And the Hippos were Boiled in their Tanks

12 days into the new year and I have only finished one book. Though to be fair to me I read it in three days and lost it for a week under some notebooks. The book was like a conversation. Like two writers met in a bar and described an event that happened to each other. Filled in each others gaps. The same things I attack others for doing I forgive in both Burroughs and Kerouac, mostly Kerouac, because it’s a kind of simplicity that’s poetic. I fully understand why nobody wanted to publish it at the time though. It’s not fantastic, original and the plot builds to an end but it never feels like it is building. But that’s the beauty of such a conversation. Boringly interesting? If that makes sense. It’s like listening to a story you want to hear from a person you do like but it’s not thrilling.

well alright then

Message read on the bathroom wall

I take pictures of graffiti in toilets. If you read something good in a toilet and you have some form of camera you should do the same and send me it. I collect them with the vaguest notion that one day I’ll make a coffee table book of toilet scribblings. This will never happen because my pictures aren’t good enough but be quiet with your dream shattering dose of reality. Bah, logic.
And the last one isn’t mine but I found it and I giggled.

For a lack of anything better to say

I am trying to read too many books. Or really I am not reading Plato because I can’t afford it just now and I’m reading Orwell and Burroughs and thinking about reading Hemingway. Everyone is kinda melting together. It doesn’t help that there are all the contemporaries to keep track of. The Beat Generation, really. Throw in influence and you can stretch to Salinger (who is in the to-read pile) and Palahniuk (who I cannot afford) and Bukowski (whose poetry I dip into now and then but not too often). 

I’m reading so much because I’m not writing. I cannot write. I enjoy it in the moment but that disappears instantly upon completion. When I get back to it I’m left with utter indifference. I can see the good bits, bad bits but I don’t see if any of it is salvageable. I can’t see if there is any point in trying.

I don’t mean to sound quite so oh woeisme pointless emo whine. I certainly am not fishing for validation. I will be annoyed if anybody tries to do so. It’s just in the frustration of everything else I couldn’t cope with this too. 

I mean, dreams of publication are always great and I’ve always had them. But I don’t write thinking I ever will be. I don’t enter competitions or submit to magazines because I prefer the solitude. It’s not the rejection I fear. It’s getting it wrong. It’s hard to explain and sounds so fucking idiotic that I’m not going to try. 

It’s easy to stop. Let it all go and soak up other people’s work. My fingers are torn apart and I’m a wreck but I’d rather be silent than mediocre. There’s just the fear of inadequacy , the threat of losing something. 

I spend too long in bookstores reading first and last pages. I browse through Amazon reading as much as they put up for free. It’s all a long narrative I can’t keep track of. But Burroughs is a kind of mundane reality that I can’t stop reading. Not like the Fuck Up which was a mundane kind of mundane that while mildly entertaining and occasionally funny was rather disappointing (but cheap).

I am sure I had a better point. Ok, I watched a film based on a Hemingway story. In it Gregory Peck shot a rhino in the face. He’s so manly.

I think I just gave a book an erection!

Oh imagery, you so crazy. I don’t know why I associate with you, dragging my reputation into the dirt as you do.

Peanut Butter and Strawberry Chapstick Sandwiches

She has a box of photos
& postcards &
half written letters
& bookmarks
train tickets
bus tickets
sticky notes
grocery lists
everything &
she pieces them together
& reads romances

Secondhand life stories

I read at the top of this post where I had written the title and nothing else There is an autosave that is more relevant than the version below. And lo this was it.

There’s a new crime, let’s commit it

I sat down yesterday and said to myself I had to finish this third chapter. It’s been sitting there for months, niggling and bothering me. I do this every so often. I go ok you’ve got til tonight, tomorrow morning, until you have to go out and I get shit done. So I powered through, working out how I wanted it to go and I went to bed thinking it’s done. I read it over today and it still doesn’t suck. It might even be good but let’s not get carried away. I may have to wait a week before I declare acceptability.

And now that is done I have new stuff to do. I can start adventuring with this idealised little me and I can continue fixing up the son of God. The only thing is after I started all of these bigger projects I don’t think I’ve written a single short story that was any good. But oh well.

Get it right or just leave love alone

I finished Haunted a couple of days ago. He’s one of those authors I can stay still for hours to read. I did after all skip two classes in order to read Fight Club. Thing is I kept having those moments when I wished I’d written bits myself and I could feel myself leeching and absorbing and saving away turns of phrases to mull over later. I probably should control that better. Like when I read this girl I found online too much that I wrote such awful poetry. I’ve always been too adaptable. The problem I have is I read and read and read and then I fall in love with the author and want to know them. I want to shake hands with them and say “On page 19 of your latest novel there’s a sentence halfway through you could have written better” but you know, inappropriate.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if we could simply string together all those words we love instead of labouring over the if but and when then she said he said on the saysure. I have a great fondness for the word insouciant. It’s right up there with asphalt and tawdry. Last time I wrote insouciant my pages were handed back with a ? under the word by someone who chose either not to remember they wrote it or were too scared to ask about it.

Bored of hanging out in your cold

I realised I have far too much I still want to write for my novel in reverse. I just wanted to read over it, fix the things I knew were wrong and I thought I’ll read it back to front which makes it reading forward as I read backward. And then I started adding. And then I kept going. My God, I love writing it. I could write this forever, I could. Still, my first Natasha was fifteen and I can’t get her out of my head. But then my timeline gets a little ridiculous if I change her back. She’ll just be fifteen in my head I think. Let’s not go illegal. It’s the first thing I’ve finished that I still love and I wasn’t sure if I would until I started telling someone new about it. I don’t have a title though. Everything I think of seems trite. But since it’s the only thing that stops me I’m not going to complain. I get sick of writing in bursts, having to gather up all these girls sitting moodily for reasons I knew but lost. Frustrated guys and tired girls, it’s all I write because it’s all I am, but then I suppose I have my pile of going nowheres and slot them into somewhere new. It’s like filing. Each scrap has a space, short story C into chapter 5. When I can be bothered (so I imagine by the time my first essay is due in of the semester) I will sort through the ever increasing stacks of paper, notebooks and train tickets and one day it’ll all come together to a space on a shelf. It’s a good dream.

I’m staring at the asphalt wondering what’s buried underneath

Originality is always the fear when you try to create something. There’s the drive to produce something unlike anything anyone has ever seen. But then there’s the comfort of familiarity. Some of my favourite things; films, books, music whatever, borrow from the previous. Incorporate a whole ton of other things. Reinterpretation. Reimagination. I sat in a coffee shop and I was asked what I wrote so I pitched my favourites and realised I never have much of a plot. Can’t really say this happens and then this happens. It’s all just scenes and if I get lucky I can connect them. Of course I had to listen in exchange to this boy and all I could think was I’ve read that already. Not exactly but I read it recently but I didn’t say a thing because he’d talked about originality. The drive to achieve it. And just before he began, before he told me how his were almost always based on some sort of science thing, I thought I should pay attention. There could be something worth stealing. There could be a spark of inspiration here. We’re all magpie thieves. Listening to stories, wanting to talk to someone new in the hopes of a good tale to share as our own words. It’s a line of thinking that started with Chuck Palahniuk as I did my convince others to buy books that I may read them for free. Our household has three of his books, I have not paid a penny and I read them all first. I convinced my dad to buy Haunted because it was the biggest and he rolled his eyes at me because he’d already read Guts and my calling it wonderful made him laugh at me. Naturally I skipped to the end, the afterword and there’s the bit about how he had these three stories he had to do something with. And it’s something like how he said he couldn’t die until he’d done so. He couldn’t let them go to waste.

And i just liked that. It makes going out worthwhile.