MYNA BIRD BEATNIK

Eighty-six people checked in so time for another entry. I sent off a short story ms to a prestigious competition. I believe I have no chance. A name writer will have the best chance. The press will want to make money on their publication. A name draw will do that. Still, I had fun putting the ms together—stories written in many styles over the years. In truth, I think I've been a myna bird kind of writer. A copycat of styles. I read something and a story pops into mind in that writer's voice. The stories in the ms represent Hammett, Allen [Woody], Carver, Hemingway, Salinger... at least that many voices. Maybe Dickens in spots. I don't seem to have developed a voice of my own. Maybe I'm just an inauthentic character in someone's novel without a voice of my own.

At SIU during my first stab at a Masters In English, a fellow TA [Terry Brown] asked me to type up a ms for him, a paper he wrote on Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. I couldn't help myself and began to imitate Swift's style, altering the style of my friend's paper quite a bit. He couldn't believe I'd done such a thing. Looking back, I can't believe I did it either.

I've written 17 stories in the past two months. Reading Carver set them off. Him being a recovered alcoholic might have something to do with my sounding like him and their themes being similar. I seem to be happiest when I'm writing or when I'm in my wife's company. 

BEATNICK BOOMER INSIDE THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

This is me in the external beam irradiation machine at PeaceHealth. I got Deana one of the techs to snap the photo. The big round head looking down on me is the piece that shoots me with radiation. To its left on the diagonal is one of the arms that takes x-rays. The other x-ray arm, a square, is peeking out below the table. The x-ray arms are retracted at the moment. The techs go into another room and extend those x-ray arms. The entire unit circles my body, then the x-ray readings of the location of my prostate with the implanted fiducials is fed into the computer and the table I lie on makes the final adjustments, then I'm zapped. The process takes about 20 minutes. Compared to the 40 minute Cyberknife treatments, it's fast. I tell the techs with a laugh it's a "zip... zap... zoom..." process. I'm hopeful and tranquil enough about everything. 

Mertie and I went into Portland to see Cafe Society, Woody Allen's latest. We weren't as impressed as by Paris Nights. We aren't alone in our judgment, but the film was interesting enough. 

The rewrite on The Porn Writer still moves along nicely, but as I said in an earlier entry, I'm giving myself permission to let the writing go hang if I feel stressed. Mainly I need to stay rested and get in some exercise and run necessary errands and prepare or serve [already made meals] when Mertie comes home from work. Nine more treatments. Will be done a week from this coming Friday. Though I haven't been sending out many things, I still have about 15 items out being looked at. The queries for my novels are falling behind because they require more work. I try to make my query letters fit the agent I'm sending them to. I imagine I sense things about them from looking them up on Google and from the presentations on their websites.

BEATNIK BLOGGING ALONG BLOGGING

THE TORQUE

I've got this 13000 word long story, Lit. Noir, in a style reminiscent of early Woody Allen. I like it, but the rewrite, the third rewrite this time thru, felt like a slog. Do all rewrites at my age feel this way, I wonder? I've never felt this way before. Rewrites were just part of the overall fun. Thirteen hundred words? Who'll publish anything that long anyhow? Serialized in 3 issues maybe?

Photo is inside the new Torque location. Lovely place to write, looking out at the river thru the long window on the left. 

My list of publications will soon increase by a single poem. First published in 1985 at Bellowing Ark, the poem "Willingness of Seeds" will be reprinted in the Perfume River Poetry Review from Tourane Poetry Press. Editor Vuong Quoc Vu got hold of the poem during a moment when I nearly was involved in a chain letter exchange of poetry with other poets, but after I sent one poem out to Vuong, I withdrew from the process. It's the same old story. To take time off for anything but writing, rewriting and, now, submitting my work, plus finding time to read every night [what about my wife besides], it was hard for me to select and pitch in 20 names of friends required to keep the process going. I did not know who Vuong was, but Vuong liked the poem a good deal, and I felt immediately humbled and appreciative of his comments. If you look on his websites, you'll find some powerful poetry about his mother and himself in Vietnam when the bullets were flying. Besides that event, several of my poems have been at Cutbank for a long while now. I'm imagining/hoping they're being looked at with some interest. Wouldn't that be nice? One of the poems is entitled, "With Hugo In Montana ".

A BEATNIK GETS ALL MUSHY WITH LOVE'NSTUFF

Find his photo here.

Needs dramatic shadowing.

Woody Allen and his films, I love. His short stories too. At one time in my life, his films so often reminded me of myself and my insecurities and my comical woundings (they felt nearly mortal) ... well, that's what good art does, doesn't it, it touches us? I just watched Hannah and Her Sisters for the who knows how manyieth time? One of my favorite films of his, and as the film closed to that wonderful piano playing, "I'm In Love Again", while the camera moves through the apartment to touch on all the relationships and how they worked out ... I got misty, and, next, I think how my first draft of the novel will soon reach its ending after all this long time of work, and how much I'm in love with my wife and our relationship after 20 years together, and my curious Facebook debates with my Southern antagonists who hope to see a second civil war so this time they can win, and, the conflagration of love and war of which my childhood was made when I, feeling the orphan, lived with my paternal grandparents all through WWII ... well ... my feelings well up and splash all over in my head, and my fired up synapses tell all my organs to get busy and create the chemical reactions this robot calls feelings, and I rush to my desktop Mac and sit to spill this rush of emotion out to you who follow this old man, trying to write a book someone other than himself will publish. The dream still lives.

ONE-HUNDRED-ONE-THOUSAND-THREE-HUNDRED-FIFTY-SEVEN

Six am. Did anyone other than myself catch the error in the title of my last entry? The title of this entry is correct. I was drowsing in my old man's recliner yesterday, thinking about that title and realized I'd made an error in writing out 101,357

ONE-HUNDRED-THOUSAND-ONE-THOUSAND-THREE-HUNDRED-FIFTY-SEVEN [no]
ONE-HUNDRED-ONE-THOUSAND-THREE-HUNDRED-FIFTY-SEVEN [yes]

But this blog is a writer's blog, not a mathematician's blog so

I forgive myself. Beside that, I've also surpassed that number with the writing I did yesterday. 

Following the writing of this early a.m. blog, I'm going to send off The Man In the Mirror today for its first trial run into the hands of an agent. I believe it ought to be labelled "... something along the lines of Crime and Punishment" in the cover letter, plus "the story of a murderous little high school teacher"? Something along those lines. Speaking of Crime and Punishment, a couple of weeks ago, I caught Woody Allen's "Crimes and Misdemeanors" which I think is much closer to the way things might happen than the way they happen in Dostoievski's novel. Unless, human nature has really changed that much in a hundred or so years.

BEATNIKING A PATH TO SUCKCESS

My oft stated goal in writing the futuristic novel Manning (working title) is to see if before I die I can get someone other than myself to publish a book I've written. I'm talking success, here, with a capital, SUCK! For publisher, film maker and for me.

In The Moral Animal, author Robert Wright uses Charles Darwin's life to demonstrate that human animals share values with other species. He points out that good monkey Darwin, for all that his ideas shocked the world, was very careful about his approach to relationships and to expressing his ideas. Darwin held back for 20 years announcing the facts he'd gathered because he didn't want to destroy his wife's faith, and he was choosy about his friends. As Darwin's influence and friendships grew among the intellects of his time, he slowly dropped friendships with people who were not as well known as he. Darwin did not consciously reject them. It just happened. The more he was caught up in success, the less time he had for many old friends. (Recall Woody Allen's Stardust Memories when an old neighborhood pal comes up to Sandy Bates and asks Bates if Bates remembers him? Pow!) 

On occasion, I've been in the presence of writers of distinction and have felt out of place with them. It's as if their experiences with financial success put them automatically into an experiential realm I'm not acclimated to. My reticence created my half of those situations. Let me tell you, if I hadn't had to deal with my personal issues before I could tackle the world of success, my life would have gone swimmingly different. I can see the experience for writing a successful book getting strong in me just as age is slowing my mental reflexes and memory. Will I reach the other side or fall through a crack in time?