Buy in

Saturday 9/6/25

More mortar but a tidy morning--thus far--and I will touch on yesterday morning, too.

Further work this morning on reworked "Dead Thomas." Something else, fix-wise, came to me in bed last night. A case of "There it is, that's it." Has to do with tenses at the start. Time periods. Do later/how it became first (which meant the reinstatement of an altered version of what had been the very beginning), then get to what actually came first. It's like the movement of a half-step inside a step. You're setting something within something, but not too deeply.

Actually, it's a lot like stairs. Different planar fields, which are still close but clearly separated. It also establishes normalcy. Status quo, as per the narrator's perceptions and those of her peers. Treat things normally. "Whoa! This is so crazy! Don't you think, reader?!" doesn't work. If you establish convincingly that this is how things are, you don't have to bother with saying, "See how markedly different this stuff is!" Make buy in, if you will, automatic. Make buy in in media res. Rather than this big gate through which the reader must pass as if as part of an ostentatious ceremony. The reader will go along with things, and won't help being able to go along with them, and won't know they're going along with something, just that they're there, too.

Then I wrote a piece on the 1944 film, The Return of the Vampire.

I finished pieces on 1932's White Zombie, 1943's Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, and 1953's The Tell-Tale Heart.

Yesterday I wrote and placed an op-ed about how watching football can kill you. That will be out next weekend. Actually, the idea came to me and the piece was essentially written within a fraction of a second on Thursday afternoon as I was checking out at the Golden Goose. That's pretty typical. Then I formally wrote the piece yesterday morning.

After that, I walked to Charlestown and did five circuits of stairs in the Monument. That's eleven consecutive days. Obviously I'm going to try and take this to the maximum number made possible by this quirk in the schedule.

Wrote two letters this AM as well. And downloaded a number of bootlegs of Miles Davis's Second Great Quintet from 1964, 1966, and 1967.

Got a ticket--which is free with my membership--to the MFA's exhibit of Van Gogh's Roulin family portraits for later today. The exhibit closes tomorrow.

Made a nice little spooky reading packet of H.G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe stories from pdfs that I printed out.

Those piano and Pharoah Sanders box sets from Mosaic arrived.

Read through quite a few of Dick Latvala's listening notes for various Grateful Dead shows and years.

Located a copy of Dmitri Merejkowski's Tolstoi as Man and Artist.

Peyton Tolle got crushed last night in his second start for the Red Sox. Hoping to stay up late enough tonight to see BC take on Michigan State. We'll see. I have stairs to run, miles to walk, push-ups to do, the museum to get to, as well as Trader Joe's and Haymarket, and I should finish rewatching Henri-Georges Clouzot's Les Diaboliques for a piece I'm writing.