Things I Learned During the Week of May 26 - June 2
A man walks down the street. Coming upon a stump, he reaches into his back pocket, pulls out a Bible, climbs upon the stump, and then proclaims to the heavens, “Gobbledygook has returned!” He removes himself from the stump and continues on to the barber.
Her are a few of the things I learned this week…
- …from moving pictures:
- That the new world held so much promise, so much beauty, and so much brutality, and that all of it could be rendered tragic through the art of cinematic poetry.
- That Colin Farrell can be a pretty decent actor when he doesn’t have to talk.
- That Terrence Malick can put more beautiful images on his screen than maybe any other film director working today.
- That Charles Bukowski may be one of the few poets who actually makes sense to me:
so you want to be a writer, by Charles Bukowski
if it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it for money or
fame,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don’t do it.
if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it,
don’t do it.
if you’re trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you’re not ready.don’t be like so many writers,
don’t be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don’t be dull and boring and
pretentious, don’t be consumed with self-love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don’t add to that.
don’t do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don’t do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don’t do it.when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.there is no other way.
and there never was.
- That Bukowski spent most of his life sorting mail in a post office, but that he also sent his poems out to publishers at a steady clip; thankfully, a white-collar businessman named John Martin recognized Bukowski’s brilliance and offered to become the poet’s patron (he promised to pay Bukowski whatever he needed for the rest of his life as long as Bukowski would keep writing; Bukowski figured that he needed about $40 a month to survive, but Martin upped it to $100), but if John Martin hadn’t come along, then there’s a good chance the wider world would never have heard of Charles Bukowski.
- That John Martin founded an entire publishing house to make sure that Bukowski’s poems saw the light of day, and that he later turned Black Sparrow Press into an influential voice on the alternate history of America, a publishing house of which Whitman would have been proud.
- That the old woman who mashed locusts and made bread in I Heart Huckabees has a starring role in Raising Victor Vargas, and that she may be one of the comedic geniuses of our time; check out “No more phone in the house” from this site of clips from Raising Victor Vargas and tell me I’m not right.
- That Scarlet Johansen and J.Lo have a love child and her name is Judy Marte; check out “You’re the closest I’ve ever been with a boy” on this site of clips from Raising Victor Vargas and tell me I’m not right.
- …from static pages:
- That Herman Hesse reveals his Germanic origin when he writes in Magister Luddi (or) The Glass Bead Game that, “Each of us should be on the way to perfection, should be striving to reach the center, not the periphery” — and that I reveal my American origin when I struggle against that prescription, desiring instead to venture out into the frontier.
- That Hesse thinks “There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught.” Of course, I’m learning that from a book, so…
- That Bolivia could be a really interesting place to watch for the left-leaning people of the world, perhaps even more interesting than Venezuala.
- That Umberto Eco thinks “There is no set of rules [for writing a novel], or, rather, there are many, varied and flexible rules; and there is no hot magma of inspiration [compare this to the first stanza of the Bukowski poem above]. But it is true that there is a sort of initial idea and that there are very precise phases in a process that develops only gradually.”
- That the first phase of Eco’s novel writing process is to find the image, the initial idea. The second is to construct a world: “This is why, when I wrote The Name of the Rose, I spent a full year without writing a line. Instead I read, did drawings and diagrams, and invented a world…Once the world has been designed, the words will follow, and they will be those that world and all the events that take place in it require.” The third phase is to develop a structure that “consists essentially of constraints and temporal rhythms…The beauty of the story is that you have to create restraints, but you must feel free to change them in the course of writing. Except that at that point you have to change everything and start again from scratch.”
- That, for Eco, it’s not about putting out a book on schedule to match the demand of a market: “The beauty, the real joy [of writing a novel] is living for six, seven, eight years (ideally forever) in a world that you are creating bit by bit, and which becomes your own. Sadness begins when the novel is over.”
- …from the web:
- That I am the only person on the Internet who still listens to Brother Chameleon.
- That Aquafresh toothpaste deserves an (Aqua)fresh backbeat, because it’s never to late to AMP up the clean.
- That Kevin Smith has a blog about his Boring Ass Life.
- That there is something very wrong in China.
- That nearly 50 million people are actively creating content for the Web.
- That I can still be impressed by an innovative juggler.
- …from life:
- That it’s always great to reconnect with old friends.
- That other old friends can lie to you for four straight months about not having plans to get engaged, but that doing such a thing can sometimes turn around on the dastardly liar and bite him in the ass; the lesson: don’t lie to your friends, even when you mean well (btw, for those of you who know Adam — well, the idiot finally smartened up and asked his incredible girlfriend to marry him; for some reason, she said yes…go figure).
- That it’s fun to make new friends over free wings.
- That Texas isn’t all bad.
- That having no homework can be a rewarding experience.
- That not every conversation has to be a debate (this is one that I have to keep relearning, unfortunately).
- That getting lost in New Hampshire in the middle of the night sometimes means discovering a short-cut.
- That putting the dock in the water doesn’t have to devolve into family bickering.
- That my grandmother could be one the most adorable people on the planet.
- That I still hate hot weather.
And that’s it for this week. Hopefully, Gobbledygook won’t disappear for another three months. Have a great weekend!