What Is This For

I came up with a good idea for what I’d like to do with this blog thing.

The whole diary / journal concept never really appealed to me.  Too femme, besides diaries are supposed to be secret, remember?

Nor could I summon the compulsion to bore the world with the details of my life in sunshine Del Mar, CA.

I enjoy Mark Sarvas’ blog, The Elegant Variation.  I love Scott Esposito’s Three Percent even more.  Every time I read them, I think to myself, “hey I can do that.”  I don’t speak Spanish as well as Senor Esposito.  I don’t steal, I don’t lie, but I can feel, I can cry.  That is, I’ve read some books that don’t get much attention, let alone reviewed anywhere.  I’d like to write a thing or two about them.

So the purpose of this weblog is to publish my thoughts and critiques of books I’ve read.  Not Amazon-style four-star reviews (i.e. ” DH LAWRENCE is SOOO GOOOD!!!).  Not happy Generation X “hey everybody let’s read a book and be different from our parents!” booster crap.  Just some imaginitive, highly personal reactions to books that many people haven’t heard of, that many people might like to read.

TO WIT — I will start with my most recent, and go from there, backwards in time.  Here is the list of what I’ve read, in reverse order:

The Artful Edit — Susan Bell

The Kingdom of This World — Alejo Carpentier

Death in Spring — Merce Rodoreda

The Best American Short Stories 2008 — Salman Rushdie (editor, he didn’t write any of these)

Henderson the Rain King — Saul Bellow

Troilus and Cressida — Wm. Shakespeare

2666 — Roberto Bolano

Can’t remember what I read before 2666.  I started that one last Christmas, and it took a while.  It was probably Cesar Aira or some other mestizo.

Still reading on the Artful Edit, so I will start with Carpentier’s Kingdom of This World.  Check back soon!

Oh yeah blog

Just remembered I have a blog.

Got my first rejection letter since high school in the mail today.  The Atlantic Monthly wishes me luck.

No, I’m not stopping here.  I’ll just keep revising and sending it out till it finds a home.

Is not bad.

There is nothing wrong here.

All day yesterday and all of today my brain has enjoyed a remarkable void.  My thoughts are short and quick to the point, without remorse or shame.  I find myself questioning my self less and less with every hour.  There is nothing wrong here.  This may turn out to be a really short post.

El Caudillo is being really good to me right now.  I can see that he is very happy.  Shawn turned 32 last night and we drank a lot of wine.  He gave a speech on the topic of ‘love.’  Just one more year and we can cruxify him.

JD has disappeared again, as is his wont.

Plans for my own birthday are moving forward with velocity.  I’ve got the house and the caterer, and I will have a special mix in my iPod just for that night.  El Caudillo was kind enough to purchase a case of two-buck Chuck.  John Brady promised to come home from Thailand early, just to join the party.  I cannot wait to be thirty.  Maybe now I can begin my ministry in the desert.

The novel-writing is going well, better than the navel-gazing, though not according to schedule.  I had meant to do homework this afternoon before launching into a quick draft of MIchelle’s chapter six.  Then I discovered that the university’s website (which has the instructions I need to do my homework) is down for system upgrade whatevers.  They promised to have it back by six pm.  Now it is 7:20, I check the website — no, so sorry, come back tomorrow.  So now my homework has been postponed until after the office tomorrow night.  And I am not upset.  I am unfazed.  There is nothing wrong here.

The great news is that after much planning and sketching and invention I had a good solid detailed sketch that specifies exactly everything that happens across the next three chapters, Michelle’s chapters of my novel.  Now I just have to follow the map I’ve traced for myself.  I will have hit page 100 by the time I’m done.  And I already know what happens after that — Chapter 9, the embassy.  The pathway is right before me and I can see my way forward.  This is going to be easy.

I wonder if I could get away with calling in sick one day this week and just stay home and type this bitch.

Life is a glassy lake.  Sundays are haiku.  Peace peace peace.  There is nothing wrong here.

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.”

If I lack all conviction, does that make be the best?

A general sleepy-time depression has descended over everything this week.  I can’t bring myself to watch the Republican convention.  What used to be my party has turned into a religious movement.  I got in a fight with a lady at work.  I’m sleeping too much.

The novel is on hold for now.  I’d rather not look at it till I’m good and ready to plunge back in for more than just a few hours.

The girl across the hall is at it again.  Weird, I only hear her moans, no guy.  If I go outside for a cigarette will she think I’m spying on her?

I once saw a book about depression called “The Noonday Demon.”  That’s exactly it — I get up early all zippity doo dah and everything is going just fine.  Then, right as I finish my lunch the same old ugly lethargy sets in.  It’s always right around the same time.  Maybe it is because I’ve just had a moment’s look at some kind of freedom I call “lunch,” but now I have to give it up and go back to reality and that makes me sad.  Or maybe it is just this damned San Diego climate, the way summer always overstays its welcome right up to the day before the day before my birthday.

Julia’s getting a new roommate upstairs.  His name is Cameron.   I haven’t met him yet.  Good to have another guy in here.  Not sure why I’m nervous about meeting him.

Found a bunch of old pictures of me and Julia as teens.  Didn’t know so many pictures of those years still existed, let alone in my posession.  Need to get them all scanned and saved.  Not sure what I’m going to do with them.

Sunday is arts and crafts day with Julia.  She’s got a ton of blank canvasses just waiting for us to go piss wild crazy all over them.  I’m already planning what to do with mine.  I remember a German or Swiss lady artist I discovered at the Reina Sofia, she was one of the first collagistas with Picasso.  I fully intend to plagiarize her work wholesale.

Read a lot of blogs today and I cannot for the life of me figure out how they do it.  The guest blogger on Elegant Variation is going for a record number of posts.  If you look at the time stamps, he’s posting once a minute, which suggests the texts were prewritten.  Not exactly spur-of-the-moment inspiration.  Still, they are damn good thoughts from an experienced writer and teacher, and a couple of them I’ve saved for future reference.

I need to find a really cool painting that deals with the subject/theme of fathers and/or sons.  Preferably Spanish.  There don’t seem to be very many comprehensive art galleries online.

Finished Obama’s memoir yesterday (pretty good, up until he gets to Kenya, where he just sort of wanders around and meets a bunch of family whose identities and relationships are almost impossible to keep track of).  Needed a new book today and just couldn’t wait for Amazon in the mail, so I printed my wish list and went to Border’s (I know, I’m a traitor to everything I stand for.  Principles’ worst enemy is impatience).  I was surprised to stumble across Tao Lin’s EEE EEE EEEEEE (did I type the correct number of Es?)  I will read it, someday I will, really.  Tried the first two pages.  His first two sentences start with three guys with plain names, and nothing to distinguish them from each other.  Not promising.

In the end I purchased Bolano’s”By Night in Chile.”  Not sure if I made the right choice, since I hate reading the same author twice when I’ve got so many other writers to read for the first time — when I read a second title by the same author, feel like I’m cheating the others.  Still, el Caudillo will be ecstatic to see me read a fellow Chileno, despite his family’s support for Pinochet.

New favorite song — “Kids” by MGMT.

Countdown to Portland — 16 days.

It is hot and sticky and gross and I do not look forward to getting in to bed like this.

My day of labor.

Last night at midnight I passed page 50 in my manuscript.

Today is my third straight day sequestered in my house, cellphone shut off, doing absolutely nothing except type, eat, piss and sleep.  I feel like a soldier.  My beard is exploring the lower reaches of my neck.  It is like a marathon — a crazy idea, but one that you just have to do to prove yourself.

And I have learned a lot.  I’ve learned to just keep typing, even when forget what I’m doing.  To stop could mean the loss of hours of work.  I’ve learned to let go of my devotion to the clock and the arbitrary schedules I’ve set for myself, to stop beating myself up if I start something ten minutes later than I thought I would.  And I’ve learned that no matter how much research and preparation I do beforehand, always something unexpected will come up that I never could have foreseen.

Example, last night I reached a pivotal point in the plot much sooner than anticipated, and took a five minute break from typing to find my place in my outline and sketch out some next steps.  All out of nowhere I get this idea for my protag to see a Spanish painting in a hotel restaurant.  I don’t know why; I don’t have any memory of a Spanish painting in a hotel restaurant myself.  It just bubbled up from the depths, I guess.  Anyway, fool that I am, I then stopped typing and started googling Spanish paintings, wasting hours staring at Goya’s Black Paintings (which unfortunately, no one has done a very good job of collecting online — note to self).  And none of which even remotely connect to the themes of my story.  Good education on Goya — bad waste of time.

And that is what I learned over my summer vacation.

The aces aligned for this weekend.  All but one of my housemates are out of town for the holiday, leaving me a deserted house all to my self.  I’ve eaten well without running out of food.  The weather has behaved.  The distractions are non-existent.

Every weekend should be like this.

But every weekend won’t be like this one, this has been extraordinary, a one-off.  There will parties and chores and errands and social outings and friends wanting me to listen to them talk about other friends.  I know this.  I’m fine with it.  I’ll make another weekend like this — promise.  For now I just need to get this weekend complete TODAY before I go see El Caudillo at 7:00pm and start on my homework.  I need to congratulate myself for what I have accomplished, even if it is not the full 90-page perfect manuscript I had imagined.

And I need to set myself up for Act II, the middle section, the next 200 pages.  I can’t even remember what I sketched in my outline for that.  All I know is that I will have to get myself excited about writing that long stretch, as excited as I am to finish this glorious first act.

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.