Tuesday, March 30, 2004 , 2:31 PM
I was just reading WilWheaton.net, and in one of the blog entries was about something he’s going to be featured in soon, along with other bloggers. One of the others listings was:
“Illustrator Mark Frauenfelder throws out his cell phone and uproots his family from Los Angeles to the sandy beaches of Rarotonga.”
WTF? Mark Frauenfelder was an editor who really, really liked my second book The Willies, until he decided at the very end not to pass it on to the next editorial level, suggesting that I perhaps cut it in half (the King Solomon-ness of the suggestion was not lost on me). I was never sure if it was the character stuff he wasn’t interested in, or the action. Given that he was with a sci-fi-ish press, I assumed the former.
Then he showed up in an Apple “Switcher” ad! (Shortly before I switched to a PC.)
And now this. If nothing else, I’m wondering what he’s doing to get himself noticed so often in so many weirdly varying ways. I’ve known a few people who have this gift, to draw attention to their decisions, movements, and activities. It’s not my gift, though.
, 9:48 AM
I took the liner out of my winter jacket before going out this morning. The end result was much like a strong man who’d wasted away after a long illness.
I decided this week to work from home. With the money I would have spent on just two days’ lunches out, I managed to buy really nice groceries to last me until the end of the week (all that was necessary, since I’m going away this weekend). I have tomatoes and halloumi cheese and pasta and sparkling grape juice and…
Monday, March 22, 2004 , 2:18 AM
Phew! I wrote two whole chapters this weekend for the book, chapters 24 and 25. The story is getting very close to the end, and — without ruining anything for anyone who might be reading it — upsetting things are happening.
I went to a lovely party this evening at my friend Fiona’s after I finished writing. Some of the people were old favourites, and some were new. Three of them were musicians, which reminded me of that funny principle with good musicians: when they start playing at a partyyou never get all the way through a damned tune. They keep stopping to tune up, to compare notes about something, or to do something even more complex that you can’t sing along with. Musicus interruptus.
I left fairly early, having to get up for work in the morning, and knowing I’d want to edit today’s chapter and mail it out before bed. This afternoon, I’d run from the house to the Royal Museum of Scotland, because I had to do some location scouting of sorts, just to make sure things were laid out as I thought they were. I doubled back on the way home tonight, too, to check the way some streets intersected. I’m glad I did, because I had some details sketched incorrectly into my memory. Then I made the rest of the walk home in a less-cold night under a clear sky of the darkest navy blue, sniffling to myself about events in the book and about the fact that all these people who live inside me will be moving on soon. Especially strange was walking through the part of the city I’d just been writing about. The book is a lie of Edinburgh, a fairy tale of sorts. I wonder how real life here will be when I’m not writing the lie anymore.
P.S. Word count: 99,294 words. Longest thing I’ve ever written.
Thursday, March 18, 2004 , 8:19 PM
Thank God! Patrick made an album of our Newcastle pictures, sparing me from having to do it. They’re on his website.
Wednesday, March 17, 2004 , 10:31 AM
I deleted all the news URLs from my browser’s ‘Favorites’. The news is just never good, and there’s damned little I can do about most of it. Here’s a quote from Henry David Thoreau:
If I am to be a thoroughfare, I prefer that it be of the mountain brooks, the Parnassian streams, and not the town sewers. There is inspiration, that gossip which comes to the ear of the attentive mind from the courts of heaven. There is the profane and stale revelation of the barroom and the police court. The same ear is fitted to receive both communications… We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and genuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful about what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention. Read not the Times. Read the Eternities.
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I had a great time in Newcastle last week with Patrick, visiting P’s friend Abby. Between conversations that were like movie car chases, we had some great meals, visited Newcastle at night (which was a neat mix of industrial and futuristic), and walked the seashore at Tynemouth and then again by the striking castle at Bamburgh.
I have a bunch of pictures in which I’ve captured some beautiful landscapes and some in which I’ve managed, once again, to make perfectly fine-looking people into grotesques. I’ll post these soon.
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My friend Glynis once shared with me a piece of advice about dating she’d been given: Whenever you feel like asking for reassurance… don’t. In theory, it’s awful. In practice, though, it’s something I need to remember. I think too much, and I say too much. More than once this has led me to wreck a potentially good thing, and it nearly happened again, except that I seem to be dealing with someone exceptionally understanding. I know I should be true to my nature, but sometimes my nature is just bugshit crazy.
Monday, March 08, 2004 , 3:59 PM
I’m drinking a mix of fresh lemon juice, maple syrup, cayenne pepper, and water. When I last did this, it was a fast, but I’m not feeling that disciplined at the moment. I just like the taste of it.
This weekend was full. Friday night I went out with the usual gang (which tends to vary by one or two members, sometimes more). We went for supper, to the Improverts, then on to Whistle Binkeys, an interlinked series of brick caves with a big stage in one room. I guess I was tired from a stressful week or something, but I was just not on. I had nothing to say to anyone, and everywhere seemed too noisy and smoky.
I stayed out in Carstairs Junction at Patrick and Anita’s place Friday night. Saturday, after a very late breakfast, Patrick and I worked on his CV, I read some of A Moveable Feast, then we watched Betty Blue, which he’d caught on his TiVo. It’s a film about a handyman-writer who falls in love with a challenging and beautiful young woman. They have unrestrained French movie sex, complete with genitals and hairy bits, which was quite a shock to us back in my theatre school days, when my classmates and I first discovered the film. For us, it perfectly exemplified the raw, passionate, impossible love that… none of us were having.
In the evening, Patrick and I went through to Glasgow. His uni friend Iain was having a party, and we were going. I felt tired, but I decided that I was going to be “on”, goddammit, so we bought a bottle of tequila and a few bottles of tonic water so we could make “Tequila Rapido”, as they drank in the movie. I stepped into the flat and thought, “Uh oh,” because it was jammed full of people who I judged were quite a bit younger than me, all sitting around in a circle. Patrick and I went to the kitchen, where we talked with Iain and had a drink. Others poppped in and out of the kitchen, so we’d soon warmed up to the crowd, like goldfish in a bag, and we were ready to join the others. Patrick and Iain fell into their own conversation, but I somehow got pulled into a drinking game that involved a deck of cards. The Tequila Rapidos were going down rapidly (though I confess I was mixing them weaker and weaker, as the game involved a lot of drinking).
I liked the others, and was finding it easy to laugh and talk with them. My initiation wasn’t complete, though, until I drew the last king from the deck. That meant I had to suffer the penalty that had been devised by the holders of the other kings. Specifically, I had to drink a mix of everyone else’s drink from a woman’s belly button.
Yeah, it was a first.
Patrick and I crashed in the living room when the party broke up, and I decided to take the bus home on Sunday. I bumped into some of the guys the next day at the bus station. They seemed pretty happy to see me again, and said the Amy’s-navel thing was the highlight of the evening. Amy was very pretty, but I didn’t make a point of the fact that Amy’s navel was really only marginally more sensual for me than the glass I’d been drinking from earlier.
I grocery shopped, talked to my new friend-with-potential Gus for a while, then finally got down to working on the book at seven. Before I knew it, it was ten o’clock, and I’d finished yet another chapter of the book. I sent it off, made popcorn, and watched Y Tu Mama Tambien whilst chatting with Gus online (which involved much flipping of windows, but the movie’s frenetic energy made that okay). I’ll leave the commentary on the film to Ebert, who perfectly summarises my reaction to it.
And now it’s Monday, and I’ve got a lot of work to do. This is good.
Friday, March 05, 2004 , 2:01 PM
Last night, I went to the symphony with my friend Sergio. In the past, I’d gone to concerts and found my eyes burning, blinking, wanting to close. I didn’t know where to look, what to focus on. Last night, though, I was in rapture throughout. The violinists were jumping in their seats as they elbowed notes out of their wooden boxes. The brass players pulled out tiny loops of plumbing and opened valves to drain the condensation out of their instruments, then delivered rousing blasts on cue. The conductor swam and fought and danced the music out of his orchestra. He was not a young man, but his body bounced agelessly, and his hands flew away then returned like they were attached to rubber bands.
Dvorak’s music made up the first act. My father is always playing classical music on the stereo, but I didn’t know this. I liked it, and found myself carried along with every change of tempo and mood.
The second half of the first act featured a singer performing an operatic version of the Psalms by Dvorak. Her voice stayed in an unusually low range, never running off the precipice of a high note like you hear in the dramatic operas. Sometimes the orchestra and she blended in volume so one was indistinguishable from the other.
She wore the standard black concert dress, but it was adorned with a green swath of fabric like a superhero’s cape put on backwards. I swear I saw a tiny moth come from her mouth as she sang and flutter in broken arcs above the orchestra. In that moment, I was conscious of the creative racing of my mind. The past week, with my worry about having enough billable work, had cut off my creative supply, but my editor’s return yesterday (with an attendant wagon full of new assignments) and the orchestra’s spirited delivery of Dvorak, then Beethoven’s 7th in the second act, I felt like someone had opened up an aqueduct. The dust was swept away by cool water from the mountains where the gods live.
Afterward, Sergio and I went next door to a pub. He shared his great news with me: he’s going to be published. I bought us drinks and we toasted the occasion. Then we had a very heady conversation about the process of writing a book, of following characters and events that are so familiar yet so strangely independent and complete unto themselves. We also tried to divine why Sergio was being published now, what, in the story of his life, was different such that this was finally happening. We came up with a theory — he was utterly committed that this would be — but only the universe really knows.
Now I’m in the library, about to write an article for The Coach. Today it’ll be easy. Then tonight is my night out with the Friday gang — my great reward for a hard week’s work (or lack of it).
So all’s right with the world, and again I was wrong to fret. When will I learn to trust that things always work out?
Thursday, March 04, 2004 , 11:36 AM
I know, I know. I haven’t written for, like, ever.
I was sitting here in my flat, enjoying the sunshine that’s coming in because I’ve finally parted the lead curtains in my living room and opened the window. For some reason my mind flitted to a breakfast I had in New York one time, somewhere in SoHo where they served the best pan-fried potatoes I’ve ever had (lots of paprika). I just can’t remember who was sitting across from me: was it Bert or Jordan?
Bert is a great friend from my Toronto years, a constant intellectual thorn in my side, making sure that I always questioned, always thought. I haven’t spoken to him in a long time, and I regret that. Funny, searching for him just now, I discovered that a letter to the editor I wrote in response to one of his pieces in Toronto’s eye Magazine was printed. I didn’t know. Here’s his article. Here’s my letter.
Jordan, on the other hand, is my ex, though “ex” is such a harsh word, when he’s someone I still cherish, with whom I shared the wild ride of my first romantic relationship. He’s doing very well for himself now as an art director for television commercials. He’s just re-launched his website.
Okay, so why haven’t I been blogging? Well, it’s mainly because I’ve been talking to someone on the ‘net, someone with whom there’s a potential something. But, you know, these Internet things — they’re not real. They’re silly. They’re impossible. But of course, what’s life about if not courting the impossible?
Still, I feel a pressure not to talk about it, or to mention it — partly because I have a few unresolved conversations out there with some other fellas, though I think we all know where everything stands. I just don’t like to assume, because nothing really goes without saying. The other pressure is that horrible notion of jinxing something: if you say too much, if you get too excited, you’ll wreck it. My mum’s terrible for this, but I guess I figure, hell, if you’re excited then disappointed, at least you got to be excited. What’s particularly special is that after the events of last year, I didn’t imagine I’d feel this way again.
Work has been pants lately, because there hasn’t been enough for me to do while my editor’s been away on holidays. She absolutely deserves every moment of free time, because she works like a dog for that company, contributing every bit of her time and creative energy. But as someone who bills hourly, I find not working very scary. And the Canadian dollar is at its lowest since I moved here. Every dollar I’m paid is worth about 44 cents here. Yeah, less than half. Ouch. I’ve been thinking about buying my own flat, but I looked at the math again, and it just doesn’t add up.
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p>I want to read A Moveable Feast again. It’s the book that inspired me to move to Europe. I could use a dose of Hemingway sitting in Parisian cafes, writing for the Toronto Star, barely able to afford bread and a glass of wine. At least as a writer there’s always the romance of it to fall back on.
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