Boys, I send my love. At the moment I'm too awash for wrapping life in fictive lies. So let's lay the state. A fair friend of the Senate, named Alex, once assured me... that we must make things. No matter what, no matter how quickly they pass or how not. Be in the business of making. Make things that didn't exist and that's enough.
Hail to that. Let me share a tale of misunderstanding. An old home boy has proved me wrong. He married a good woman in a rapid shuffle and then sailed out to the orient. All in a breeze far quicker than I could absorb. The boy slaved under the singularly consuming Japanese work ethic. In order to salvage the working soul that beat within, he wrote a novel for children. I read much of it and judged him like the armchair aesthete I'd become.
As time passed me by, I languished in my private hell parallel to this author. We met again, by chance, on a snowy weekday in the town library. We discussed his book, and maybe it was his appeal to me-- he readily admitted he'd never read an English "adult"novel. Under this auspice,we traded book recommendations. I gave old bismark battleships and he graced me contemporary young adult transgender literature. Now we revel in our meetings and trade stories like old hens. Hell, I'm going to his hole tomorrow.
Yet I am the thin reed and he the stout oak. He's presented his novel to a triple dozen literary agents and only rejections return-- his tome is 190,000 words long and the profitable ideal lies at 100,000-120,000 words. Literature is like an actuary service, where every profitability margin is percentage based. Hedging risk against word counts and verb/noun ratios. This old fellow has commenced the planning of his second novel. Hail to he. It's a discipline and he's crafting himself. We expect a fully formed human end product, and baulk at the sausage making process. The old boy will needs be an author or death to him. I love him for that-- Sweat and bleed baby.
Recently, I just built songs. I drink and cobble songs. Shitty affairs tied to immediacy and pretensions. I play them around a dark industrial-failed city. Tomorrow I hold a whole court alone, one that I am not ready to preside. Peddle away shoe-man. I tentatively sent my first song effort to our Nero. And I love him for his response-- "hey, did you have a break up recently?" Hehehe. Street corner saint. When I find something worth pride I'll send it here. Sweat until then. Beer soaked rail workers love anything new, especially.
When I told one weathered man that I wrote the song I played him, he nearly threw a stroke. He slapped the table, stood up and hollered. As though the fact that anybody could make anything in this shithole was reason worth waking another day. I thought he might cry. Truly, he stammered.
Tonight I sang jazz standards at a club full of weekday alcoholics. The band leader woman may have gone to elementary school with me-- we traded whiskey shots for a liver's time. I was a step off tune tonight, but instead of noticing, people just cheered. The woman looked like she's shrugging a meth addiction, her 55 year old night-daddy sat in the corner and nodded to approve me taking his girl. We danced and her green dyed hair spun. Her words dripped of sputtering-mental disease, but I loved her. For a few free hours we'd be each others' heaven. But sauced on whiskey, I slipped out the kitchen door to swerve-drive my brother-friend back to his old-lady.
Love's a flash-pan, but friends an investment. So it goes.
In the essay “Of Friendship,” found in his Complete Essays (public library; public domain) — the same tome that gave us his timeless insights on studies and beauty — philosopher and scientific method pioneer Francis Bacon considers one of the greatest gifts of human existence: Friendship.
ReplyDelete"A principal fruit of friendship, is the ease and discharge of the fulness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause and induce. We know diseases of stoppings, and suffocations, are the most dangerous in the body; and it is not much otherwise in the mind; you may take sarza to open the liver, steel to open the spleen, flowers of sulphur for the lungs, castoreum for the brain; but no receipt openeth the heart, but a true friend; to whom you may impart griefs, joys, fears, hopes, suspicions, counsels, and whatsoever lieth upon the heart to oppress it, in a kind of civil shrift or confession."
To this he adds a chief benefit of a friend — the capacity to neutralize our astounding gift for rationalization through wise counsel:
"Add now, to make this second fruit of friendship complete, that other point, which lieth more open, and falleth within vulgar observation; which is faithful counsel from a friend. Heraclitus saith well in one of his enigmas, Dry light is ever the best. And certain it is, that the light that a man receiveth by counsel from another, is drier and purer, than that which cometh from his own understanding and judgment; which is ever infused, and drenched, in his affections and customs. So as there is as much difference between the counsel, that a friend giveth, and that a man giveth himself, as there is between the counsel of a friend, and of a flatterer. For there is no such flatterer as is a man’s self; and there is no such remedy against flattery of a man’s self, as the liberty of a friend. Counsel is of two sorts: the one concerning manners, the other concerning business. For the first, the best preservative to keep the mind in health, is the faithful admonition of a friend. The calling of a man’s self to a strict account, is a medicine, sometime too piercing and corrosive. Reading good books of morality, is a little flat and dead. Observing our faults in others, is sometimes improper for our case. But the best receipt (best, I say, to work, and best to take) is the admonition of a friend... A friend that is wholly acquainted with a man’s estate, will beware, by furthering any present business, how he dasheth upon other inconvenience. And therefore rest not upon scattered counsels; they will rather distract and mislead, than settle and direct."
End this quote heavy comment with this aphorism,
"For there was never proud man thought so absurdly well of himself, as the lover doth of the person loved; and therefore it was well said, That it is impossible to love, and to be wise." -Francis Bacon, Of Love
i recently saw the authore george saunders discuss his new book of short stories on the colbert report. a book which the the ny times magazine said is one of the best books you'll read this year.
ReplyDeletenow as to the content - that is something of which i'm unaware. but the meat of this discussion is when colbert asks "why do you write short stories"
saunders response is that in a short story the reader expects to obtain all of the same sensations and sense of gratification that they get from a novel, but in the span of 8 pages. thus the author is left with the enormous task of trying to fit all of the feelings and movements contained in a novel into that small space.
his example:
in a novel the man in love with the woman chases her onto to the train tracks and she boards a train to leave. he squeezes through the stories just in time and sits down next to her and their story continues.
in a short story, the man in love with the woman chases her onto the train tracks and gets there just as the doors are closing behind her. he must then yell all of his feelings at her running next to the car as the train pulls away and hope to have left an impact.
he ends by saying a short story is also like a pop song. but pop song or otherwise, what you have shown here is that the writing of a song is really the ultimate short story. in even less then 8 pages a well written song can evoke all of the feeling and symbolism of a 200 page novel.
it is funny to me that you have juxtaposed a seemingly similar realization within the context of your friends novel.
were i you senator, i would find validation in publishing a post the same week as this interview that speaks so similarly to the thoughts of the author of "the best book you'll read all year".
keep chugging, keep building.
full interview:
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/423310/january-29-2013/george-saunders
I'm gonna french the shit outta you Po-Mo.
ReplyDelete<3Senny