Wednesday 3/2/22
Nine o'clock in the morning now. Went to bed at 11:30 last night, up before five. Worked some more on "Desilva"--added about 250 words. Worked on "Darkness Within Darkness," which should probably be totally done now. There might be like a tweak of a word or an alteration in where a paragraph might start, so I'll read it again in a while. Then I wrote a feature for JazzTimes on the 1986 film, Round Midnight, which was excellent. I will put it into The Root of the Chord: Writings on Jazz's Essential Power and Artistry, along with that Coleman Hawkins piece I had mentioned. Now let's go run some stairs. This is how you are going to beat these people. All of these things in tandem. So keep doing them. I will say this about The Root of the Chord: first off, it's the best jazz book ever written. So there's that. Secondly, it's a perfect book for right now. All of this lip service is paid to race, but why do we so infrequently turn to these artists? Why do we know next to nothing about these great artists? What could be a better time to address that? Thirdly: the book is about the art of the jazz "heavies," the Hall of Famers, if you will. It's perfect for beginners with this music, but it's also perfect, because of its unrivaled knowledge, for the most devoted, longstanding fans. It's just such an obvious music book to do. Or it should be.
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Ran 3000 stairs. "Darkness Within Darkness" is all done. 1000 words in the end. I feel like I worked on it for a long time. I want to be very clear--clear for history. Spell it out. "Darkness Within Darkness," "The Parable of the Woodpecker," and "Desilva" were all written at the same time. Among other things. Because I want people who read these pages--including people who won't be born for 200 years--to try and wrap their minds around that when they do know these stories.
Still going to go through the second two again, so I'm not technically all done.
I came up with something else called "Don't Be Bitch: A Putin Satire," which is hilarious, but it's so, so, so, so wrong, I wonder if I could even show it to anyone. It's all written in my head.
It's about two o'clock. I'm exhausted. I have two other features to write this week--one on F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel, the other on Jelly Roll Morton--among other things.
Also, I have a stat. Something happened in June 2018. That's when this journal started, and when I began writing the short stories. A lot else got written between then and now, too--Meatheads, Sam, Scrooge. Obviously all the pieces. This journal is a book. That's what's happening here. This isn't some blog. We call it a blog, because that's easier, but this is a vast work of literature unlike any there has ever been. Everything I do is. This is another example. These pages will be between hardcovers, and that work might run to 150 volumes. Who knows? Because I will write this until the day I die. Formally die. Not die as an artist. I think of a piece of shit like Knausgaard's My Struggle, and I laugh when I compare that garbage to this journal. He called it a novel? Call this a novel. I don't care. I don't care what anyone wants to call it. I care what it is. But to give an idea of length: the last year of this journal totals over 1,970 pages in a Word document, and about 600,000 words. Production-wise, this is the least of what I do. As all of these people are against me. It is going to be glorious when I get past them.
Listened to Black Rebel Motorcycle Club's first album.