Writing Life

I was thinking this evening that I have fallen out of the writing habit again. Today is ‘grocery day’, which is always too busy, but it has been a few days now that I have failed to sit down and whip up even a simple, brief journal entry. Then I remembered those dreams I had about mother and Jack, and of Pop dying. Before those dreams, it had been ages since my last remotely meaningful dream. Might there be a connection between the writing and the dreaming? Maybe the writing churns the subconscious deep, making for richer dreams. Or maybe I should stop playing master psychologist. In any case, I should not need more incentives to write. I have perhaps gotten too selective, feeling as though what I write now should be good enough for my hardcover journals or my Three Journal. Seeing how I am kind of hungering for distraction from the howling emptiness around me, I should just be spewing and spewing words and sentences on the most mundane things, such as what I had for lunch or exactly how cloudy is the sky, or on whether I masturbated today, and if so, what fantasy did I use, and drown my pitiful self in an ocean of words. Since it is apparently out of the question for me to write poetry or essays or stories, or anything very meaningful and remunerative, I can at least bury my blog in the trivialities of my trifle life and give my restless mind something to focus on. For instance, this little journal entry just chewed up forty minutes, just like that.

The Book of Strange New Things

I almost forgot that I had one more exerpt that I wanted to draw from “The Book of Strange New Things” before I leave the novel aside. Our pastor-protagonist is suffering doubts about the wisdom of his wife giving birth to a child at a time when the planet earth is convulsing in destruction and societies are falling apart. His friend tells him that it will be a new world for the child.

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“Your kid will be brand new to the planet,” she said. “Your kid won’t be thinking about all the things we’ve lost, the places that went to hell, the people who died. All that stuff will be prehistoric like the dinosaurs. Stuff that happened before time began. Only tomorrow will matter. Only today.” She smiled. “Like, what’s for breakfast?”

He laughed.

-- “The Book of Strange New Things” by Michel Faber

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Marlon Brando

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Brando came up to the Cape when I was there. There was no point in discovering him, it was so obvious. I never saw such raw talent in an individual, except for Laurette Taylor, whose talent was hardly raw. Then, before he was famous, Brando was a gentle, lovely guy, a man of extraordinary beauty when I first met him. He was very natural and helpful. He repaired the plumbing that had gone on the whack, and he repaired the lights that had gone off. And then he just sat calmly down and began to read. After five minutes, Margo Jones, who was staying with us, said, “Oh, this is the greatest reading I’ve ever heard, even in Texas!” And that’s how he was cast in Streetcar.

-- Tennessee Williams at The Paris Review

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Friday Morning

Yesterday morning, grocery day, sitting at Jim's Restaurant, sitting across from Pop, waiting and waiting for my pancakes, I was folding and refolding the paper that my straw came in and thinking hard about what I am doing with my life these days, collecting quotations, almost obsessively, no, maybe obsessively, as though I might be able to turn them in somewhere for cash, like it is a respectable job. Although it is kind of late, turning fifty in a few months, I cannot help thinking if I might be able to do something better. Should I try poetry again? Might the music happen this time, finally, after all? No, of course not. Stop that! I am not a writer, much less a poet. Is it too late to grow up and get a job? The fast food industry always welcomes all comers. Pop would be so happy that he might kiss my feet. Maybe Jim's needs a dishwasher. However, what I end up thinking is that I really wish I had an e-reader with me, so that I might be skimming through "Gulliver's Travels" or even Casanova's memoirs, hunting up some more quotations, or one of Shakespeare's plays, a little paperback that I could carry in my pocket, reading yet again some of those immortal lines that lead people to think about the dreamy possibilities of literature and of being a writer, something, anything, to keep my mind away from that hot black waitress and that sexy ass that I cannot touch, must not touch.