Start Your World

The novel marathon begins tonight.   No distractions for three whole days.  I am grateful to be alive. 

Bjork’s “Medulla” is in the cd player (though I may have to switch out to something older, less distracting). The research is over.  The house is clean.  The cellphone is silenced.  The coffee pot is full.  The list of characters and a detailed outline are taped to the wall.  The three-day weekend is here.  At last I am prepared.

The schedule:

FRIDAY  9pm to 12 midnight  –  last-minute research, make ‘final’ decisions on all character and place names, double-check to make sure I’ve got everything, tape everything to the wall, start a quicky trial sketch of scene 1, the holiday party

SATURDAY  9am to 12 noon — draft chapter 1

12 noon to 3pm — lunch with El Caudillo

4pm to 7pm – draft chapter two, the company’s backstory exposition

7pm to 9pm — dinner and, if possible, blog a update

9pm to 12 midnight — draft chapter three, the hero at home, we meet the wife and kid

SUNDAY (see Saturday, only with chapters four through 4 through 7, with just one hour for some homework)

MODAY (see Saturday, only with chapters 7 through 9, and a couple hours to read over what I’ve accomplished)

And then click “save” and “print” and put the whole thing in the freezer for a couple weeks and go back to work and life on Tuesday morning, same as always, only now I’ll have some temporary freedom from this obsession.

I just want to say how much I really do appreciate all my housemates and coworkers for their understanding and excitement and support for this major project in my life.  And I especially want to express my most profound gratitude to mi senor, mi novio, El Caudillo, who without complaint has made all this possible.

r a d i o h e a d

The fans are getting older, including me.  Good to see a few people in the audience who must have been babies when “the Bends” came out.  But they were rare — just about all of us had gone through high school, college, and into their thirties with the band.

But I should really write about those lights.  Once the roadies had finished setting up the instruments, they dragged out what looked like a curtain of three-dozen long grey poles or tubes which hung suspended above the band.  Turns out these strange tubes were LCDs.  They lit up and glowed all throughout the night, from “15 Step” through “Videotape.”  At one point, during an organ solo, three tubes on the far left of the stage made an equalizer to rise and fall with the sound.  Another time, they created a waving line of pinpoint lights, like a space-age chandelier.  And then, at the end, the lights became an insane psychedelic technicolor swirl and I.  I was in a two-hour trance state.  I was in rainbows.

After, waiting in line on the 805 to come home, I regretted (briefly) that they performed neither ”Karma Police” nor “Idiotech.”  But I can forgive the oversight.  After all, how hard must it be for Thom Yorke to write a set list?  When you’ve got >60 brilliant tunes in your repertoire, it must be nearly impossible to choose which songs to leave out.  They could have done a cover of a Billy Ray Cyrus tune and it would have been gorgeous.

Best of all, the mob of nearly 10,000 San Diegans seemed almost excited.  Most of us made some noise to express our joy.  Almost as many bobbed our heads to the beat, and a few even tried to dance.  I had never seen the like; had given up on seeing San Diegans dance.  Such things are not done in San Diego.  Such is the power of one band.

There was a time, back when “Kid A” first arrived, I think, when I considered the possibility of writing a full-length research piece about this band from Oxford.  Wonder whatever happened to that essay.  It had something to do with pregnancy and heterosexual relationships and the postmodern inversion of the love song, which in turn implied a reversal of Petrarch’s trope of divine love.  Or something like that.  Should see if I can dig that up somewhere.  I could use a good laugh.

Three days and counting and I’m jonesing.

Just three more days until the writing marathon begins.  I can’t hardly even think about Radiohead right now.  I can’t think about anything but getting my ass in front of that desk and typing away in to the long long night. 

This obsession is healthy.

Normally this wouldn’t pose a problem except that I am a responsible grownup now.  When I was a kid I could hole up in my room and write all I want and never leave except to go to the bathroom.  At some point that changed.  Now I have a job and a partner and people expecting me to do things, and so now there are consequences when I check out.

Take tonight for instance.  I have this meeting I’m supposed to go to.  It was scheduled months ago.  It will last for three hours.  That is three hours that I could better spend passionately engaged with my protagonist, digging le mot just, all undisturbed in my solitude.  And all I want is to flake out California-style and blow off the whole meeting, not tell anyone, just drive home and write until I crash.  The pull is intense.  I’m like an addict jonesing for a long-overdue hit.

But the fear of pissing people off and having to explain myself makes a coward of me all. 

My body will go to the meeting.  But my mind will go to Spain.

This week is crazy busy.

I’m going to see Radiohead tomorrow night.  It has been years since I’ve seen them — in Utah, in fact.  Should be cool to hear some of “In Rainbows” live.  I’ll take notes and post a review on Thursday.

Plus, el Caudillo and I are finally putting together the finishing touches on our business before the official launch – business cards, website, filing papers with the county, and all that.  It is a major headache, especially because I’m the one who gets to do all of it.  But hey, he’s the one who is paying for it, so I better shut up and quit whining.

At least I still have just enough time to read the Times.  Fascinating article on an amazing architect named Lebbeus Woods.  Great line: “If you want to participate, you will have to reinvent yourself.” A little too much on the Adbusters side of the brain for my taste, but no doubt a great draftsman.  My guess is he’ll go the way of A.G. Rizzoli.

Absolutely no time whatsoever for the cinema.  Still haven’t seen Pinapple Express, may have to wait for the dvd.  At home, I’ve still got Renoir’s “Grand Illusion” (1937) and Melville’s “Bob le Flambeur” (1955), two classics that somehow escaped my education in film.  No clue when I’ll get around to them.

El Caudillo and I found the perfect place to stay in Portland, and I’ll call tonight to book it.  I’ll post some pics here — it looks fabulous.  Just now I’m realizing that it has been nearly two years since I’ve spent any time with my sister Ashley (last Christmas doesn’t really count).  It will be good to have another family appraise my soon-to-be-gay-life-partner-slash-suggar-daddy and reassure me that I am not insane for thinking about getting gay-married.

Quein es el Caudillo?  Voy escribir mas una otra vez.

Oh, and Friday is the company’s yearly drinking party and baseball game.  I’m taking the two free beverages and skipping the game (Padres, nothing to see here).  That begins my annual ritual of celebrating Labor Day by going in to labor, giving birth to a new novel.  I will take on a three-and-a-half-day writing marathon to knock out the first third of my manuscript.  It’s all in the prep work before hand.  I’ve just got a little outlining left to do, and two or three characters to sketch (briefly, oh so briefly) and then I’ll be all set up and ready to go.

Fortune favors the bold.  Party favors the . . . something.

In Media Res

What the hell are they playing on the jukebox in here?  It sounds like “I’m Leaving Las Vegas” — Sheryl Crow?  And I thought this place was hip.

That’s called In Media Res, a fancy-pants Latin term for “just skip the intro and jump right in.”  See, I didn’t mention anything about who I am, what I’m doing with this blog, or what this is all about.  I just jumped right in and started righting the first thing that came to my mind.

Now there’s some guy with a scratchy voice trying to sound like a soul singer, something about “its too late to say goodbyyyyeeeee” and no, it is not Julien Lennon.

Apparently, that’s the way it is done on the Internet.  Out of curiosity (and a little creative desparation) I did a little research into some of my favorite blogs and took a look at how others started their first posts.

Blake Butler started his blog in May 2007 with a post called “DFW and” with a sort of diary entry about accidentally discovering a new story by David Foster Wallace in a Barnes and Noble.  Blake Butler has a higher regard for DFW than I do, probably because he has taken the time to crack open a copy of Infinite Jest.  At the end of the post, he writes with his typical wit: “I’m not sure what I’m going to do writing on this thing. I may just blabber and not mention that its alive. Every fucker has a blog yes why not why not.”  And that is one reason why I like him.

Michael Kimball launched his blog in March of this year with a straightforward, no-bullshit plug for his novel.  Good marketing move, I say.  I would mimic him, if my novel were published.  More on Kimball later.

The infamous Tao Lin decided to use his first post to give his spin on Richard Yates, a writer with whom he has almost nothing in common (on the surface of style, at least).  His first post ends this way:

‘not everyone in the world is the same’

i am a person and i don’t read a book to judge and congratulate the writer, but to feel connected to another human being

and i don’t feel like i can (as effectively) feel connected to you if you’re making up characters who are not you, who have not had the same experiences as you, who are deliberately not you, then if you are writing about yourself

but other people, i know, are different than me

i’m not saying it’s ‘bad’ that you are good at ‘imagining worlds’

just that me personally would rather read something by someone who does less of ‘imagining worlds’

people are different, they read for different reasons, and no one ’should’ be doing anything

Media Res, indeed.  Just jump right in and start swimming with Tao Lin and Blake Butler and all the rest.  Why the hell not?

Another female singer.  “Little bit of this, little bit of that.”  How trite.  Someday I will write a fully researched monograph specifying exactly why the female’s voice is inferior to the male’s (Bjork’s excepted, of course).

OK so I am very, very late. I am belated, as Master Bloom would have it.  It is August 2008 and every twelve-year-old girl has her own blog. Even dogs have blogs. Until today, I was blogless. I don’t know why I waited. I’ve been reading blogs for years now, and got myself on friendster and myspace (http://www.myspace.com/260284) before most people. No excuse — once in my life, I am way late. So now that I’m here, what is this blog all about?

Art
Politics
Culture
Resisting Tyranny
Classical Liberalism
Secular Humanism
Arab Soccer
Amnesty International
Latin American Literature
The Landmark Forum
Scientology
Disney
Motivational Speaking
Jehovah’s Witnesses
Latterday Saints
Writing Letters to My Senators
Victorian Poetry
Narcotics Anonymous
Apostacy
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Postmodernism

And anything else that happens to occur to me.  Oh, and I’m hard at work on my second novel.  More on that in posts to come.

Up-tempo reggae.  At least it is an improvement.