and johnny cash on the radio.
After sleeping vertically for most of the week, I managed to get all horizontal last night. And this morning. And this afternoon. I’ve kipped more in the past 24 hours than I have in the past 2 weeks. Now I’m all Greenwich Mean and groggy and trying to finish the books by my bedside. I’ve made it through Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” again and I’ve rediscovered Kurt Vonnegut and am trying to finish “TimeQuake” before I keel over for the night. Tomorrow, I’d like to get into Elmore Leonard’s “Mr. Paradise”. But I probably wont.
arabian nights
There use to be a massive Borders bookstore just outside of Manchester. The Euro and I would spend rainy Saturdays there drinking coffee and reading American Magazines. It’s sunnier here (72degrees on Friday!) and more difficult to justify a day indoors but we manage to do it now and then. A few weeks ago we went to Barnes & Noble, this time to read British Magazines, lunch on lattes and peruse the cinematography books. I had a 50% discount code so I brought home this little lovely for under a tenner.
The Barnes & Noble Leatherbound Classics Collection is gorgeous. They’re not Folio, which I understand hold up much better under thumbing, but they’re a steal for the price. I don’t buy these books to read – I use dog-eared paperbacks for that. I buy them to display. The Arabian Knights isn’t my favorite title in the collection but I think it’s the most beautiful.
lars and the real girl
There are favorites, and then there are favorites. Books or movies we always come back to. For me, it’s Flannery O’Connor and Chekhov. It’s Beautiful Girls. And it’s Lars.
There’s nothing I can say about Lars and the Real Girl that can do it proper credit. The screenplay, by Nancy Oliver, is magnificent. And Ryan Gosling is just so perfect you forget he’s perfect. You forget he’s anything, other than Lars. And that’s a big deal for me. I get lost in a great many books, but very few films. It’s rare that I manage to suspend reality long enough to believe that what I see really is. Gosling lets me do it every time.
bunny and poodle
When we were young we use to write letters to one another from aboard Venetian gondolas and beneath Cambodian crypts. Flamboyant and fabulous. All the places we will be from.
On Thursday, this arrived in the post.
Hang in there, yeah?
sometimes a great notion
Today someone reminded me life is beautiful. Like Paul Newman, beautiful.
For most people it can be difficult not to get caught up in their own personal stories. I think this goes doubly true for writers. Those of us who write fiction spend our lives willfully creating drama and conflict, driving people to the edge and back. We carry it around with us. It’s what we do.
Writing can be enlightening and full of understanding but trying to live what you write, when you’re not actually writing, it can wear you out. I realized recently that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. Ruminating on a plot I made from scratch. Offhand, this seems like a creative technique. Method Writing. Live and breathe it, baby. But for me, trying to live it, takes away the structure that defines it. And I need that structure. Otherwise, the process carries me away.
This will make a lot of sense, or none whatsoever. Either way, Paul Newman.
