___________________________________________________________
Notebook Thinking
Again, as in most blues idiom roles I play, I'm sittin'--always sittin' never sitting--you gettin' the idiom here?--I'm sittin' here thinkin'--though the other night, I was sittin' here drinkin'--
gettin' it...
gettin' there...
the point...
and the point must always be sharp...
and my dad taught me that when I was a young learnin' kid, no kidding--yes, "ing" on kid--Kid-Ing--no kiddin' allowed...
and my dad showed me how to hone a pocketknife blade...
his pocketknife a pig sticker...
when opened, his pocketknife blade was long and pointed...
that blade got to the point quick...
encased when folded up in a staghorn and silver handle...
the pocketknife handle being also what the blade or blades were encased in when the knife was folded up...
and my dad called me over while he was honing down the blade of his pocketknife with his special Arkansas whetstone...
"This stone is like a flint stone...it's found over around Jasper, Arkansas...remember when we went over there to Eureka Springs...the Ozarks, when you were..."
"Yeah, I remember dad, so what's it you want?"
"You always gotta keep the blade of your pocketknife sharp...here watch."
I watched as he slid the whetstone up and down his pocketknife's blade...
"You slide it out toward the point and then back towards you--out on one side of the blade--you see--like that--then you come toward you on the other side of the blade--like this--see--you do it with smooth action--like this--see--it's kind of a dance-like movement. You gotta keep the blade sparkling sharp and, if you use your whetstone right, at the same time you're honing the blade sharp you're also sharpening the point. Ya always gotta keep the point sharp, son, always."
...so, see, you've got to keep your point sharp and to the point...
stabbing points.
And I enjoyed Barabas Munn-Dayne in yesterday's The Daily Growler rummaging through an old notebook of his he found while rummaging through his past...
I, too, am a believer in notebooks...
handwritten ones, too.
I can't imagine keeping a notebook full of primordial up to well-thought-out notes on say a computer...
A notebook has to be kept in a notebook...
handwritten notes...
quick jots and tittles--and I NOTE: I started this jots-and-tittles stuff way back in the early Growler days--I brag--I note--just a note to keep you informed--this one-liner style of writing is an old newspaperman's trick--like Walter Winchell used to write like he talked, as if reading news headlines off a ticker tape...
the ticker tape...what an amazing invention!
wire reports then came along...
what's on the wire? Check the wire.
I remember as a young man going down to the newspaper where my brother worked and training on pulling wire reports and taking them to the newshounds--
the copy came over the wire--yellow copy paper pouring out of this wire machine that was full of ringing bells and dings and then the printer engine started and the thing produced quick jots and tittles of type...
the wire reporting machines right next to the wire-photo machine--
one wire was the AP wire...
the other wire was the UP wire...
if it was a big-time newspaper it had the Reuters wire...
the IP wire...
a police wire...
the stock market tape.
Notes in notebooks are the closest you can get to the truth about a thinker--a writer...
look in my tons of old notebooks and you'll find out more about me than you'd really care to know...
and notebooks aren't for anybody's knowledge but your own.
"Why do you keep those notebooks laying around here collecting dust and germs and Zeus-knows-what kind of bacterial evils?" my female companion asks with that sarcastic look on her face.
"Those are my shed skins down there, babe."
What a lucky man I am to have had so many women around to CORRECT my mistakes.
My notebooks pay tribute to those many women, too.
Ah, my notebooks. My wildernesses. My coming forth from Plato's Cave to throw my blinding light into the face of the darkened world.
My notebooks are my flashlights on my life and all the life that includes.
Like, do you know why rappers wear their pants to where they're almost sliding off their hips and falling to the ground?
That's in a notebook of mine I'm currently using to work on a film treatment I've been piddling with for a couple of Blue Lester years now...
Blues Idiomspeak...sorry.
Do you know why rappers leave their sneaker laces untied?
Do you know why rappers wear long dress-like teeshirts?
Their pants are loose and falling down (symbiotically) because they've taken their belts off to use them for another purpose...clue: the pants are beltless for a reason.
Their shoelaces are untied or missing for the same reason.
Their shirts are dress-like long for the same reason.
All to do with prison life--prison thinking...
Something black men have had to deal with in both reality and their subconsciousnesses (Freud said we have to trust our subconsciousness) for many a generation--the possibility that some time before they're dead they're gonna do some P Time--black men have to go a long way back to find that time they were individually free...
That's why rappers aren't interested much in anything but the NOW...
They've tuned in, turned on, and dropped out, baby...
You see, Timothy Leary has popped into the Growler spaces again...
from out of one of my notebooks, I must note.
Enter Somerset Maugham
One of my very favorite of all time books is Somerset Maugham's The Summing Up. Every writer or wannabe writer should read this book. I've read it like fundie religiosos read their "Gods's word"--or like lawyers read the Supreme Court decisions--or like bartenders have to keep referring to the Old Mr. Boston drink mixing guide. I've read it at least 5 times and referred to it (in)numerous times. It is referred to especially frequently in the notebooks I compiled during the 80s and 90s--though I first read the book as a young struggling writer while babysitting my brother's kids during one summer of happiness and unexpurgated reading I lived.
My copy of The Summing Up is a falling apart Mentor Book paperback from that time when Mentor Books carried a 35-cent price tag--seventh printing, 1956. The cover's torn loose. The first pages are torn loose--the middle of the book is still kind of bound, but the back pages are falling apart, coming unglued off the spine--I need to make it whole again by holding it together with a rubberband. Still, with a little prestidigitational effort, it can still be read--though the type is yeah small--and the pages are yellowing darkly with age. I can judge the last time I started reading the book because between pages 80 and 81 I've placed a business card from the Baby Monster Studios ("24-track music production") as a bookmark. That means I was reading the book last around 1989. That's the year I made a recording with my pal theguitarplayer (see One Spring Morning Off Spring Street in some long-past posting of The Daily Growler) at Baby Monster--which I'm sure is no longer in business--long gone--long gone on into obscurity. They still have our master tape from that session. On one track, one of my longer compositions, this young artist chick I called thedairymaid was sitting on the piano bench with me teasing me with her hands as I was trying to play the piano and sing at the same time...I kept fucking up the takes..."Take 25...Louisiana Song...we're rolling...."
The Summing Up is the book from which Maugham's great grammatical no-no comes--dangling prepositions--oh how Maugham hated dangling prepositions--no matter what you're writing on.
"...And since I have put the whole of my life into my books much of what I have to say will naturally have found a place in them. There are few subjects with the compass of my interests that I have not lightly or seriously touched upon. All I can attempt to do now is to give a coherent picture of my feelings and opinions; and here and there, maybe, to state with greater elaboration some idea which the limitations I have thought fit to accept in fiction and in the drama have only allowed me to hint at.
"This book must be egoistic. It is about certain subjects that are important to me and it is about myself because I can only treat of these subjects as they have affected me.
"...No one can tell he whole truth about himself."
from Chapter 4, p. 10, The Summing Up, Mentor Books (Doubleday), 1956.
"I write this book to disembarrass my soul of certain notions that have hovered about in it too long for my comfort. I do not seek to persuade anybody. I am devoid of the pedagogic instinct and when I know a thing never feel in myself the desire to impart it to others. I do not much care if people agree with me. Of course I think I am right, otherwise I should not think as I do, and they are wrong, but it does not offend me that they should be wrong. Nor does it greatly disturb me to discover than my judgment is at variance with that of the majority. I have a certain confidence in my instinct."
from Chapter 5, p. 11, The Summing Up, Mentor Books, 1956.
What a writer! How could you deny instruction from so great a writer! Some writers are pretty dumb as to why they write, but not Maugham. It's instinctual with him. Dig?
The instinctual. That's a part of the Blues Idiom.
theinstinctualgrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
P.S. A thanks to www.languagehat.com for being impressed by Remy de Gourmont's quote on why writers write that Barabas Munn-Dayne posted in yesterday's The Daily Growler. Huzzahs, as always, to L Hat--a damn good writer himself.
No comments:
Post a Comment