Yesterday’s blog was kind of a downer. I apologize, but only partially. I needed to say what I said. The great British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams once commented about his Fourth Symphony: “I don’t know if I like it, but it’s what I meant.”
I have so much to live for, and I know it. I have all of you, I have my family here, my grandson, my patient and ever-supportive wife. I have my writing, and I make pretty good use of my time, enjoying every minute I spend punching keys on the keyboard or scratching ink onto sheets of paper. I hunger to do it. I even enjoy the breaks I take from the writing – any excuse will do, ask almost any writer – to play solitaire or watch a syndicated rerun of House, NCIS, the Mentalist, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Thanks to Erik and Annemieke, I have a decent sound system now, and have vowed to go through my CDs A-Z. I also have discovered the visual delights of BluRay, even with these old eyes of mine.
But the anger is there, under the surface, as I reported yesterday. No number of Silents on Buffy or symphonies by Shostakovich can make it go away. It’s under control, but it is in no way abated. And I thought about it and made a startling discovery: I’m lonely. I miss my job.
It’s not the job I miss, really. I hated the job, the organization, the attitudes. My current job is much more satisfying. But I loved the people. Mostly, I loved the gals. I miss them. I miss the banter, the joking, the self-depreciating humor, the candor, the sharing. I miss being around a delightful, insightful and attractive group of women.
In a time for confessing, I confess that. All apologies to the guys, but women are much more interesting to be around than men, and more fun to look at in the bargain.
Showing posts with label WORK. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WORK. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
The Grateful Writer
It's Chrristmas and the writing is going slowly, with so much else to do. But the thinking goes on full tilt. And the reading -- what follows comes from encountering a slim volume used on Amazon, wherein lay the following treasured remarks. They remind me that this is a great time to take stiock and counbt our blessings, and I for one feel particularly fortunate right now -- and many of you contribute to the reasons why I feel that way as I struggle, mostly with myself, to do the work.
If you can read this, consider yourself loved, fortunate, and skilled.
My all time vavorite author, Kurt Vonnegut, said the following in an interview in 1999 that became "Like Shaking Hands With God, a Conversation about Writing," with Vonnegut and Lee Stringer. I needed to read these words, to remind myself that what I am and what I do is a blessing. He said:
"And it's important to retreat from the hoopla on television, and what television says matters and what we're all supposed to talk about. And of course literature is the only art that requires our audience o be performers, You need to able to read and you have to be able to read awfully well. You have to read so well that you get irony! I'll say one thing meaning another, and you'll get it. Expcting a large number of people to be literate is like expecting everybody to play the French horn. It is extremely difficult . . . when we think about what reading is . . . it's impossible. Literature is idiocyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines of only twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten Arabic numbers, and about eight punctuation marks. And yet there are people like you who can look at the printed page and put shows on in your head--the Battle of Waterloo, for God's sake. The New York Times says that there are forty million people in the United States who can't read well enough to fill out an application for a driver's license. So our audience cannot be large, becaused we need a highly skilled audience, unbelievably skilled.. . . . Thank you for learning to do this virtually impossible thing."
The point to me is that writing is something the writer does not for an audience, exactly, but for himself. Lee Stringer added:
"More and more these days I find that people want to boil things down to something simple, something you can grab in a second. I also see that today people are very result oriented. We don't do anything because it's the right thing to do, or for the sake of art, or for the sake of anything unless we can prove that down the road, e, y, or z is going to happen. I guess in that kind of environment it is difficult for what we call literature to exist because a book is not all that practical in short term. It's probably infinitely practical in the long term. But you're not going to pick Timequake (Vonnegut's last novel) off the shelf and learn how to scamble eggs tomorrow. So, in that context, writing is a struggle to preserve our right to be not so practical."
I am learning every day. I am learning a sad truth, but an important one. I won't change the world by writing Ghost Music. I know this; so do you. All I can do is write it, or not, and to be honest, or not, is not a choice.
But I will be read. And for that I thank you. Merry Christmas!
If you can read this, consider yourself loved, fortunate, and skilled.
My all time vavorite author, Kurt Vonnegut, said the following in an interview in 1999 that became "Like Shaking Hands With God, a Conversation about Writing," with Vonnegut and Lee Stringer. I needed to read these words, to remind myself that what I am and what I do is a blessing. He said:
"And it's important to retreat from the hoopla on television, and what television says matters and what we're all supposed to talk about. And of course literature is the only art that requires our audience o be performers, You need to able to read and you have to be able to read awfully well. You have to read so well that you get irony! I'll say one thing meaning another, and you'll get it. Expcting a large number of people to be literate is like expecting everybody to play the French horn. It is extremely difficult . . . when we think about what reading is . . . it's impossible. Literature is idiocyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines of only twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten Arabic numbers, and about eight punctuation marks. And yet there are people like you who can look at the printed page and put shows on in your head--the Battle of Waterloo, for God's sake. The New York Times says that there are forty million people in the United States who can't read well enough to fill out an application for a driver's license. So our audience cannot be large, becaused we need a highly skilled audience, unbelievably skilled.. . . . Thank you for learning to do this virtually impossible thing."
The point to me is that writing is something the writer does not for an audience, exactly, but for himself. Lee Stringer added:
"More and more these days I find that people want to boil things down to something simple, something you can grab in a second. I also see that today people are very result oriented. We don't do anything because it's the right thing to do, or for the sake of art, or for the sake of anything unless we can prove that down the road, e, y, or z is going to happen. I guess in that kind of environment it is difficult for what we call literature to exist because a book is not all that practical in short term. It's probably infinitely practical in the long term. But you're not going to pick Timequake (Vonnegut's last novel) off the shelf and learn how to scamble eggs tomorrow. So, in that context, writing is a struggle to preserve our right to be not so practical."
I am learning every day. I am learning a sad truth, but an important one. I won't change the world by writing Ghost Music. I know this; so do you. All I can do is write it, or not, and to be honest, or not, is not a choice.
But I will be read. And for that I thank you. Merry Christmas!
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
My New Project
I recently found a book length manuscript I had written in 1997 and started reading it. Oddly enough, I like it. It is unrelentingly sad, but it is honest and true and beautiful in its portrayal of the uglier aspects of Mankind. And if the Holocaust told us to keep busy remembering, then this is my effort to record some names worth the time and energy. I call it "Ghost Music."
I know it is funny how you see several ideas or projects ahead of you, and you flit from one to the other until one grabs you and says: WORK ME. I have begun the transcription/rewrite of this first draft, written in pen in two journals. I do not know if this will be the project that won't let go of me until it is done, but I suspect so: my brain keeps thinking about the lines and how to make them better. I also don't know if the book will ever have any appeal to a wider public, but that does not matter. The material matters -- to me.
And I ask myself -- how can so much sorrow bring me such joy? Because I think I got it right. And because these ghosts remind me of how lucky I am. And, finally, because I have been busy remembering all my life and now it's time to share those memories, even of lives lost long before I was born.
I know it is funny how you see several ideas or projects ahead of you, and you flit from one to the other until one grabs you and says: WORK ME. I have begun the transcription/rewrite of this first draft, written in pen in two journals. I do not know if this will be the project that won't let go of me until it is done, but I suspect so: my brain keeps thinking about the lines and how to make them better. I also don't know if the book will ever have any appeal to a wider public, but that does not matter. The material matters -- to me.
And I ask myself -- how can so much sorrow bring me such joy? Because I think I got it right. And because these ghosts remind me of how lucky I am. And, finally, because I have been busy remembering all my life and now it's time to share those memories, even of lives lost long before I was born.
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