PM | |
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