Friday 7/3/20
Total focus, no mercy, matchless art. That is the mantra here now. Keep it going. Keep the pressure on these people. Getting closer. Rip it. And remember: A revolution impacts many, but it can start with one something. You are more than enough.
I just completed the 2500 word Charlie Parker cover story. So that was done this week. There was the Beatles pod on "There's a Place" taped Monday (we're actually doing a fifth episode, so in July there will be five hours of me talking Beatles), the radio interview about the writing on Tuesday, the two short stories composed ("August Autumn," "Taffy and Grilled Cheese"), and the 2000 word piece for The Daily Beast. This new JazzTimes piece on overlooked Blue Note musicians was published. Ike Quebec. Blue Mitchell. Curtis Fuller. Tina Brooks. I covered forty-one miles on foot between running and walking; this does not include the many thousands of stairs that were run, or the sprints on the field at Alumni Stadium.
It feels like ancient history now--I think I wrote it the week before last--but this is what one reader--an author and long-time professor--had to say about "Slung Stack."
"Complex characters are what drew me to fiction as a way of telling the truth and evincing humanness. Great writers like yourself create and inhabit them while with so much of what is published today the author condescends or mocks his or her stock stereotype 'characters' for cheap and fake pseudo emotional impact that leaves me flat. Reread 'Slung Stack' while waiting outside my eye Drs office and damn I think it is fabulous. If great jazz is often about the notes you don’t play and the spaces between them, that story is Monk, Armstrong, Miles and Brubeck all in one. Melodic with tight meaningful leitmotifs that make one fine session. Seems to me that revealing without a 'reveal', if that makes sense, is true genius."
What more can you want? I shared this with Sy Safransky of The Sun, said it would seem that this is exactly what anyone would order up if they could, work fitting this bill. But it is not about the work.
Next week--which begins in mere hours--I will do better. Also, it's time to expose more people on here. Christina Thompson of Harvard Review is a logical next move, so I will show people what she's about and how things go down there. As discriminatory and fraudulent as they get. Ladette Randolph of Ploughshares is quite similar. That one is coming as well.
Anyway. It'll will keep. I'd like to get this Nate Brown/American Short Fiction entry up here, too, but I'm still at work on it--it's quite a tangle of people and corruption. It's taking a while to write it all. Like I said, I am thorough, and I make sure I get it all right.
Total focus, no mercy, matchless art. Say it again. You are not losing to these people.
This is a mirror. More people should try looking into them.
