I feel like journaling lately, although strangely, when I get in front of the computer screen, all of the thoughts I’ve had, all of the things I’ve felt worth recording for posterity, seem to fade away… or more accurately, they seem like too much, and too abstract to capture on this little electronic screen… but I’ve been feeling creative… and curious and interested in everything… I took a walk in Reyerson Woods today and I must’ve seen 12 different kinds of spiders… all of the really cool… nature is unbelievably beautiful, it really is perfect… it’s exactly how it’s supposed to be… so balanced… so right… but so cruel… to everyone who thinks humans are cruel and evil… what about the spider… the beautiful perfect spider who entraps little flying insects, and then wraps them up alive, and sucks the life out of them… that’s very humane… I don’t know… I saw “District 9” tonight, a great little work of movie making/story telling (probably partly what’s got me feeling very creative right now) and it’s kind of about that… how humans are horrible and cruel… but man… that’s life isn’t it? Spiders trap things, immobilize them and eat them alive, humans grow chickens and then toss them arbitrarily into grinders, alive… and then, who knows… they probably feed that shit back to the chickens. So, I guess that’s part of the balance… you have horrible pain and death on one hand, but that’s part of the perfection, you need that shit for the balance… anyway… I think I might try to go ahead and start writing these journals more regularly, and posting them on my anonymous blog… which I just did.

So I started this blog as just a general kind of outlet for a vague feeling of inspiration... some subconscious need to express myself, to grab my share of the noosphere. Most of the stuff that I think about, however, I don't really feel warrants manifestation into the written word... Maybe there's some sort of unknown 1/100,000,000th law of creation, where only that percentage of the potential to create is worthy of something to be created... I'm thinking of sperm here, specifically, but it seems to apply to thought, or ideas as well. Anyway, I'm a teller of stories, a thinker of stories, and a sometime 'writer' of stories. And I also like to promote the story telling/writing of people I know, if I feel it's at least half decent. This spring, a friend of mine recently published all of the short stories he'd ever written, in whatever form they happened to be in, at a self-publishing website called Lulu.com, which is a fantastic little sight/resource for anyone who writes anything and would like to see it in a bound edition. I'm not going to tell you that it's a great resource for becoming a well known published author, but most people who write leisurely are not out for fame or fortune, and for those of us, it's the perfect sight. I first read about it in a book called "The Long Tail" by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine.
Now, despite the fact that I don't have any authentic illusions of literary notoriety, although I won't deny the occasional day reverie, I am always torn between the desire to write only for oneself, as an act of pure, untainted, more or less, necessary form of expression, on one hand; and on the other hand, to give my work a life beyond the page by having it read... Think of a lonely virus, inhabiting a pulpy tree in the jungle, unknown to the world, until someone chances across it, and becomes infected with it, and then Voila! en Ebola outbreak! Well, my friend, Chris Kilgore, shares this trait with me, and so he's put together this little project that I think is interesting, and is worth giving a plug on my blog, especially since no one ever reads it. What he's done is collected all of his fiction, and as a way to avoid the inspiration-sapping starts and stops of the conception -> edit -> finish, process of writing, he's developed a sort of perpetual-inspiration method in which a story is never considered finished (a concept which we've had many discussions about), but is always re-read and tweaked, if not completely reconceptualized with each new edition (which he claims he will put out yearly). We discussed Whitman, and how he was constantly re-creating "Leaves of Grass". So he's collected all of fiction, much of it nowhere near being finished, some of it nothing more than a working title and a vague idea. But even in that embryonic stage, it was something, a way to get started, and so the process is now in motion. You can buy a copy of this book, on Lulu.com, at the this link, if you're interested. He's set the price of the hard copy so that he doesn't make a red cent on any purchases, and on ebook purchases he makes only a dollar. I'll continue to write about this project from time to time as he works on it, and hopefully some readers of this blog will take an interest and comment and share ideas and stories and it can synergize into something greater than the sum of its parts.

Book Review: Low Side of the Road: a life of Tom Waits, by Barney Hoskyns

Tom Waits is one of the best living characters in the story of mankind, specifically the chapter on America. He inhabits a strange twilight land in which he is both famous and virtually unknown. I’ve never done it, but I would bet that if you approached ten random people and asked them what they thought of Tom Waits, six or seven of them wouldn’t have any idea who you were talking about, and the other two or three would gush near-fanatical fandom. I am one of the fanatical, and apparently so is “Low Side of the Road”, author, Barney Hoskyns. To those of us who have or do love naively, (which is any of us who have ever loved, since to love wisely only comes after many loves lost, if at all) our love quickly becomes indistinguishable from a greed to possess. And so it seems that Hoskyns’ love of Tom Waits has motivated him, via some lame, albeit understandable, altruistic justification that he is doing this for the world and not himself, to try to possess the character that is Tom Waits, and thus reduce him to something concrete, something with definable beginnings and endings, something that can be placed upon a bookshelf for future reference. I sympathize with that, but I like Tom Waits just the way he is: a great character, which is to say he is entertaining, and inspiring and amusing, even if not necessarily something that actually exists in what we think of as “reality.”

Without getting into the whole psychological debate of whether or not there is such a thing as an authentic “self,” and whether or not we are all, in some way, performance artists, let me just say that I think there is something essentially futile in the endeavor of biography. For all of the other things that a biography is, it is mostly a story, a long, complex, incomplete story. How can a life be summed up in words in a finite number of pages? So there are ways to biograph that reduce the story that they try to tell into something flat and monotonous, and there are those that nurture the story by embracing the fictional element of any story, even those stories we like to call “true.” The best recent example of this is the Bob Dylan biopic “I’m Not There,” which didn’t even bother to attempt to tell the story of Dylan, but by taking up the tradition of his legend, ended up saying more than anyone could’ve thought possible, never mind whether or not it was “true.” The character of Tom Waits is ripe for a biography of that sort, but as it is, us fanatics will settle, somewhat ambivalently for Hoskyns’ “Low Side of the Road,” which, although I don’t think it contributes anything to his character’s story, doesn’t diminish it either - a rare feat in the genre.

I think I'm going to start a new blog tonight, because...

I guess maybe it will provide me with some sort of satisfaction... like a feeling that I am bigger than I am... like I am talking out to the world (wide web) and it is listening (and I secretly hope that it will respond... with adulation and awe... and that it will be mostly made up of beautiful, mature, although courageous women (for some illogical reason, when I anthropomorphize the www, this is how I envision it)). I was Googling myself tonight (that’s right), and although I was pleasantly surprised to see a link associated with my actual identity as the first to come up under my name, the vast majority of links on the first three pages (and let’s be honest, anything beyond that might as well not exist) were about either a chess master or a Hollywood producer who happen to share my same handle. Now I’m not complaining; three links associated with me on the first three pages of a Google search isn’t bad, and furthermore, those three links had to do with pieces of fiction I’d written, which is the only thing that I really crave recognition for… I’m fine with anonymity in my everyday life, I cultivate it, in fact. But I have this weird conception of the www, (in addition to the way I anthropomorphize it) which I know is just a strategy my brain is using to personalize, organize and make concrete, a concept that is abstract, impersonal, and complicated. That conception is of the www as something like a sold out 6 billion seat auditorium, and my laptop is the podium on the stage. I kept a pretty seldomly updated Myspace blog awhile back, and I’ve been toying with the idea of starting what I’m starting tonight, but have hesitated because I’ve always felt that anything I have to say, is essentially, inconsequential to every living thing, myself included… but I feel that way about everything that’s ever been said since people figured out how to talk.

So here goes, and we’ll see how long this lasts… if I had to bet, honestly, I’d say not very long, but as I write (type) I’m having delusions of grandeur about all of the readers and commentors who will follow this blog weekly, maybe even bi-weekly… dare I say, “daily?” Let’s not get carried away. (I’ll consider it a personal victory if this doesn’t end up as the single post on my blog)(I’ll consider it an even bigger victory if someone reads it) Anyway, so I’m at the podium, and with my personally insightful, and self-deprecatingly humorous (although, needless to say, inconsequential) opening remarks, I envision 6 billion readers sitting at their monitors with rapt attention, their mouths figuratively watering for more.