I have been grueling, not growling, over a novel I’ve been working on for a couple of years now, a novel about a writer. What else can I write about? It’s a novel about a mystery writer. I have to get trendy. Mysteries are now considered “literature.” Wilkie Collins’s Moonstone was considered a masterpiece of mystery in my day. I never read it. I was hung up on the mysteries of John Dickson Carr and his detective character, Doctor Gideon Fell.
Most mysteries to me are boring. Like watching police shows on teevee. After a while, who gives a shit; just another turning over of another multiused plot. There have to be a whole lot of people getting killed for a mystery to work. I want to write about death, but I want to write about walking straight right into Chaos instead of death, the atheist’s purgatory, with no turning back, and there’s no mystery to that; that’s inevitable.
But I’m trying to write this novel I’ve been working on for two years now in a “regular” novel way, whatever the hell that means. I mean, I’m trying to write this novel like one would write a stage play or a screenplay, you know, acceptable in a general way and not in any literary way. Aha! Literary. What the hell does that word mean?
The first usage of the word, according to my trusty Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, is kind’a needing deliberation: “relating to or having the characteristics of humane learning or literature.” Wow. That’s a weird definition. Sounds like something from one of Pastor Melissa Scott’s “teachings.” What the hell is humane learning and what’s it got to do with literature? The “b” portion of that dic definition is “bookish.” Then the “c” portion sez “of or relating to books.” If I am “of a book” then I am literary. I like that. Since everything I write is autobiographical ballooning, then I am “of a book.” But then, I am “of a book” all day long. Damn, not very literary of me, sorry.
The second accepted definition of “literary” is “Well-read.” As opposed to “Ill-read,” I assume. Am I well-read? I ask myself. I’m reading 14 books at once right now, several of them coming to conclusions and, hell, I suppose that makes me well-read: I’m reading Freud, Hilda Doolittle, a tome on Gestalt therapy, a book on Mesopotamia, 3 books on Charles Edward Ives, Henry Miller’s Nexus, The Poetry of Stephen Crane (I just read at it all the time for several years now—hey, I know how to live with books and in them, too. So there, I am “of a book” as long as I’m reading a book that leaves me well-read. I’m also in the last act of Eugene O’Neill’s Days Without End (an autographed first edition, remember?). Will John Loving crash and run to the Catholic Church for his salvation?
Also, yesterday morning I got up and wrote another song at the piano. I even put in some drum tracks, bass tracks, with a channel of vibes, too. “The Rising Sea.” That’s what I called it. Then the woman that I love and adore came over and we got into one of our arguments. She’s a graphic artist. I was showing her some “outsider” art I was thinking of buying, two I really liked, one by M.C. 5 cents Jones and the other a sign painted by Ruby Williams of Louisiana. My lady friend immediately put them down as “child” art. I was arguing that it was “raw” art, the rawest form of art. She said, in that case, everything is art. Hell, I didn’t want to argue with her. I never can win. She’s so F-ing practical and pragmatic. That’s the kind of women I attract. I can’t get no women romantics, like Ray Charles used to sing, “Just give me a woman who likes to make love in ¾ time.” You know that song? “Well, I like enchiladas and old El Dorados that shine/ I like Fender guitars, good song, women, and wine…” I flipped out the first time I heard Ray sing it; I loved it so much I added it to my repertoire and did it once with my bass playing friend, the rye farmer from Queens, New York, on my only ever-issued cassette recording back in the high eighties, but the recording people left it in the can saying it didn’t match the rest of the tunes on the album.
Anyway, back to being literary and writing novels and stuff like that. [You notice how I’m trying to avoid politics—you know, my neck hairs aren’t frizzing up in growling anger, though I could easily tumble off this literary train and fall down into a hobo camp of political dissidents. There is a group of impeachment freaks here in NYC who are wanting to go do 24/7 vigils in front of Congress…but, shit, I’m too literary for that kind of revolutionary action. I’m more like a Lenin when it comes to leading revolutions. I work best from Switzerland.
[Politics are hard to ignore. On this Sunday morning, the day after the hottest January 6th on record in NYC, police helicopters have been circling the city since 7 a.m. One big huge police helicopter cruiser is making the biggest noise. Must be a peace march or something. Or maybe city saint Rudi “Goombah Duh-brained” Guiliani is in town to whisper about running for president. He’s a loser. He’s only won one race, for mayor; otherwise he was beaten by Hilary Clinton in his run for Senate. He’s such a piece of cornball crap.
[Today, the Sunday teevee dumbasses are trumpeting Bush’s plan to send a “surge” of 20,000 more poor sappy Amurican dog soldiers to Iraq. [Except, I've noticed that Navy and Air Force soldiers are getting killed on the ground in Iraq now, which means the dirty rotten lying coward who's our never-honestly-elected president is using Navy and Air Force personnel as ground troops now, something those guys just aren't trained for. What a waste of human life and time. He just won’t give up that Holy War even though 71% of the Amurican numbskulls want us out of Iraq. Today also, rumors are about that Israel is going to nuke Iran. Why not? Let’s have a new holocaust and get it over with: send the f-ing Jews to Gehenna or wherever the hell their worthless souls go and send the Christians to F-ing purgatory and send the Muslims to that place where they get to screw a 100,000 virgins--man, that sounds like heaven to a wolfman; anything to get these religious nuts off the planet so we can continue with this evolution of culture in a terrestrial wy—perhaps a restructuring of our system of planning—give us something culturally substantial: like a good damn novel that is not a piece of mystery pap written by a woman with a singing cop heart who idolizes men in uniform or men, like Joseph Wombaugh, who idolize men in uniform, the corruption of being a cop just a part of life we, the criminals, have to get used to.
What happens when the government knows every god-damn thing there is to know about you? Will we all one day be in prison writing books about mouse holes and government bureaucrats?
How novel of me to fall off the edge and get into politics when I swore I was going to avoid it. Fiction writers are liars, or did Hemingway already say that?]thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
No comments:
Post a Comment