Tuesday 4/14/20
I'm going to bed soon. I have had a long day. Not long enough. Didn't work hard enough. Didn't fight hard enough. I can work much harder and fight much harder and I need to. Today I read all of Meatheads Say the Realest Things for probably the last time. We are in the stage of finalizing the last galleys. I read it from cover to cover. I fixed/revised two short stories in "Sleepies" and "Skip Shack," and I wrote an entirely new short story called "The Gristers." Black woman and a white woman--coworkers--go out for a late lunch at the end of the work week on Friday. One has something about her kid to tell the other. The other has things she doesn't want to tell about her marriage. The story takes place in that place in time and in other places in time. There's a grist mill in town--basically the town's lone tourist attraction as such, a mild tourist attraction, with the mill dating to the 1700s and features in the logos for all of the schools in town, each of whose team names is The Gristers. "Skip Shack" is as powerful as anything I've ever written. This is a piece on Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus that ran in The Smart Set. I ran three miles, got back just in time, dripping sweat, to hop on the radio and discuss Orson Welles's The Stranger, a bit of The Lady from Shanghai, Bob Dylan, T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," the differences between me and Samuel Pepys, and how I nearly removed the top of my finger the other day in the shower. Where else on earth is there any one doing that on the radio? Who could? And make it all entertaining and edgy and funny. It was nice to read some Eliot on air. I also began an entry on here that will go up later that takes one single writer and shows you how far corruption spreads in this industry starting with just one person. You'll see it soon. Wrote my old producer at NPR, Greg Cowles at the NYTBR whom I used to write for and who now wants me dead and has made it sure The New York Times will not review a Fleming book, and spoke, finally, to my webmaster. Also figured out more of that other work of pandemic-related fiction, "Green Glass Door."
