Listening to Bach…
I once had a professor who said if he was stranded on a desert island the only two items he would need would be, Immanuel Kant’s, Critique of Pure Reason & A Best of Bach album. A good starting manifold of perception. One slide to the next coming to be one.
I said, “well wouldn’t you need a WalkMan or something. Record player or batteries or you know, anything, something to play the album.” (not a question)
He laughed and said, “Andrew, please explain to us, in it’s entirety, Kant’s Refutation of Idealism. What I asked to be done, two weeks ago, a paper you have yet to turn in.”
“I’m still working on it…”
“That’s what I thought” He said.
SNAP! PUT IN MY PLACE!
1927 words left…ha!
Even got up at six a.m like I have been. Started reading books and cleaning and looking for my camera, in which I’ve been searching for, for weeks. Nope. Organized and even cleaned floors. Ate toast and then lunch and then played with music and hell its Good Friday they say, so I can’t even go to the library.
Looked at fat squirrels that I said, that looks like a badger, no, it’s one fat monkey of a squirrel, and then I sat there and listened to some writer’s almanac that I needed to catch up on as my eyes looked at Bluejays and cardinals and wrote some letters to people who said I’ve been, M.I.A.
The thing is, I don’t think people realize that I take writing letters seriously and then they don’t even read the full letters because they say it has too many words. One time I wrote what I thought was a short letter and the person said, briefly what’s the point? I couldn’t believe it. I actually mapped the point out. In my response I only said, I don’t know. But Oh well, and so what else… oh hell man, I need a shower and a cup of coffee and a clean smoke and then I’ll finish this entry…
In the meantime go listen to some Bach and so yeah, I’ll try to remember while I get myself ready for the night…oh goodness, another weekend of another damn american holiday. Sometimes I feel bad for the deities of the modern so and so world. They’ve been as marketed and used as much as the kids of the nineteen eighties have, and as much as captain crunch and captain planet and captain Kangaroo. All retired military vets of a war that had no time to…ha, never mind.
SHOWER man while trying to remember that oh yeah, yesterday, I looked at growing buds on trees. Came down with a cold last night. Damn. Haven’t been sick in so long and man my damn luck as soon as it gets kinda nice I would come down with the bug.
Anyway and so I was sitting by the lake and it was cold, but the birds were darting under the particles and their shadows looked great to my eyes. No camera so I just took it in.
It’s hard to explain how alive I remember feeling.
Remembering is more difficult than people think, and writing helps with this, but the more you remember the more you think, and then, the more you remember the more you can forget, based on statistical numbers and frequency of your memory and storage allotted by, THE HUMAN BRAIN.
And yesterday I worked so much and drank too much and was eating swiss-cake rolls falling a sleep in bed watching old cartoon from childhood called WIZARDS, a real strange movie that for some reason was my favorite movie when I was a kid. I don’t think my parents knew what I was watching, ha. This is what the film is about:
“Wizards is a 1976 American animated post-apocalyptic science fantasy film about the battle between two wizards, one representing the forces of magic and one representing the forces of industrial technology.”
So I fell asleep in bed watching that just like I did when I was a kid and woke up with face on paper smeared with pencil markings that were made the day gone by when I edited for about five hours downtown (Mr. King says you should edit in public and I kinda agree with this).
The Book. Yeah that number, and it’s all about done but who knows if it will be done on Monday like I said. April fools! Ha.
1927
Nice Shower and always a good feeling. I Feel much better. Stopped thinking. This is the good part of the day that I look forward to.
1927
Something I was thinking about that I don’t say much is that I really do like walking around my town, it’s lonely and gutted but full of possibility. Possibility that I’ll never really be a part of, because I won’t live here forever, and if I do, I still don’t know, but anyway, it’s a classic white flight situation where now they are trying to make it look artsy and historical. And it’s nice, and there was a time when this was where one of the richest business-men in the world lived. Isn’t that kinda strange that the lumber barons were once the googles and the apples? I think it is, and maybe ironic and gross, a perversion of life, but I’m not going there today. It’s a good day.
Walking down there though you get a feeling for what is obviously important for a town to thrive, and really those tent-poles for culture don’t seem to be as respected or really understood by the people anymore. The library and glass floors and huge paintings on the wall and some of the finest collections of books that I’ve seen anywhere in any public library before. The echo of the past, the time that all of this took and walking and sitting in the park, looking at the flags and the seagulls, birds that for some reason don’t get any respect, the writers of the bird family. They wait and fly back and forth all winter and it was cold but warm, a last dance for the winter, and it was cold and I probably shouldn’t have been walking as much but hell man, I walk, that’s my mode of transportation.
I was looking at the tracks that lead to nowhere and the world war two boats that are next to a sign that tells (if I remember) of two war heroes from this town. One that ran back into combat and took on an entire enemy army. And for some strange reason I laugh because I come from the same town and like a wild animal I would do the same to save my friends, and that makes me feel good in a very strange and american (human) way.
And I needed to unwind so I got three beers and slowly got drunk and felt good about the whole thing. Told a guy to hold onto his stocks of book face because man, who knows, but you have to wait until the generation grows up first before you make money on them. He laughed and didn’t care, because he had a lady to talk to.
For about two hours I was in the bar I sat alone and read and edited and felt strange but it was good. I looked out the window at the buses of people and thought about my book and if I should tone it down a bit because sometimes I get angry and it is shown in my writing. But this whole world, this society, this human nature, it isn’t easy and clean all of the time. I’m not sure what I’m trying to say, but if people stay polite all the time we could find ourselves in new wars that we don’t even want to be in. I rather be wrong and learn that I’m wrong through years of writing my thoughts out, than to not do a damn thing and say I wish that I would have spoken up and said something, I wish… I wish, I wish that I could have those years back. And yeah, I might disagree with somethings that I’ve written but they have tried to stay objective for the most part, and it’s hard because nowadays people come at you for saying something when they don’t even know what you are talking about. There is an argument here. There is a standard of living, and I think it has something to do with decency. I guess I’ll just have to write more to figure out what this life and the world is really all about. When I’m older, will I know anymore than I do now? Perhaps a little more, maybe not; there’s only one way to find out. To write it down by living and yeah, by writing as the days go on and on and…oh you know just…on.
1927
Drew,
Postcard received from India. Picture of human. Bhagawan Sri Ramakrishnd Paramahamisa (I may have spelled that wrong) Life happens. Life happens. Like a record on repeat. Peace and happiness.
1927
Messy Notes written in pencil from reading at the library
Old Hemingway book. Esquire article. Old Newsman Writes. Conrad preface to the (night?) of the narcissus. Use of elements of fiction. 1925 Frederic Marryout. Ivan Turgenev. Sportsman spring. Henry fielding Theories of satirical comedy. Shamela.
Get rid of many things by writing about many things. Pencil dying. Hard to read the correct spelling and what my own letters even are. Close enough is better than not written down at all.
Though Hemingway was real short on money he said, “it’s much more important for me to write in tranquility.—Trying to write as well as I can with no eye on any market nor any thought of what the stuff will bring, or even if it can ever be published –than to fall into the money-making trap which ruins american writers.”
He saw writing as a kind of fiercely competitive literary prize-fight in which contemporaries pitted themselves against the established masters, as well as against each other to surpass what has already been achieved.
“What a writer, in our time, has to do, is write what hasn’t been written before, or beat dead men at what they have done.”
Study the best literary models. Master your subject through experience and reading. Work in discipline and isolation. Begin early in the morning. Concentrate on writing for many hours and then make sure to allow yourself to relax and enjoy something else, not thinking about your writing, allowing your subconscious to go back to it.
Just some of Hemingway’s rules that caught my eye and which I will now distort and implement into my growing rules for writing.
1927 words…
I will get to a thousand of them…
SOON, OK…
HA!
Have a good weekend humans.
Bye!
“Hemingway wrote four articles for the left-wing journal New Masses beginning in 1935 and ending in 1939. Other well-known contributors to the journal included Max Eastman, John Dos Passos, and Carl Sandburg.”
Source:
Adventures In American Writing 