The Hive
The official blog of science fiction / horror author Terence West.
William Gibson Blog
Famed author of Neuromancer and Johnny Mnemonic: The Screenplay.
The Word Foundry
Joe Clifford Faust's "blog of a working writer: tracking writing projects, musings on the
creative process, occasional side trips into music, media, politics, religion, etc."
A Writer's Diary
By Cynthia Harrison, who has the good sense to quote Virginia Woolf: "The truth is that writing
is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial."
The American Sentimentalist
"Never has any people endured its own tragedy with so little sense of the tragic." Essays by Mark W. Anderson.
Screenwriting By Blog
David C. Daniel writes a screenplay online. "I've decided to publish the process as a way to push myself through it.
From concept to completion, it'll be here."
SeanAlonzo.com
Official site of occult fiction author Sean-Alonzo, exploring symbolism, alternative
history, philosophy, secret societies and other areas of the esoteric tradition.
Crafty Screenwriting
Maunderings of Alex Epstein, tv scribe, about life, politics, and the tv show I'm co-creating.
Stealing Heaven From The Lips Of God
Writer & Artist, Dee Rimbaud reflects upon politics, religion, art, poetry, the meaning of life,
the nature of God and why toast always lands butter side down on carpets.
The Writing Life...
"An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's." J.D. Salinger
"All my best friends are writers and are dead." A friend over beer, Berkeley, winter, 1959
"And it came to pass that all the stars in the firmament had ceased to shine. But how was anyone to know?" The Half-Life Conspiracy
Thursday, August 31, 2006 Agassi for the ages What an incredible almost-4 hours of tennis I just watched!
By HOWARD FENDRICH, AP Sports Writer
NEW YORK - How about that? Andre Agassi, 36 years old and burdened by a bad back, held up better than the kid across the net in a thriller that will be talked about for years.
Buoyed by a cortisone injection, along with a raucous, sellout crowd that boosted his spirits when things suddenly looked bleak as could be, Agassi extended his career for at least one more match by beating eighth-seeded Marcos Baghdatis of Cyprus 6-4, 6-4, 3-6, 5-7, 7-5 at the U.S. Open.
They traded stinging strokes for nearly four hours as Thursday night became Friday, and it was the 21-year-old Baghdatis who broke down physically, his body contorted by cramps in both thighs during an eight-deuce, four-break-point game that Agassi eventually held to lead 5-4 in the fifth. Later, Baghdatis used the chair umpire's stand to stretch his aching legs.
And there was Agassi, still hustling to reach seemingly unreachable shots, responding with winners, and skipping out to the baseline to start games at his record 21st consecutive Open — one for each year of Baghdatis' life.
When it was over, they shook hands at the net, then embraced. And Agassi was quick to thank the 23,700 or so of his closest friends who sure are enjoying quite a ride at Flushing Meadows.
"Tonight has been another example of moments you're not guaranteed in life," Agassi said.
Baghdatis' very first serve of the second-round encounter was a fault, eliciting hoots from the stands. Moments later, a fan in the upper deck yelled: "Andre, this is your house! And it's all of us against him!"
As if there were any doubt. Agassi is, after all, an American at the American Grand Slam, one of the most popular players in recent tennis history — and everyone knows each match here could be his last as a pro. That final part is also why Agassi went to the hospital this week for the latest in a series of shots to dull pain from a troublesome sciatic nerve; he could barely stand after his first-round victory over Andrei Pavel.
Against Baghdatis, Agassi missed consecutive backhands to get broken in the fifth set's opening game. Agassi wiped sweat from his brow, shook his head and trudged slowly toward the sideline. Was the end near? But with the lead — and momentum — finally on Baghdatis' side, it was youngster who asked for a medical timeout so he could get his strained left thigh massaged.
Agassi took a seat and sighed, while the crowd chanted, "Let's go, Andre!" And there was nothing wrong with Agassi's back when he stretched for a low volley at a sharp angle to break right back in the next game. Agassi shook his fist and clenched his teeth, still spry after all these years.
He had appeared to be in control after the first two sets since he had won all 58 matches at the Open with that size lead. And Agassi was up 4-0 in the fourth set, before winners began to come more frequently from the racket of Baghdatis, who knew his role going in, saying: "Sure, I'm the bad guy for tonight."
Now this was drama! I remember once I took some students to see some plays at the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. The world series was on -- and on the night of King Lear, it was the 7th game. A close game, not over when the play began. The students were shocked that I chose to watch the game, not the play, which I finally entered late. Why? they asked later. How can you choose baseball over Shakespeare -- you, a writer!? I explained the matter very simply: drama is driven by "what happens next?" There was only one ending I didn't know. I stayed to experience it.
The Well In my forty-plus years of writing, I've never had even fifteen seconds of writer's block. On the contrary, I've always been working on several projects at once. Lately, however, I find myself not with fewer ideas but with fewer ideas that seem worth the effort. What determines whether or not I go forward on a new idea now is my sense of how much "heart" (as opposed to "head") is in it. I'm only interested in heart projects in my last act, it seems.
Working on Sally In The Blue Tent, I've had the sense this was my last book. Then an idea for a new memoir really excited me. Okay, next to last book. This morning I woke up with a new novel idea that really excites me, another spin off of the "old age and dying" themes I've been working with lately (wonder why ha ha), original with lots of room for exploration and using a high tech theme not typically in my work -- I like it. Wrote some quick notes this morning and figure it might be my first 2007 project.
So "the well" continues to stay reasonably full. A mysterious process. I may die with my boots on, so to speak, not a bad way to go. Like B. Joe Medley, a Portland actor, who died in makeup after a play.
Also woke to find an email from a former grad student of mine, turned colleague and friend, who responded well to my new screenplay The Brazen Wing. It's one that's difficult to market, given its old main characters, but I think it may be the best screenplay I've written. As Lew Welch wrote, "Not the bronze casket but the brazen wing!"
8/31/2006 07:47:00 AM |
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Wednesday, August 30, 2006 A Tribute to Jim Wylie Good news from Jim: his cancer has not spread beyond the left lung, so treatment has a shot and possible surgery later.
This and that Cummings wrote this couplet to conclude a poem:
the most who die the more we live
Ain't it the truth!
A busy morning at the university, doing editing chores. Have decided to release a "preview" of the Wylie material from my archive before its publication in the review in December. Given the cancer, the future is uncertain and there are advantages to having his stuff available sooner rather than later.
I forgot my reading glasses but seem to be seeing well enough to function here. I need to keep a pair in my desk drawer.
New memoir This is a perfect project for this time of my life: a celebration of reading. I'm not going to market it. First, it would be a hard sell. Mainly, though, I'm not because I would have to write a book proposal, which is how things are done in corporate publishing, and this would be a pain in the butt and more difficult than the book itself. It would turn a project of love into tedious work. So fuck it. I'll write this for the joy of writing it, for a few friends, and for students of literature who might appreciate it.
I see it this way: a chapter to each book, perhaps each chapter divided into three sections. The book, in which I explicate it; the background, which would be literary, historical and personal; and the appreciation, in which I articulate my admiration for the book.
Books possibly on the list are The Quiet American, Mrs. Bridge, The Grapes of Wrath, Ragtime, The Last Good Time, Fat City, The Skin Of Our Teeth, The Physicists, Marat/Sade, an Albee play (from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, A Delicate Balance, Tiny Alice -- perhaps the latter since it is the neglected one), Seize the Day, What I'm Going To Do I Think, Armies of the Night, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, The Fire Next Time, a few classical works.
This is the kind of book I can dabble in for several years. I look forward to it and will begin with the two definite chapters, The Quiet American and Mrs. Bridge.
8/30/2006 05:49:00 AM |
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Tuesday, August 29, 2006 Almost but ... Chekhov moved to academia, The Sisters is a tad too high brow for its own good. Style is the issue here (directing), and the mix of elevated dialogue and daytime soap opera doesn't work for me. Incest, drug overdose, adultery, etc., it's all here, and the attempt is to provide a classic-like treatment to these high brow lives, but nothing quite comes together for me, despite some good performances and witty one-liners.
8/29/2006 10:01:00 PM |
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Little Miss Sunshine This is an entertaining dark comedy filled with biting scenes. An ensemble piece, the acting is great top to bottom. However, the whole is equal to, not greater than, the sum of its parts, and this isn't a film, as enjoyable as it was, that I'll think about often. The possible exception is the ending, which is worth the price of admission, a hilarious look at those terrible kiddie beauty pageants.
8/29/2006 09:57:00 PM |
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University life In the office again this morning, doing editing chores with the faster connection. I'm not ready to enter the classroom yet but I seem to be ready to get back into the university rhythm of things.
We may take a break and "do something" today since it's H's only free day before she flies east for two weeks after Labor Day. Poor weather, drizzly, maybe a ride somewhere.
8/29/2006 08:50:00 AM |
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Rock & roll meets terrorism I'm reading a fascinating book about the roots of Islamic extremism, about which I'll say more when I finish it. But something very odd and interesting struck me while reading the early chapters. Post-WWII America, the U.S. in the late 1940s, provided backdrops to two very different kinds of revolutions. White American teenagers, bored with the culture of their parents, started finding greater sensuality and energy in black rhythm-n-blues music, from which rock-n-roll was born. They also rebelled toward bohemian lifestyles and were soon called "beatniks." At the same time, in the same American culture were young conservative Muslims, shocked and upset by the creation of Israel, here in the U.S. for college -- and now shocked by the "sensuality" of the same white culture that native teenagers found dull. White teenagers and Muslim foreign students reacted to the same culture by going in opposite directions, the former toward the greater sensuality in black culture and bohemian lifestyles, the latter toward the greater conservatism of a strict interpretation of Islam. So the roots of rock-n-roll and terrorism share some background. Fascinating.
8/29/2006 03:26:00 AM |
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Mississippi Hippy For some reason, I woke up with this song in my head that I wrote in the late 60s to the tune of "Okie from Muskogee":
MISSISSIPPI HIPPY
We don't get our kicks on scotch and water We don't take our trips on credit cards We don't spend a fortune on our daughters Or every year go out and buy a car
CHORUS: And I'm proud to be a Mississippi hippy Smokin' grass and takin' LSD Burning up my draft card at the courthouse The inside of my head is my country
We don't buy ten suits for just one body Or 40 socks for just one pair of feet We don't think a beard can become shaggy Unshaven armpits are all right with me
CHORUS
You say Love it or Leave it rather often I'd never say the same thing back to you 'Cause you're not even here but in your coffin The world will change no matter what you do
CHORUS
I didn't write many songs in my folk period but those I did write were usually topical and played well. The most popular were talking blues, suck as West Meets East Talkin' Misery Blues ... and this one.
One story about the song. I was with grad student friends at a beerfest in Springfield, the blue collar town across the river from Eugene. The towns were tense neighbors in the sixties as the antiwar movement spread. Springfield was always "patriotic" and supportive of the war. Once, in fact, the towns almost clashed violently. 13th Ave., which used to be open to public traffic through the middle of the university, was forcibly closed one night by a group of radicals (actually a fraternity started it and radicals co-opted it!) and a large group from Springfield came in pickups with shotguns to reopen the street. Only a creative and fast-thinking Eugene city councilman stopped the violence. At any rate, I was drinking beer in Springfield to a country band on stage. They played the Haggard classic. I was loose enough to go on stage during the performance and talk myself into singing "additional lyrics" to the song. Then I sang "Mississippi Hippy." What is amazing is: I finished the song without being physically attacked and, two, we escaped Springfield before being physically attacked. I was booed but that's about it. What a stupid dumbass thing to do! I could be pretty reckless in those days. In fact, it's amazing I survived dozens of incidents like this.
8/29/2006 03:16:00 AM |
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Monday, August 28, 2006 Winter review Is shaping up to be perhaps the most interesting yet, with full artistic portraits, if you will, of a novelist-painter, a storyteller-painter and a folk musician. Very excited about how these areas are shaping up. I'm behind in play reading but will catch up before school starts. The new nonfiction editor is terrific.
Wandered around the city this morning. You don't have to go far to realize what a large number of lost, high, hustling, ill, angry, bewildered and otherwise displaced people there are in Portland, as in any American city. But I had a pleasant chat, again, with our former mayor at lunch at Nobby's, where I ran into him. A good morning in the city even if I didn't snap any photos. I was too into my head to "see" anything, brooding about a new idea for a memoir.
8/28/2006 04:58:00 PM |
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Wandering around the yard After watering, decided to wander the yard with my camera and see what I found. We do love this place, and it will be hard to leave. But we also want to be closer to a walking, everything-close lifestyle.
The flowers and gardening in general are more H's doing than mine. I mow the lawn ha ha.
We've used the deck less this summer than usual. Hmm. Mainly, I think, because H has been so busy, often not home for dinner when we'd normally use it.
8/28/2006 08:40:00 AM |
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The opera, again Another day of heavy interest in the archival opera yesterday, including downloading the full score, this time from someone at the University of Montana. And more international interest in the archive in general than usual, with visits from Australia, Hong Kong, France, Nepal, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Israel, UK, Netherlands, India and Canada.
Going to the spend time at the university today. A big download to do, a webcast of Jim Wylie's folk music, and maybe I'll wander the city with my camera for a change of pace. I also feel it's time to revisit some literary works I greatly admire, like The Quiet American, Mrs. Bridge, The Grapes of Wrath, Ragtime, Cheever's short stories, Yates' short stories, Durrenmatt plays, Albee plays, Wilder plays, finish the Updike Rabbit novels.
Sunday, August 27, 2006 Mose Alison Cruising the city at 630 a.m., coffee in hand, jazz on the radio, I heard a Mose Alison tune I hadn't heard before. A lot of his tunes are based on great couplets: "Your mind is on vacation but your mouth is working overtime." This was another: "You call it jogging but I call it running around." I last saw Mose here in Portland about 20 years ago in an intimate club, a fine gig.
It's been a while since I told my favorite Mose Alison story here. This happened almost 40 years ago at the University of Oregon. I got four tickets for the first set of two one night at the university, going with friends. We got there early but the gig started almost an hour late. When it did, all was not well with Mr. Alison. He clearly was pissed about something. He even brought a six-pack on stage, set it on the piano, and left the stage when the bass and drums had their solos. It was a short weird concert. Oh, well, temperamental artist etc. I still loved him.
Later that night, around midnight, I saw him sitting alone at the end of the bar in a university hangout. I approached him as a fan. When he got comfortable with me, he told me very simply why he had been pissed: "They thought I was a guitar player." The university guy in charge had set up the stage for a guitar player! The gig started late because they had to round up a piano! Amazing. I bought him several drinks, hung around and had a great visit with Mose Alison.
8/27/2006 07:23:00 AM |
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Saturday, August 26, 2006 A different energy With summer winding down, I've been reflecting on the distance between what I accomplished in recent months and my goals in June. I had hoped to draft the Sally novel, for example. Instead, I have 50 pages written in the wrong point of view.
However, I did get the musical albatross off my back, no small matter! I got a good start on the winter issue of the review.
I've been writing more or less nonstop for forty years. Writing has been almost obsessional with me. Maybe it's time to slow down. At any rate, I'm not upset about the summer at all. So clearly I'm less obsessional than I've been in the past. Indeed I think the editing chores, putting out the review, may be taking more of my future energy and my own writing less. Maybe I'm running out of things to say ha ha. We'll see.
8/26/2006 11:52:00 AM |
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Friday, August 25, 2006 Slow day At half speed all day. Uneasy night, awake with stomach cramps, little sleep, and paid for it today.
8/25/2006 06:45:00 PM |
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Joshua Then and Now A common narrative strategy is to begin with a crisis, then backtrack and tell the story of how things got to be so messed up. Amadeus uses this strategy. So does the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. To work, two things must be operative: a major crisis as the hook; and a compelling clue that the explanation in the past will be satisfying dramatically.
This film fails on both counts. The "crisis" is a messed up writer. What else is new? There is no clue but rather an unusual Jewish boyhood with a gangster father. But everything is nebulous and vague. No obsession with Mozart, no madness because of invading aliens. This is based on a novel, in which the leisurely strategy may have worked. But this film is boring, boring, boring. I quit after half an hour.
8/25/2006 12:35:00 PM |
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Thursday, August 24, 2006 Everything Is Illuminated A nice indie about a young American Jewish man on a personal family odyssey to the Ukraine, where he discovers a good deal about his history. Manages to add gentle humor to serious reflections about history, responsibility, family.
8/24/2006 08:56:00 AM |
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Symphonic Choir Composers no doubt are familiar with this software but I just learned about it through Robin. It creates "performances" from scores, both instrumental and vocal. The quality to my ear is extraordinary! It's very spendy, as one would expect, but with this a composer can make a professional-sounding demo without needing to hire musicians and singers. I think Robin may use it for our musical.
Brooding, insights, changes Woke up brooding about the Sally novel. I think the point of view is wrong. It's the same protagonist as in the road story, and I've been using the same first-person narration but this won't work with Sally. Sally gets too dark, the protagonist too dark himself, for such a limiting, self-defining voice. I need to step back to see him in fuller context. So I'm changing what I have and see how it reads. Better, I should think. We'll find out.
8/24/2006 08:46:00 AM |
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Wednesday, August 23, 2006 Winding down Okay, I have an excellent shot at finishing the rewrite of the musical's book today, leaving only polishing lyrics left on my end. Considering how this project has been something of an albatross, this is a great feeling.
At the same time, I want to do more musical projects, just different from this one, your standard romantic musical. I want to do darker things ha ha. Also, more with John, in particular an adaptation I have in mind but didn't get any work done on during the summer. I definitely haven't forgotten it.
But I want to incorporate music and fiction in a new way. I have something strange in mind but the concept is still too vague.
A couple of nice fan letters this week. Don't get all that many of them but they feel good when they arrive.
8/23/2006 08:31:00 AM |
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Tick tock When you outlive your best friends and start outliving your closest acquaintances after that, it's hard not to wonder why the gods haven't put you in line. I don't dwell on it but it comes to mind whenever I get word that someone else has the big C or whatever. Now it's Jim's turn. Why not me? No answer to that. It certainly isn't because of a more healthy life style and, what with Dick's hard-living mom still alive in her late 80s, it doesn't seem to be about genes either. Count your blessings and move on. Or paraphrase Tom Lehrer: It's a comforting thought to know that when my mother was my age, she'd been dead for five years. Count your blessings and move on.
8/23/2006 04:54:00 AM |
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Tuesday, August 22, 2006 Sunset: A Musical Drafts of the covers for the upcoming coil-bound score/book.
Still grunt work to do before we're ready to publish and market but we are getting very close. My work is almost over, the real polishing being done by the composer.
This and that Jim is a journeyman folk musician in the 60s tradition, active and always playing somewhere but without a CD out. I offered to help him put one together via Lulu -- he needs to leave a record. He finds out this week if his cancer is operable. Lung cancer isn't kind, in my experience.
Meanwhile back to work on Sunset: A Musical, trying to get as much done on my end before Labor Day as possible. Worked on the cover design last night. Robin, the composer, decided on a few cuts. We're getting there.
Monday, August 21, 2006 The Big C Jim Wylie, the folk musician who joined me in the last incarnation of my tribute to Woody Guthrie (the version on CD), has lung cancer. The future is iffy, of course. More as I learn more.
8/21/2006 07:40:00 PM |
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The calm before the storm I've felt more like I'm on vacation since returning from vacation, our trip to LA, than while away. Moving slowly, reading a lot (finally), watching some Little League WS games, and well aware that after Labor Day I go into high gear to prepare for the new term. The Sally novel is much harder than I imagined, so I'm taking it slowly. I have editing chores to do and musical chores to do sooner rather than later. But mostly I'm moving slowly and enjoying the leisure of it.
8/21/2006 02:13:00 PM |
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Sunday, August 20, 2006 Adults Beaverton is in the Little League World Series, the first time an Oregon team has gone in almost half a century. They lost their first game, so a win today was a must. I rooted for them, of course, but their coach was so obnoxiously loud and domineering that I almost started rooting for the other team. Oregon won and is still alive. No thanks to the coach, who appears to be the team's major problem.
8/20/2006 02:27:00 PM |
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From relative obscurity to complete oblivion I've been thinking a lot about George Shearing's description of the fate of most of his musical compositions. Surely almost all writers feel the same: a trip to the library, seeing all those dusty books, makes the case. The miracle is that as long as the work exists in an accessible way, such as in a library (or on the net!), anything can happen. Hence the discovery of my essay "English Composition as a Happening" by Geoffrey Sirc, a student who later wrote a book of the same title inspired by it:
"One of the Composition-specific articles in this genre of radical sixties pedagogy, one which I have never been able to forget since the day I first read it in the dimly-lit stacks of my university's library, was written in 1967 by a young graduate teaching assistant at the University of Oregon, Charles Deemer. His article, "English Composition as a Happening," did what many of these articles did, but did it in a formally compelling way (the article is a collage of brief sound-bite snippets, alternating between Deemer's own poetic reflections-as-manifesto and quotations from Sontag, McLuhan, Dewey, Goodman, and others), and Deemer's ideas seemed to catalyze my own discontent with what passed for Composition during the 1980s."
I love this image, reading in the "dimly-lit stacks" and getting so excited that some time later you write an entire book inspired by the ideas you've encountered. This is what writing is about, networking, from writer to reader who becomes writer. As Norman Brown has written, "The proper response to poetry is not criticism but poetry." This is what the community of literature and ideas is about.
8/20/2006 09:22:00 AM |
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Good morning Considerable interest in the opera yesterday, according to activity stats in the archive. All the sound files accessed, half-a-dozen downloads of the libretto, even the full score downloaded, a sizeable pdf file. What's it all mean? Who the hell knows. (Closer investigation reveals the activity came from Oklahoma, Indiana and the Russian Federation. A bootleg production in Russia!)
Today I need to put on my editing hat and get back to the review. I particularly have a hypermedia project to format. Plus, an application for our nonfiction editor to consider. Looks good so far.
Saturday, August 19, 2006 Signs of the times Dinner in NE Portland prior to an art opening at a wine shop in a refurbished neighborhood full of new energy and young folks. Drinking and eating establishments advertize "vegan fare" and "free wifi" and most of the young women have tattoos.
At the opening I ran into Bud Clark, our former mayor (1984-92). I can remember sitting at the bar at the Vat & Tonsur, one of my hangouts a quarter century ago, when Bud wandered in with a large jar, taking up a collection to run for mayor. What fun! Seemed like a cool joke or something. The man was best known as owner/bartender of the Goose Hollow Inn and the model in the infamous "Expose Yourself to Art" poster. But the man was serious, he won, and he did a hell of a job. He was mayor during the Golden Age of Portland, at least to some of us.
How did I miss this? Not sure why I missed this 1999 film but I enjoyed it -- it's one of the more engaging stories about marriage I've seen on film, funny and serious, perhaps too easy in its ending but otherwise full of human truths about coupledom.
8/19/2006 02:57:00 PM |
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Columbia, Mo. Columbia's little league team is in the world series. Columbia, Mo., is a city I'll always remember because it was where my first "success" happened as a playwright. My one-act play "Above the Fire," my first, was one of three winners in the Univ of Mo's Tennessee Williams competition and all three of us were flown to Columbia for the premieres at a festival and treated like royalty. At the time I was primarily publishing short stories in lit mags but also was a "failed" novelist, having written two I couldn't place. However, I had an agent interested in my third, with the working title Idaho Blues. I never finished it.
We three playwrights couldn't have been more different. Myself, in my mountain man mode with a red beard hanging to my chest; a stuffy academic in suit and glasses; and a flaming gay who came with his young boyfriend. What a treat for the classes we visited to see three such different incarnations of the playwriting life! Of course, I was the raw amateur of the bunch. We were put up at the Daniel Boone Hotel but we playwrights hardly spoke to one another, we were so different. I hung out with the director and actors of my play and had a fine old time. This was my first taste of recognition as an artist and I liked it. This helped sway me to change my grad school focus from fiction to playwriting, which is what I eventually got my MFA in.
"Above the Fire" later got published in Dramatics magazine and done at the U of Oregon. Years later I was strolling down the boardwalk in Virginia Beach, Va., and saw a flier for it. Without my permission, it was being done, the script apparently found in the magazine. It was a shoebox production and I didn't cause a stink or anything. I've only discovered two unauthorized productions of my plays -- the Half-Life Conspiracy was done in a cafe in NYC a couple years ago, which I discovered by finding the poster on the net while looking for something else -- but I bet there are many more. How do you police such a thing? (Two actors in the NYC production have the credit on their online resumes: Dara Seitzman and Dave Bickle.)
8/19/2006 09:56:00 AM |
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The office At my university office bright and early to do a chore. Campus full of high school kids, the usual indoctrination tour perhaps. The farmers market usually here Saturday is not here. Hmm. At any rate, nice to see my key still works ha ha. p.s. Ah, the market moved up the campus a ways. Bought huge tomatoes.
8/19/2006 08:04:00 AM |
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Friday, August 18, 2006 The chores of the writing class Running around all morning on errands, buying supplies, getting books at the library, and so on, the usual writerly routine. Heard George Shearing on the radio talking about most of his musical compositions: "they went from relative obscurity to oblivion." What writer can't relate to that!?
Packaged some books to send to a few friends in LA. And I enrolled in a piano class for seniors. A big deal. Been messing with my keyboard on my own, might as well get some structure and official knowledge and discipline behind the effort. Fridays right after the term starts. If it works, I can continue on for as long as I want. Hope it works.
A surprise in the mail: an agent wants to read the entire Kerouac's Scroll manuscript on the basis of the first three chapters. I've rather given up on its marketability, yet I still pitched it out of habit. I think it's good, which is to say it came out as I wanted it to, and a few readers agree with me, but I also am a realist and know it's not best-seller material. But it'd be nice to get better distribution than my literary coop activity can offer, but I'm not losing any sleep over the possibility. I can get it where it needs to go.
Behind, way behind, on reading. Need to read a lot between now and the start of school. I'm not even going to think of my new syllabus until after Labor Day. A couple weeks to read and leisurely write then.
When I left for LA, I told the musical composer we needed to cut songs out of the first act. He didn't like the idea. I'll write him and see what happened. Onward.
8/18/2006 11:07:00 AM |
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Thursday, August 17, 2006 And now the news The news is no news. I'm exorcising it from my routine. Before the trip, I listened to a lot of news: two hours of Morning Edition early each day, the CBS news at night, snippets through the day -- maybe 3 or 4 hours of news a day! Then cold turkey for a week on our trip. I didn't miss it. Not in the least.
In fact, the news doesn't change its verbs, ever. Only the nouns change. The verbs are always attack, defend, accuse, deny, gain, lose, murder, kidnap, explode, etc. etc. etc. I already know what the news is, I just don't know the nouns. So why bother?
This is quite a change in my routine. So far, so good. No news today and I don't miss it at all.
8/17/2006 02:34:00 PM |
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A bed of one's own Is anything more comfortable or comforting than returning to one's own bed after a trip?
Wednesday, August 16, 2006 A surprise trip to L.A. to celebrate Tee & Colette's 75th and 70th birthdays August 6th. Day 1.
LA-bound, camping our way, to surprise a couple friend on Saturday at their 75th and 70th birthday celebration. A late start but made it to a campground along the Rogue River, Valley of the Rogue State Park. Very nice facility! Have the good sense to space their tent sites some distance apart. Quiet, mellow, lots of trees, the river in the distance down a path. Tomorrow we’ll get as close to SF as we can since on Tues. we have a lunch date in the city with H’s oldest son. Sketch travels like a champ, riding his throne of mattresses and sleeping bags in the back seat. We only went 240 miles today but it was plenty for me. I don’t travel nearly as well as I did when I was younger. At least we stopped around 3. Alone, I’d travel 6-noon but with H, 9 to 3 is a workable compromise. LATER. A long walk along the river led to the area where the RVs set up. What a contrast! Wall-to-wall rigs, as close as in a parking lot at WalMart’s. This is camping? Walking along the river, I marveled at how swift the current of the Rogue is. Really hauling ass. Later we found a quiet cove in which the dog splashed around and cooled off. Later still we were surprised by a thunderstorm, covering the supplies on the table and rushing to the car to wait it out. Sketch didn’t like the thunder much. Day 2, Up at 6 to take the dog for a walk. Returned him to the tent with H and I appear to be the only one up in the campground. Will make coffee and relax. I got my first “battery getting low” warning on this AlphaSmart – approaching 3 years of pretty heavy use! Absolutely amazing.
On the road. A glorious morning! A tedious afternoon. After breakfast and a long walk with the dog, still managed to hit the road by 9. A quick stop in Ashland for supplies and gas. Ashland was such a great little town in the 60s. Full of artists and bohemians. Then the Shakespeare Festival got more widely marketed, and the town became the quaint artsy-fartsy spendy touristy place it is today. No respectful bohemian could afford to live in Ashland any more.
Onward into Calif, past Mt Shasta and the huge sprawling Lake. We stopped for lunch at a gorgeous park on the Sacramento River in Anderson, a town I never heard of let alone stopped at. One of the best river parks I’ve seen. After lunch, the landscape turns flat and boring, grain- and farmland but without the rolling hills of the Palouse. Earlier, in southern Oregon, we had the brown hills of my youth, the San Gabriels. I love southern Oregon, in terms of its landscape, more than the upper valley. I get no spiritual satisfaction from living in Portland, in fact, although in the 80s, the city’s artistic Glory Days, I felt a strong community connection I haven’t felt since. Only the university gives me spiritual sustenance in Portland these days. But I can get the same, or something close, from certain landscapes, like southern Oregon and especially the southwest, the southern Utah, 4-corners area, those incredible canyonlands. So we suffered through the flat landscape until we’d put in our six hours of driving. We decided to get a motel and stopped in Williams. Easier to get clean and dressy for the trip into the city, SF, tomorrow, to take H’s oldest son, an artist, to lunch. 3 straight days of camping then, and finally into LA. Onward.
Later. H brought her laptop and for the first time used her wireless on it. Here we are in the cheapest motel in Williams in the middle of nowhere, and H is doing her email. What a world. Day 3, Tuesday, Aug 8. This may end up being my least favorite day of the trip, depending on how many times we get lost in SF ha ha. We’ll see!
LATER. H the navigator with her wireless connection went to MapQuest for our directions in SF. What a world. Getting out of SF looks more tedious than getting into it. Our campground tonight is some 60 miles south, along the coast, off the main drags. Then tomorrow into Big Sur where we get to stay for a few days! I really look forward to that. Have my camera with me and expect to get some great trees along the coast.
LATER. What a day! First, the SF adventure. We begin on I80 southward toward the city. Traffic across the 4 lanes is light, given the 11am hour, and thank the gods for that. But the freeway needs work, Calif roads apparently much worse off than Oregon roads in general. As we approach the Oakland Bay Bridge, traffic gets more interesting, various feeds coming in until we are ten lanes across. Whoopee! $3 due at a poll booth, after which the ten lanes converge to five and we’re off. We find H’s son’s apt without difficulty, in the Haight district. Indeed, we get lunch to go at a deli near Height-Ashbury, where I haven’t been in forty years, but the vibes are the same, little has changed, and some of the characters on the street surely haven’t moved since the Summer of Love. We carry out sandwiches to Buena Vista park overlooking the city. Good weather, a fine SF day. Then it’s time to go. An easy route out of the city, southward, but then the day’s real adventure begins as we follow MapQuest directions to our campsite in the redwoods. We come the back way, over narrow roads climbing into hills, twice almost colliding with someone coming down, once almost being creamed by a log truck that took up the entire road, but we manage to drop into Big Basin Redwood Park and find our reasonably secluded site for the night in a grove of spectacular redwoods. Worth the harrowing drive to get here. Tomorrow it’s to Monterey, some sight-seeing, and on the Big Sur for a couple days. Onward. Day 4. Early morning, still in the redwoods. Some of these trees are 1500 years old. At any rate, thinking more about how remarkable it is that Haight-Ashbury still FEELS like it did in the 60s, or close enough to be remarkable. Not so in Portland, where NW is 180 degrees from the Bohemian feel it had up to the early 80s. “This is like Greenwich Village used to be,” my NY agent at the time said as a compliment. Now it’s gentrified and quaint. Like Ashland today, quaint. QUAINT. The Haight-Ashbury, even today, ain’t quaint.
This is so majestic and pleasant, we’re actually in no hurry to get out. We only have about 100 miles to drive today but we want to stop in Monterey and look around and take the famous 17-mile drive before hitting our campground. I have done no reading on this trip yet! Maybe this morning. Or maybe I’ll write. Onward.
In the Big Sur campsite. Well, our short travel day began by twisting from the redwoods into Santa Cruz, then down the coast to Monterey. I lived in Monterey from Oct 59 to Oct 60 while attending the language school. For the last six months, several of us rented a Party Pad on the wharf – and it’s still there! It’s about the only thing I recognized. I recognized the pad because of its 2nd story swinging doors that open up over the walkway. It was our escape from the Army. I was delighted to see it still exists and snapped a photo for posterity. Monterey otherwise was beyond recognition, it’s grown so much.
We took the 17 mile drive but it wasn’t as spectacular as I recalled, despite several good photo opportunities. Then into Carmel, which they can have despite former mayor Clint Eastwood. A single scoop of ice cream costs almost four bucks and wall-to-wall tourists suggest a subsidiary of Disneyland, CarmelByTheSeaLand. Got out of there as soon as we finished our gold-plated ice cream. The campground next, bug city, driving me crazy, they seem immune from cream for me and the dog, though it works for H. Also, we have one of those campers from hell neighbors with a generator and a record collection he insists on sharing with the world. We are two days here so better get used to it. Day 5, Thursday, Aug 10. Snooping around last night, we learned the real attraction here is the Big Sur River and several delightful swimming holes along it. This is a family attraction as a result. Always full – in fact, “reservations only” for this campground, which of course we made by phone before we left. Or was it by the net? At any rate, here we are, not in the quiet majestic seclusion of redwoods off the beaten path, but in a family favorite right off the highway. Today we’ll venture into town to check out the Henry Miller Library. Onward.
The Henry Miller Memorial Library is funky and perfect. Neither a memorial nor library, it’s a hippyish bookstore and place to hang where lawn concerts and readings are often featured.
Interestingly enough, tomorrow night Ramblin’ Jack Elliott will be there to celebrate his 75th birthday! Alas, we have to get to LA tomorrow.
Are we crucifying humanity on a cross of computers? A question Miller might ask.
The Big Sur campground is refreshingly quiet this afternoon, no doubt because all the kids are on the river. Family campgrounds are a good thing, and it’s nice to see them all doing things together. However, sometimes an old fart would like to be around considerably less noise and energy. Indeed, a motel is much quieter than this campground once the families return. Which brings something to mind. I think this may be my last extended camping trip. I am at the age where I prefer a bed to a sleeping bag and putting the small tent up and down each day got old quick. I like traveling. I just like showers and beds and privacy. I like motels. Actually I think I could live in a motel. So let’s call this the Last Camping Trip. Why not? Has a nice ring to it.
The jays and squirrels around here know no fear. Brazen scavengers.
Oh, yes … this morning I did manage to write a vignette chapter on Sally. Amazing. Except for writing here, I’ve done no work or reading to speak of. The exception, this morning, and the careful reading of Sally on the first day. But no matter. I’ll return full of energy, or as my mother used to say, piss and vinegar.
LATER. Seeing the old Party Pad on the old Monterey Wharf was a highlight of this trip for me. The Army was a pivotal and life-changing experience for me. The advantage of being between wars (Korea and Vietnam)! The year in Monterey at the Language School changed me forever, primarily because of the guys I met, all older, all former grad students in one humanities field or the other – very different from the techies I had been running with until then. My journey to become a writer surely started there, though this was the farthest thing from my mind at the time. But I was introduced to many, many good and important books. The Party Pad, which was a place to drink and party for the several of us who were under 21 and couldn’t get into the bars (for a time we did with fake IDs … all of us had one) with consistency. A place off-base to turn loose. The folding doors opened up onto the wharf below, and we play jazz, drank wine, and pretended we were bohemians despite our Army crewcuts. It was a damn good time, a changing and learning time for me. It’s also when I first started playing guitar and banjo in public after my solitary learning time in Berkeley. Soon I would go everywhere with one or the other and play everywhere I went as well, a true folkie. Oh so long ago.
Tomorrow H wants to visit Cambria on Highway 1 on the way. A girl friend recommended it. Maybe we’ll stop for lunch there. The tricky part tomorrow is timing our arrival so we miss the worst of the traffic. I say arrive at 3 or at 7. We are staying in Alhambra, the closest place we could find a motel that was dog friendly. Sat. morning we visit H’s nephew, then to the surprise birthday party. Sunday is open but we hope to spend it with the birthday couple and with my dear friend Lynne. Head home on Monday then. A straight shot up I5, staying in motels.
This is a good trip but it also will be good to get home, the battery charged, ready to go. I am a home body. My routine is my life and is quite enough most of the time.
Walked away for a moment and a damn bird shat on my AlphaSmart! Back into the case. Onward.
Day 6, Friday. LA day. But first the morning at Big Sur, where I’m the first one up in the entire campground perhaps. The wonderful quiet part of the day when even the bugs are still asleep. Sketch got up with me, we took a walk so he could do his business, her perched on my lap for a while to check out the rising jays and ground squirrels, then decided to go back to bed and joined H in the tent. Today will be a tricky day since we definitely don’t want to hit LA during rush hour, though it’s always rush hour down there now – but there are degrees of congestion. We’ll play it by ear at any rate.
Though this may well be “my last camping trip,” at least in the sense of one day stays in a pup tent while on the road, I’m glad we’re doing it. But the trip really reinforces how happy I am in my quiet routine at home, teaching and writing and minding my own business more or less, not quite reclusive but certainly not very social (far less than H would prefer, in fact) … at this stage of my journey, the routine is perfect for me. At the same time, I look forward to selling the house and embellishing the routine by moving into a facility or neighborhood where everything I immediately need is available on foot … groceries, a cup of coffee, and so on. Hop public transportation to the university but otherwise be self-contained, self-sufficient. The quiet reflective life of aging. Day 7, Saturday. In a motel in Alhambra. What a long harrowing, adventurous day yesterday. 11 hrs to get 300 miles. First, down the coast from Big Sur we hit a fog bank that stayed with us much of the day. We stopped at Cambria, a Disney subsidiary in the making, bought lunch to go. At San Luis Obispo we hit 101, freeway traffic considerable. Stopped at Pismo Beach for lunch at a lovely Oceanside park. Back to traffic, which got very bad at Santa Barbara. Rush hour stuff. Hopped off at Ventura to catch our breath and get coffee. How did I grow up in SoCal and miss Ventura? A lovely town! A beach town for the residents, not the tourists, my kind of place. I’d spend time in Ventura in a heartbeat. Onward. Managed to find the motel around 830, exhausted. Showered, junk food for dinner. Here we are.
Today, lunch with H’s nephew, then on to the party. Loaded with maps since we go all over the area. Wonder how many times we’ll get lost?
Walking the dog this morning around the rundown neighborhood of our motel, I met a pedestrian, Vietnamese perhaps, who jabbered in his native tongue about the dog and it took me some time to figure out what I believe he was talking about – how tasty this breed of dog is! I swear to the gods, I think he was telling me about dog recipes. That’s what I got from his hand gestures anyway. He was hard to get rid of. Maybe he was trying to buy Sketch for dinner. Wow.
LATER. In a park near the party, where we are meeting H’s nephew for a picnic lunch. Small lake, very nice, in the middle of the city. AND we drove here without taking a freeway! Very proud of ourselves. A pleasant, sight-seeing drive, much more fun and interesting than the damn freeways everywhere. Seeing LA closer this way, I see and remember what a dirty city it is, at least compared to Portland and Seattle. Lots of trash on the streets, dirt, stench. There are nice neighborhoods to be sure but in general the inner city is not attractive to me. However, this part is very nice. Parks can save cities.
This may be the last time I see some of my LA friends who will be at the party. This is probably my last trip here, for example, and there has been no rush to the NW from LA that I’ve noticed ha ha. I’ve known some of these folks for 40 years…one almost 50, we went to the language school together. This trip feels special in this regard.
Tomorrow is open. Laundry in the morning. Then presumably some more intimate time with a few friends. And homeward bound on Monday.
I’m very glad we made the trip but I’ll also be damn glad to get home. I’m a homebody.
The motel has DSL, which means we can check email. Nothing exciting on that front. Mainly I had over 1000 spam collected the past week.
I brought the camera, want to get some photos of my LA friends for the blog.
What would I do without this AlphaSmart? It still needs my needs so much more than a laptop. I’ve been thinking of upgrading to the new model, which has wireless. If I could check email on this, then I’d have no use for a laptop or cybercafe at all when traveling. Best investment I ever made. Still on my original 3-AA batteries, too, after almost three years! There’s first rate battery life ha ha.
I’m on a park bench in the shade near the entrance into the park and, man, the cars are lined up to get in here now. A popular place, and I can see why. Nice way to get away from the oppressive heat and grime of the city itself.
EVENING. A fantastic celebration, lots of family and friends present for the senior guests of honor. I saw some folks I haven’t seen in forty years. At the same time, I felt a bit on the edge of it all and will more appreciate my visit with them tomorrow minus the crowd. I’m not much for large gatherings any more. And I’m eager to get home and back into my postage stamp of a world, my literary routine.
T&C's son Jeff, who is a film editor.
Vicky and Lloyd. I met Lloyd in 1959 at the Army Language School. A retired film editor, he worked on the Dallas TV series for years.
Day 8, Sunday. Today’s the laziest one of the trip. Do laundry, maybe cruise around, late afternoon visit to our friends. We woke up this morning with a common thought … it would be nice to be home. But not quite yet. We’ll get there. It’s been a good trip.
Lynne, a singer/songwriter, one of my favorite people on the planet, who in the 1980s wrote songs for a number of my plays.
My friend L really likes the road novel. Some insightful comments. Some tears and laughter at the right places. Nice to hear from an appreciative reader. She didn’t respond to my last one, so this is nice.
A lazy day. Need it.
The Master At Work Day 9, Monday. Car trouble? Need to get it checked out this morning.
But last night was spectacular. Tee, the host, did his BBQ thing, of which he is the undisputed champ, small good company, lots of stories over these past 44 years, laughter, etc. The highlight of the trip.
A zero sum universe. Now this morning.
MORNING. Killing time while the car gets looked at.
One thing about this trip, I’ve seen almost no news. When I do see it, I know it. News is so repetitive, the most boring kind of drama really. It’s all murder, mayhem and catastrophe, only the scale and details changing. Maybe when we return I’ll stop watching the news. By habit, I listen to NPR in the morning and CBS at night and CNN here and there at home … maybe I’ll go cold turkey on the news! I mean, really, it never changes. The same old bad news, ad nauseum.
FROM A MOTEL IN MERCED. Oh, did I mention our motel had no water this morning? No shower, no flushing the toilet. That’s how the day began. Then the car problem. But we were off before noon … for about two hours, when we had car trouble again because the mechanic didn’t do it right the first time. But we were able to self-administer the fix this time, and the rest of the day went fine. We did switch from I5 to 99N because the latter passes more towns in case we again needed to stop.
Why is the Calif valley, its breadbasket, all that farmland, so damn boring and desolate looking? Flat, I guess. With its brown and gray dusty horizon. Doesn’t radiate like the Palouse in the northwest.
So we’re in Merced where H had a gal friend, and they are off in search of food take out. I hope today is the most trouble we have on the return trip!
Another thing: there appears to be no coffee culture in SoCal like in the NW. No Starbucks or its rivals easily found. In Pdx or Seattle, you can’t go 3 or 4 blocks without a coffee shop on the corner. Not so in LA. We never did find a coffee house. Later, leaving this morning, we saw one off the freeway (a Starbucks). Day 10. From a motel in Weed. What a good day! We got an early start, heading up the endless San Juaquin valley, finally at Stockton (Fat City country) able to leap west to reconnect with I5. This was a relief. 99 was full of trucks and traffic, I5 relatively deserted. Climbed into mountains and country that reminded us of Oregon, to Redding and Shasta Lake and the mountain ahead. Called it a day in Weed, one of my dad’s favorite towns. Found a delightful motel and connecting country café, liver & onions for dinner, very fine. And earlier, after two hours on the road, we had our first restaurant breakfast of the trip, a special treat. It was cool enough to leave Sketch in the car. We don’t take chances with our important family member, the dog.
So we’re thinking a long drive tomorrow to get home. The car holding up, knock on my wooden head. We have about 360 miles, a long day for us, but it doesn’t make sense to stop 60 miles from home unless we are really beat. We’ll see how it goes.
This has been a good day. The motel is great, and country café is great. We are on a fast running creek and park for Sketch to enjoy. This is good. Day 11. Home! The trip back had a mystical surprise: sunny great weather until we hit the Oregon line, in the Siskiyous, when we are met by a thick drizzly fog bank! No sun the rest of the way. Welcome to Oregon. But we are glad to be safe and sound at home.
8/16/2006 05:24:00 PM |
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Sunday, August 13, 2006 Checking in Greetings from a hidden abode. Will be back online later this week. An adventure to report! Amazing what can happen when you're unwired.
8/13/2006 08:24:00 AM |
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Saturday, August 05, 2006 Unwired Going to shut down the home computer for a week or so. We all need a rest from time to time. I need to remember my Remington manual days, just in case the Big Brownout comes sooner rather than later. I'm of the old school who can write without electricity or batteries! I may check in from time to time at a cybercafe, just so the offers of millions from African countries don't jam the mailbox, but otherwise I'll be back when I get back. Time to putter in the garden. Gone fishing or something. Having the battery charged before Labor Day, after which I have to put my teacher-prep hat on and get ready for the new term. Don't need a computer to brood and brooding is my main activity this summer. See you when I plug the computer back in.
P.S. I'll leave you with two screenwriting jokes. You may have heard them.
Two producers in the studio cafeteria at lunch. "What's new, Ed?" "Don, you are not going to believe my good luck. The best screenplay I've ever read landed on my desk. It's perfect. It has everything -- edge-of-the-seat suspense, heartfelt romance, a tear-jerker that makes you feel good in the end. Everybody's going to love this film. It also has Oscar written all over it." "That's fantastic! When do you start shooting?" "As soon as I get the rewrites."
Hear about the blonde starlet trying to sleep her way to the top in Hollywood? She didn't have a clue. She was so out of it that she slept with the screenwriter.
8/05/2006 03:35:00 PM |
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Online screenwriting class My next 6-week online class begins Oct. 2, 2006 and ends Nov. 11, 2006. $150 tuition includes Screenwright, my electronic tutorial. Syllabus and more details available at this website. Enroll early to reserve your spot.
8/05/2006 08:08:00 AM |
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Friday, August 04, 2006 Quarterbacks During my illustrious career as quarterback of the 1957 freshman football team at Cal Tech, which compiled a perfect record of 0-5, I acquired an appreciation of the art of quarterbacking. So I was eager to see the results today when I learned that Sports Illustrated had chosen the ten best clutch quarterbacks of all time. Coming immediately to my mind were Y.A. Title, Joe Montana, Roger Staubach, John Elway. How would they do on the SI list?
Chores Editing chores for the review this morning. Rejected two plays and two essays. If one of the plays gets tightened, as I suggested, I'd take it. I like much about it. Almost caught up with the slush pile.
8/04/2006 01:51:00 PM |
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Thursday, August 03, 2006 This and that The last time I opened the Army screenplay mentioned below was Feb, 2003. I printed its 40-odd pages and read them -- like the characters and a good situation developed but I have no idea what ending I had in mind so it's all invention from here on. I'll see what I can do.
The update DVD for my NYer collection is finally ready for pre-order, bringing it up to last April. I think I'll let my subscription expire and just read the DVDs a year behind.
8/03/2006 03:11:00 PM |
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Anniversary On this day, in Berkeley in 1959, I joined the Army. Since I was raised in a Navy family, this became something of a family scandal, though my dad understood my behavior more than my mother did. I joined the Army because it was 3 years, not 4. I joined because I was broke. In fact, I was living in a tree house I'd built near the cyclotron in Strawberry Canyon. Each day I hitch-hiked into Oakland to talk to military recruiters, timing this so I could get a free lunch ticket at a restaurant nearby, often my only meal of the day. Otherwise I was supporting myself by stealing a fat technical book at one bookstore and selling it around the corner at another. You might say it was a mixed-up period of my life. I was 19 and lost, having learned that I couldn't become the Pure Mathematician I always thought was my career. Even though I published a number theory article as a sophomore at Cal Tech. I met too many people far brighter than I was. My destiny was to be a practical mathematician or, God forbid, an engineer. I wanted none of that. I wanted a more cerebral, independent way of life. I wanted to get paid for brooding. No wonder I ended up a writer.
Better to join than be drafted, I decided. The recruiters were all saying put up or shut up by this time. I had talked to everyone possible and taken every possible test I could take. The Army recruiter stuck me into the Army Security Agency because I had a few years of college and he had a quota to fill. A blessing! I ended up going to the Army Language School in Monterey and becoming a Russian linguist in Germany with a Top Secret Codeword security clearance. I was a spy. Yahoo!
The Army was an amazing experience. In my outfit of about 100 linguists, only 3 of us didn't have a Masters degree. Typically a linguist was someone who was 25, on a PhD program in the humanities without a deferment, about to be drafted -- and so joining the security agency to avoid being a foot soldier. I had 97 big brothers who were bright, interesting, great to hang with. They were always giving me books to read. It was the most intense educational experience of my life, more than Cal Tech, my prior schooling, and more than grad school down the road. The Army! Amazing.
Shame on me for not writing more about this experience. This is about to change. I'll begin with a screenplay I started some time ago, see if it still registers with me. And there's a very funny dark comedy of a novel in this material, too.
8/03/2006 10:33:00 AM |
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Energy Feeling good this morning! Perhaps because I've been rereading some recent work and really like it. Perhaps because I heard from a reader looking at Kerouac's Scroll and she loves this man's book. Perhaps because the weather has turned warm again.
This morning I'm donating more screenwriting books to the university library. I've given them 100s over the past several years! Talk about a good screenwriting section! Well, I get so many in the mail to review, what else do I do with them? Early on, I sold them to buy other books. Better to give them to the library and write it off on my taxes.
I've decided to return to my screenplay based on my Army experience. See if I can finish it. Also ready to print out the first part of Sally (again) and look at it carefully before moving on.
Ah, getting ready for some camping. First of the season. What about our annual Idaho trip? Not sure when we'll do that -- after Labor Day, maybe. Or maybe I'll grab the dog and do a quick trip myself. The major purpose is to visit Dick's mom in the rest home.
Time to get to the university and start the chores of the day. A good day it's shaping up to be, too.
8/03/2006 07:44:00 AM |
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Wednesday, August 02, 2006 Deadline met Managed to write my review this morning. I don't like reviewing books I don't care for but there you have it. A deadline is a deadline. I like reviewing screenwriting books because it keeps me up to date in the field -- and now and again I find something I really like, such as Aristotle's Poetics for Screenwriters. I then give the books to the university library, which is building a tremendous screenwriting section.
8/02/2006 01:18:00 PM |
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Front burner Significant work done on Sally early this morning. Have restructured the story into three parts, and I finished drafting part one. Onward.
Meanwhile, today I have three books to review for Creative Screenwriting magazine, which will not be an easy one to write since I'm not wowed by any of the books, all of which have to do with developing character in a screenplay and all of which read like psychology textbooks.
8/02/2006 07:19:00 AM |
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Tuesday, August 01, 2006 Varmints II Looked over my libretto -- and I like it. I love the ending. After double-crossing one another galore, the gold-seeking varmints are attacked by Indians for digging up ancestral bones and most of the varmints are killed.
(MUSIC. The scene is washed over in red light, heat and fire.)
QUARTET OF THE DEAD
Every lout deserves A proper death With oratory, song Even a prayer Though a life be full of lies A corpse is nothing to despise It doesn’t hurt too much To sing a hymn
CHORUS OF DEAD MINERS
All I ever wanted Was the best Just like the tycoons living On the hill But pap worked for a small pittance And I got no inheritance Everything I got I had to steal
CHORUS OF DEAD CAMP FOLLOWERS
I don’t want your pity Not a smidge You can stick your pity Up your arse We navigated with our wits Scratched out a living bit by bit Your husbands always picking Up the check
COMBINED CHORUSES
When you’re dead there’s nothing To be done It doesn’t matter what you Have to say When the next wave comes around We’ll be rotting in the ground Quite without a mem’ry Of all this
QUARTET OF THE DEAD
All day blood flowed deep Into the land The very land that offered All the gold And only two of them survived And managed to escape alive A poet of the west, A broken man.
(Red lights fade. SPOT up on McGuinness. At last he has his cigar.)
MCGUINNESS
Never have I seen such a massacre Never have I seen so much blood The Indians showed little mercy They fought as if fighting for their Soul
I awoke to horrid cries and screaming I was too afraid to wander down Staying on the floor, I feigned death Feigning death, I somehow stayed alive
For months I thought I was the sole survivor Until I saw an item in the press Hiner had obtained his fame and fortune In London, called the Poet of the West
(CROSS FADE to Miller, fully buckskinned, in London as the Poet of the West.)
MILLER
I sing of the West and I sing of the greed that makes a man act outlandish And all for the lure of Oregon gold — that's Oro Oregono in Spanish. Into the deserts and mountains they come, like hornets swarming to honey. They sacrifice home and family and friends, and all for the greed for money. They dig for days and weeks and months til blisters turn to stone. As hard as ore their hands become, and muscles 'round their bones. A nugget here! A nugget there! Nature lures them well, And so they dig and dig again, how long we cannot tell. They found his bones in a deep long hole across the desert sand. His hand clutched 'round a sterile stone, a pick ax in his hand. But here's the telling mark, my friend — though the stench was strong and vile, This miner felt no grief or pain — his lips were in a smile! And in the desert sand beside the grave wherein he sprawled, In careful printed hand, this very message had been scrawled: 'Yes, a sinner rotted here, whose greedy smile has vanished, Who lusted after Oregon gold!' — that's Oro Oregono in Spanish!
(Off Miller, back to McGuinness.)
MCGUINNESS
But I had trouble sleeping every night I could not share the truth of what I saw The stench of burning flesh remained with me The screams became the chorus of my life
For a while I thought I would recover I would learn the meaning of all this The meaning seemed to be a constant trembling The meaning seemed to be the lack of sleep
The meaning seemed to be that gold is evil When it consumes a man’s very soul But how can greed be evil when so common? Who would have the will to deny gold?
The meaning seemed to say that sometimes living And staying in this world is worse than death
(CLOSING MUSIC. McGuinness joins the quartet of the dead, as …)
NEWSBOY
Extree, extree! Read all about it! Massacre in Canyon City! Indians on the warpath! Extree, extree!
QUARTET OF THE DEAD PLUS ONE
We are the dead
Our rotting flesh The buzzards’ treat Killed because We dug for gold And found instead Ancestral bones
Arrows from The savage bow Rained upon Our weary flesh And struck us down Our scalps removed An honored prize
Mourn for our Disfigured souls We are the dead
(All the other characters come out.)
FULL CHORUS
We only went Where greed will go We only sought What greed will seek Since greed is good We’ve done no wrong
We are the dead Who did no wrong We are the dead Who did no wrong.
Remember when ... ? ... something you bought lasted forever? Cranked up the 40+ y/o Coleman camp stove, unused for over a year, and it fired right up. Also put up our small tent, the traveling tent, and nothing amiss. Ready to hit the road at the drop of a hat.
8/01/2006 02:42:00 PM |
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Varmints I see at John Nugent's blog that he is getting ready to orchestrate Varmints, my libretto based on my play of the same name, having finishing composing the principal motifs. Moreover, he strives to make this his best work yet. More power to him! I hope the libretto lives up to it. Libretto (draft).
8/01/2006 10:40:00 AM |
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The Wayback Machine Here is an extraordinary resource!The Wayback Machine, which accesses old versions of websites and even those no longer online.
For example, here is my original screewriting/playwriting website! Screenwriters & Playwrights Home Page. The entire site isn't here apparently (the error message says the links haven't been indexed) but you surely can get a flavor of the scope of the original site. I'm going to have fun playing with this.
8/01/2006 08:33:00 AM |
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"Universal access to human knowledge" The most radical aspect of the Internet is its offering of free resources. At the center of this are sites like the Internet Archive that organize and codify a growing collection of materials, providing what amounts to a free library system online. For example, here one can find:
_The Writing Life