So I did not blog the entire time I was in Portland.  Sorry.  I figured my time would be better spent writing the novel and living my life.  It was sheer heaven.  I will write up a summary of what I did on my autumn vacation and post it here, complete with photos of the evil victorian we stayed in, soon.

Till then, here is a list of books purchased at Powell’s:

– The Verificationist, by Donald Antrim

– Eclipse, by John Banville (hardcover, second edition, only eight bucks!)

– Make Loneliness, by J. Reuben Appelman

– Immediatism, by Hakim Bey

– Little, Big, by John Crowley

– Pedro Paramo, by Juan Rulfo

– An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, by Cesar Aira

– Granta issue #63, “Beasts,” including stories by Paul Auster, John Barth, and Martin Amis

– Granta issue #43, “Best of Young British Novelists 2,” including stories by Kazuo Ishiguro, Will Self, and Iain Banks

And so forth.  Also got to see Bernard Henri-Levi speak about his new book.  My ten-second take on Henri-Levi: an upstanding advocate for human rights, a very sharp apologist for liberalism, a decent writer, and a completely self-absorbed, arrogant bastard when it comes to speaking in front of an audience.  A bad specemin of a Eurotrash stereotype.  Maybe I was just exhausted after six hours on my feet searching the stacks, but god that man can digress, especially when talking about his good friends in the elite.

El Caudillo is in Los Angeles with his fellow leaders, taking a stand for the transformation of what it means to be human.  He left me the laptop, so I am at home alone drinking coffee and listening to ABBA while my iPod recharges and I begin my preparations to write.  I am typing now to get out the crap that I need to clear before I go into that other place in my head where my characters live and suffer.  After two weeks stuck, unsure how to jimmy up three chapters worth of incident and conflict, just enough plot to carry my protag from the hospital to the grassy riverside, I experienced a brilliant flash of inspiration.  I’m going to leave my protag for a little while, and let him roam around Spain on his own.  Instead I’m going to dive into the character of his wife.  We’re going to have some quality time together.  After all, I’m always better at communicating the personae of female characters.  I don’t know why, but somehow they’re just easier to inhabit, just more natural I guess.  Male characters tend to veer too close to some version of myself or my father.  But female characters are just so weird.  There’s more there there.

So Mrs. Michelle Bielo and I will become best friends this weekend. 

I imagine her with a lot of that tightly-curled hair that just flourishes in every direction out from her head.  She doesn’t quite realize how pale she looks with that makeup.  Her ex-coworkers tease her for being a ‘couger,’ when in fact she lost interest in sex years ago.  There was a time when Michelle was the most significant person her friends knew.  She liked herself better then.

There you have it.  I’ll take it from there.

The song that just now shuffled onto my iPod is “There There.”