Spacious Thoughts

Did I mention I’ve had maybe like 20 beers in the last three or four weeks?  Very sober-like.   And it’s easy.

And I’m writing this novel, which I didn’t wanna jinx by bringing it up too early.  But I’ve been working on it for five days I think, writing a short chapter a day or a longer one every two days.  It was brewing in me and of course I’ve started a dozen or two novels before.  But after I started the first chapter (and for the first time I’m writing a novel directly on my laptop instead of on paper) I realized the formula I needed to achieve the plain goal of simply WRITING an entire fucking DRAFT: don’t try to make it great; don’t worry about the form or tone; don’t try to fit it into the mold I’ve fabricated in my mind; fuck expectations-JUST WRITE THE GODDAMN THING.

At the same time I’ve gotten into a habit of reading only one book at once (well, of prose; I also read poetry.)  This instead of saying “Okay, I can read 1. Non-fiction book, political/historical/philosophical/sociological, et al; 2. Non-Fiction book, personal and informal essays/memoir; 3. Fiction book, short story collections (which led to me reading half a dozen collections at once); 4. A novel.”  It didn’t work out well for me, even after I (foolishly) cut out novels since I was reading so much short fiction…

I’ve corrected myself and a few days after starting my current novel I started reading The End of the Story by Lydia Davis, her only novel, about a woman relating the life course of a relationship with a much younger man while also adventuring with writing a novel about that relationship and exploring every aspect of what is going into writing that novel…It’s a beautiful, beautiful book.  I’ve read almost all her short fiction and am impressed at what a novel she’s executed, and wonder if it takes her a long goddamn time to write a novel and if that’s why she’s only written one.  (Besides the short story collections she also translated Swann’s Way, a fucking towering task I can’t imagine the weight of, let alone how much time it took to create what’s a highly respected translation of that novel.)

And the rest of the time I’m trying not to go upstairs and kick the shit out of the snot-nosed, unbelievably assholic little boys I call neighbors, attempting to keep the apartment relatively tidied in comparison to what it was, and desperately looking for a job, the non-results of which are becoming depressing…

I’m gonna go back to the novel now.  Ciao.

“The fact that I must be mistaken about some of this doesn’t bother me.”

-Lydia Davis, The End of the Story