#209

Mm-mm-mmm, people. Thought I'd wait a bit longer to write, but the mood came on strong, and while sometimes the mood must be denied, and sometimes laziness is stronger, well, here I am, punching keys and watching the words appear on the blank field.

Phew. How do I describe it? It is like sex, a dragging, slow fuck with the infinite. As a penetrative member of the species, this is the closest I come to experiencing being fucked in the way that I fuck, if you can dig it; not that the penetrative element is absent from the experience, but that there is something rocking me back in the same way. In this sense it is more like plunging my hands into raw dough and kneading, only the dough carries a live charge that travels up my arms and causes the wild bunch of inexplicable phenomena in my forebrain to ferment and vibrate. To roll into long slow climaxes punctuated by sharper comings--throwing my head back involuntarily and working my jaw as I hammer out something elemental (to me), not even breathing as the words assert themselves (I do not choose them so much as clumsily summon them to do an imperfect job), before the charge, having flared bright, drops and leaves me boneless and giggly in my chair is not uncommon occurrence in the typing life.

Also it is like carrying two suitcases up an infinite hill, and you don't give a fuck about what is in them any more than you want to be walking up a hill, you would rather be living any other kind of life at all, and denied that, you would rather be fucking dead, but something behind you, something so vast it is either God or every devil sprung from every hell ever conceived, propels you forward with not just undeniable power, not just goads of ice and goads of fire, but with Force, and not even Force could tell you what the burden is or signifies or why you have to climb the hill, only that this is the Situation and everything in Creation is subject to the Force and the Situation. So fuck you if you don't like it. So you bend to your work, and you sweat, and it sucks, and you burn it all down yourself later, you don't grieve if by accident you lose it all; what matters is doing it, and it's like sex in that way too, isn't it? No matter how much you might think you might be better off without it, happier, easier in your mind, you find yourself making the right moves to end up laid. No matter how much you play with dropping all your pretenses and living a sober life of calm attention to the moment, eventually, you always get back to work, the insane work you can't say no to.

Put me in a room with a typewriter hooked up to a pistol that tracks my head, rigged to pop me square if I write a full sentence, go over half a page, or wait twenty-four hours.

It won't be too very long. Might shed a tear, but I've led a good life, and ending it with a period would be so poetic there exists no doubt that I'd die smiling. Comes down to it, how much fun it is, to write a sentence--any sentence.

Force and Situation.


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I said there would be lists, and lists you shall have! Not all at once, though, because I might need the next post to be lower-effort. I really do work very hard at my day vocation and probably will be updating less often than before. Also, I currently have no saved work, not so much as a sentence in word document, so if I want to publish another book anytime soon I have to start from scratch and work pretty steadily, as opposed to before, when I had two books simmering and one getting started pretty good. Some foolish part of me is holding out hope, but I know the score. My hard drive holds no evidence that I'm a writer at all, and the cloud is just as empty.

Anyhow! The length of this particular list may be shocking, even if you're familiar with this blog.

Books Obtained since July the 28th

The Fall of Gondolin by J.R.R. Tolkien
Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness and An Echo of Heaven by Ōe Kenzaburō
Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller
They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib
The Gormenghast Novels by Mervyn Peake
Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens
Dreamsongs vol. II by George R.R. Martin (already had vol. II)
1984 by George Orwell and Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley (these are recovery purchases; bundled together because you know how these books seem to get gifted right out of your library constantly, willingly or less willingly, for very similar reasons. Or maybe you don't, whatever)
Deliverance by James Dickey
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
No Time to Spare by Ursula K. LeGuin
Norwegian Wood and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Murakami Haruki
Silverwing by Kenneth Oppel (have owned the sequel, Sunwing, for a long time, and used to own the conclusion, Firewing; got rid of it at some point, find it again someday maybe. Sunwing is far and away the best of the three)
The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
The Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece with Carlos Gómez as general editor
A Really Big Lunch by Jim Harrison
The Drawings of Heinrich Kley (200, Dover Press)
The Passion of David Lynch by Martha P. Nochimson
The Wars of the Roses by Alison Weir
The Best American Nonrequired Reading, 2006 edited by Dave Eggers (now I have 2005, 2006, and 2007--the years I spent wholly ensconced in High School)
The Bird Artist by Howard Norman
See Now Then by Jamaica Kincaid
Stranger Things: Darkness on the Edge of Town by Adam Christopher
Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick
The View from Saturday by E.L. Konigsburg
There's a Boy in the Girl's Bathroom by Louis Sachar
and,
Elevation, The Shining, 'Salem's Lot, 11/22/63, Under the Dome, Bazaar of Bad Dreams, Needful Things, The Long Walk, Christine, Everything's Eventual, Firestarter, Thinner, Dreamcatcher, The Tommyknockers, The Outsider, Pet Sematary, Revival, Carrie, Finders Keepers, The Colorado Kid, Misery, Cell, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, and The Running Man, by Stephen King, as well as Black House by Stephen King and Peter Straub, Gwendy's Button Box by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar, and The Cycle of the Werewolf by Stephen King and illustrated by Bernie Wrightson.

See? Big difference between my trying not to buy books and my letting myself do what I wanna do.

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Did you see how much Stephen King I bought? I checked Bag of Bones out from the library at age eleven, depressed and angry and ready for a fucking adult-ass book. I had no idea who Stephen King was, though the older movie based on Pet Sematary (which I am currently reading) had done some psychic damage to me as a kid. I only knew that the desolate cover, with its man in silhouette facing the ghostly nude woman on the still water, looked adult as all hell and the paperback was thicker than my arm. I propelled myself through somewhat madly, drinking its pain and its nightmares and its gasping loss like they were cool water in the desert.

Got an education from that book. Yes, in many ways, it was exactly my first adult book, setting the course of my life as I very consciously put childish things aside (being able to see the childishness in this act only comes much later, of course, and only if you're lucky). The only book about authorcraft I would tolerate for a long time was Stephen King's On Writing*, and it is high time, as I have mentioned before, that I completed my collection of his work. At one time I felt I had too many of his books and didn't get any new ones for a long long time, stopped reading new stuff, mostly, after he moved to Florida. Fine, things went how they went, but I'm reclaiming certain threads of my life to myself, and his books are crucial to the endeavor, perhaps in some still-unacknowledged way central, essential.

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Many more lists to come! At least two next post. I have an interesting and nice day planned for my one day off, and the writing in the blog portion of it is up. I am going to take a big rip out of my new bong. Have a blessed day, free of the undead.


--JL

*the list has not exactly bloomed: Strunk and White's guide, accepted based on Stevie's guidance, John Gardner's On Becoming a Novelist, and Italo Calvino's Memos for the Next Millenium.