BEATNICK WRITER QUIBBLES WITH THE GENIUS OF TOLSTOY or THE MYTHOLOGY OF FEELINGS

I was innocently reading War and Peace when I came across the following:

It seemed to her [Natasha] that everybody knew about her disappointment, was laughing at her, and pitied her. With all the strength of her inner grief, this grief of vanity intensified her unhappiness. 

[Natasha loves Prince Andrei and can't understand why he hasn't visited in three weeks. Andrei is talking with his disapproving father about proposing to Natasha.]

Tolstoy labels the poor girl's anguish as "grief of vanity". In that passage, he reveals why everything we know about human behavior and how we moralize about it is obsolete. Take away language, strip Natasha's feelings free of the moral epithet, vanity, place the poor girl in a troop of monkeys where we all came from and, then, understand the truth of her grief, or what Tolstoy labels as grief. 

Natasha's feelings, her pain, and her imagination about what others think of her is the evolved process by which all animals in our human troop find our places in society, either low down or high up or somewhere in the middle. Emotions, beyond our control, are mechanisms which move us to find and accept our places in the human monkey troop. Nothing noble about her feelings or reprehensible. Emotions just are. Tolstoy's moralizing is his monkey brain justifying his own processes of finding where he belonged in the human troop, and, interestingly enough, look how his feelings of "shame" caused Tolstoy to free his peasants and to unsuccessfully try and be like them, but he couldn't escape his own genius. Fortunately for me, I've got no genius to deal with. Only endless shame. Good movie to watch about Tolstoy is The Last Station.

PPS: For all my understanding of the human condition, I continue to write as of old, too old to change my ways, all the while asking, "How will any of us write if we no longer mythologize our feelings?" Perhaps we won't.

BOOMER'S SILENT NIGHTS IN OLD SPOKANE

My novel, Manning, has lain untouched for several days as Mertie and I have been in Spokane visiting family. We both have family here and our days are full as we try to touch base with as many as possible. We both have friends in the area, and we've only had time to make one or two contacts. Tomorrow, early, we'll drive back to Vancouver and back to our old haunts and routines. 

Good news for people who would rather hold a book in their hands than stare at an eye scorching bright screen. Books are holding their own against e-books which are showing flat sales recently.

Recently, I notice I enjoy reading the news in my newspaper much more than reading on the Internet. I admit my mind is unintentionally being biased by the fact that I follow up the shares of my Facebook friends and my incoming emails from the charities and political groups I contribute to. Without meaning to, I take in more news with a slant than without a slant. Over the Xmas holiday, I had a talk with a retired farmer and a Republican, one of my wife's family, and discovered that he and I agree on many things. There's a vast middle ground shared by Republicans and old Democrats like myself. It's only these hardline "True Believers" who are making all the noise and creating all the hatred, and we all know who they are.

A MACHINIST WRITER'S BEAT LIFE IS UNIVERSALLY AMBIVALENT

One morning when I was working from six pm to six am, seven days a week, as a machinist at Brown and Root in Belle Chasse, Louisiana, I awoke to just such a morning as the one depicted in this photo. The photo was posted on Facbook by my virtual friend, Thomas Gunn in Jacksonville, Florida. 

I was in my 30s, the prime of my physical life. Looking out my efficiency apartment window, I asked myself what I really wanted to do that morning and decided I didn't want to work at Brown and Root on a hot day in a tin shed without air-conditioning, standing twelve hours on ground so unsteady that every piece of heavy equipment passing by made the tin shed shake, rattle and roll. I went to my foreman that morning and told him I was packing up and moving on. King Ray, that was his name, understood perfectly and sent me on my way with a smile and a recommendation for rehire should I ever return. 

That morning was the closest I ever came to truly feeling like a free man who could choose his own destiny, but feelings are fleeting, and, of course, the money I'd saved didn't last long. Another woman appeared who I should never have married, and, soon, I was back in deep doodoo. Within the year, I was splitsville with that wife and on the road again. That's what I always think of as a Southern man's thinking, the sort of thoughts and behaviors that make up the vast majority of country-western songs—struggling, loving, fighting and moving on. An endless cycle. Of course, then I got sober and a lot changed, but a lot more remained the same. Ambivalence is, maybe, more universal than change.

BEATNICK, SILENT BOOMER GROWS MOSSY

in the uninspired memedome today

Except for this blog entry and interactions with others through my Facebook personality, I won't write much today. Nothing at all on the Manning novel. If it weren't for the knowledge that the current novel has the potential to earn a few dollars, I might quit working on it altogether and go sit on my ass while my skin grows mossy in the rain. Manning is a good tale because it set my skin tingling as I conceived it, but the day to day process of birthing it is proving a grueling ordeal. (90 pp by 3 months)

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Writer isn't always a fun movie these days. I recall when writing was pure joy. Watching the words come out of nowhere and build their relationships with each other, take their place in the essay or story, novel or poem ... that was pure joy, endlessly entertaining. Though the whole piece might end up in the circular file later and no financial success, nothing was lost because I was entertaining myself for free, playing happily with my own feelings, words and thoughts or, more coarsely, dabbling in my own shit.

I'll get back to Manning tomorrow and the mystery he's trying to solve 250 years in the future. Today, I'll live in the moment, watching people until my lovely wife comes home from work, and we can sit to watch something informative or mindlessly comforting on TV ... like "Law and Order: SVU" which, by now, is almost family. Or "Dexter" ... also like family?

Had a good time last night at the book party thrown by Curious Monkey Publishing at Ford Food and Drink on the corner of 11th and Division in Portland. Those things are fun when I don't drink anymore and hungrily yearn for every cool lady in the house. A happy marriage has great side benefits. 

SILENT BOOMER SPEAKS ON LANGUAGE: SPOKEN AND WRITTEN

Richard Dawkins talking

My query letter, nice little worm, must be getting more attractive. Two nibbles. An agent wanted 5 pages but quickly got back to me. Did not "draw her in", her nice note read. The other, a small Portland publishing house, wanted 4 consecutive chapters. Sent that off this morning after dealing with fear because it also requested my ideas for the dreaded "marketing".

Now for some discussion of language as written and as heard. If we listened to ourselves speak while we're speaking, we'd realize how we actually "sound". Novelists who use dialogue realize there's a line between how our language sounds and how it's written. Enjoyed this article which contained a discussion of Californian language. 

The section about "hella" in the article points up my thoughts. "Hella" is a contraction of "hell-of-a" so it's not really a new word; it's a contraction. I worked with troubled teens in the past and, for a long time, I couldn't understand what a couple of Cincinnati teens meant when they said, "fingo". Later, I realized "fingo" was a contraction for an Appalachian phraseology, i.e. "fixing-to-go" as in "I'm fixing to go shoot that man if he don't quit singing." 

Deafness contributes to changes in language too. In the 60s, people used to speak of "boogieing" as in I'm going to "boogie it out of here", meaning get out quick from the frenetic dance, boogie-woogie. Wasn't many decades after that phrase appeared before I began to encounter the written word "book" in place of "boogie". Now people were "booking it" out of somewhere. Phrase made no sense except to the ear. Recently, a friend, Carl Tropea, pointed out that "book  it" might be a phrase coined from "booking a flight". That makes sense.

THE BEATEST SILENT BOOMER GETS LOST IN HIS REFLECTIONS

klipschutz

The personality trait about myself hardest to accept is that I'm a writer. Came through to me two days ago when a publisher I queried asked to look at Angie's Choice and also asked for "intended audience, marketing ideas for your work". These days the writer not only writes but he must market his work. Panic! I never took a course in marketing, have no talent for selling myself or the book I've written. The thought of selling myself terrifies me. 

my hidden nature

I don't know marketing from grocery shopping or networking from fishnet hosiery. I've been writing about my life and the reality it exists in since high school with absolutely no financial success or major critical acclaim. If I'm not writing a poem or short story, I've been at work on a novel, most of those unfinished. Those times when I'm not working on creative stuff, I'm pounding away at internet debates with strangers, letters to the editor, emails to friends and family, and essays or journaling, now blogging or Facebooking—thousands and thousands of pieces of my reality all over the place—plus those scholarly term papers when I was in school. Several decades ago I got tired of carrying them around and found a home for them in a dirty green dumpster. Could it be, I ask myself, that I'm trying to disprove the idea that if a writer sticks with it, he'll make it. "Make it" itself is loaded with ambivalence and ambiguity. 

Here's the problem in a nutshell: What is it about a human nature that it must have someone other than itself approve of what it's doing before the value of the doing becomes evident to him or her? At the top, I've included a photo of klipschutz, a poet/songwriter who understands the art of presenting the self. His work is pretty damn good also. Take a look at it. We published him long ago in a microzine wife and I published and edited: George & Mertie's Place.

THE SILENT BOOMER LOOKS FEARFULLY TO THE MILLENNIALS

It’s 4:50 am. My interior alarm awakes me in a sweat. At this time of the day, the world always appears extremely dark (unless you live at the North Pole during the winter solstice). I’m a worrier. Always have been. Proof of that fact is the fact that I’m 76 and worrying over a future—over a fictional tale about reality in my brain—that will have no real power to affect me but that really affects me as I worry about it.

Find photo here...

In another 50 years—I tell myself—the bookless and newspaper-less world as I know it will be so different, I truly can’t imagine it, but I’ve got a few favorite dystopian ideas. I see a world returned to the Dark Ages. Lots of information at humanity’s fingertips, but each man jack of us, at his or her starship computer station, will be tuned solely to their favorite world views. Like a villager at the mythological time of Jesus, we won’t know what’s going on in the next village except the hottest gossip and most frightening and disgusting news as distorted by world leaders whose best interests are served by the distortions. Charlatanism will be the order of the day and all sorts of fake systems of knowledge (like clairvoyance or telekinesis or theology) will have new power in the stories that people tell themselves about their personal realities. Meanwhile the zillionaire rulers of Planet Earth, flitting here and there to secret meetings on yachts all over the globe, will be uncontrollably dishonest, beyond punishment, as they accumulate more and more of the world’s wealth, leaving the rest of us to take the hindmost. No longer will there exist a fourth estate with the money and reach to watch over the plutocrats and sound the alarm.

Then, again … the sun also rises and the sky lightens, and I return to the hopeful business of writing a futuristic novel about a worldwide plague as if the bookless dark age ahead will have any place for my fantastic novel.

SILENTLY TIME FLIES, THEN IT'S TUESDAY AND ONE IS 76

find photo on this site

I've been thinking about the phrase "once upon a time" that I discussed in my last blog entry. I asked myself why would anyone (why did I) use that phrase in a work of fiction that is not a fairy tale? I fear I'm guilty of using that phrase frequently. I suppose it represents a lifetime attitude that most of life is a fairytale in the minds of most people. I've used the phrase unconsciously and sarcastically until it's become a sort of writer's tic. 

It's sadly true that most people grow emotionally until they reach the age of 12 or so, then they freeze into that emotional state, half escaped from fairy tales and gods and romantic notions about life, country and family they picked up in the home. They reside in those falsehoods until, in the last decade of their lives, many realize they've been foolish. 

Sometimes, I imagine my alcoholism, my three divorces and all the pain in my life and pain I created in others lives was the price I paid to escape the fairy tales that still entrap so many humans. It's not always comfortable outside the human family that remains sitting around the campfire and endlessly retelling the old fairy tales they continue to live by, but I'd rather live on the fringes than live in the fairy tale. 

What proof do I offer for what I've just said? I look around my world. Would a species of grownup, sensible people create the sort of mockery of life we force ourselves and others to live in if we actually knew better?