Was talking to a twenty-four-year-old woman from Brooklyn. Six foot tall. Beautiful. Looks like a model. Tells me she has a book coming out next year. Uses words incorrectly in her notes to me. I ask with whom the book is coming out. She says Random House. I ask who represented it. She says no one, she had a friend there, and they "looped" her in. She asks what I do. I tell her, but vaguely. She then immediately offers any one of three nights for us to get dinner. She's seeing someone. No real mystery how things get done in her world. Ah, publishing, you vile cesspool of lies where the people in it pretend to care about literature and books that twine with their souls--and the other rot expressed in similarly treacly and insincere phrases --while no one anywhere truly cares about literature less, about reading less, about readers less, or talent, or sanity, or business. I wonder if she's had lunch with Cal Morgan.
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People now use the word "pivot" way too often. They should try to master the difference between "then" and "than," "compliment" and "complement," "have" and "of," and is there anyone who thinks it's "piqued" rather than "peaked?" Ain't a mountain top.
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Sent birthday card to my mother. Have a working garbage disposal for the first time since last year. (Presumably. I haven't dropped anything down it. I don't have any food.) Walked three miles, climbed the Bunker Hill Monument three times. Raw day, but warmer. I can take in great amounts of breath it feels like. This must be the strongest my lungs have been since I played hockey. I plan to work through the weekend. Figuring out what I will be discussing on Downtown for upcoming weeks. Likely will do Longfellow and The Courtship of Miles Standish for Tuesday. Also, the box of recordings from Dylan's Blood on the Tracks sessions and the Kinks' The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society. I need my own radio program. It would cover everything, carrying the show by potency of humor, edge, size of personality, and an emphasis on making everything inclusive and compelling, whether that's chatter about crazy shit Beethoven got up to or the hypocrisy we see everywhere in society or an exciting new film or a Beatles discovery, or we can make it about one thing--art and culture, sports, politics/the state of the world. Then, coming up: a talk about "Hold Until Relieved" in Boulevard, a talk about Edward Hopper, and I will do a segment on this journal and the thinking behind it, and talk of other journals that have some overlap in some ways, and not in others: Thoreau's, Pepys's, Delacroix's, Boswell's, Tynan's. (Also will write a piece on the art of diaristic writing next year.) I am writing into that tradition and past it. I feel l like these journals will be bound up in where I get to, and they will also be agents of change and reckoning. And a cull. This is journal entry #89. I began in June. About 70 entries makes a book. So we are in the second book now. I think the first should be called The Fleming Journals, Vol. 1: Ask a Question and You Present Your Heart. I hope I live to see them all between hardcovers.
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Mookie Betts won the MVP, but it should have been J.D. Martinez. I would entertain trading Betts, as I don't think he has a burning desire to remain in Boston and you might lose him anyway. I'm also concerned that he's a bad postseason player, and he doesn't drive in enough runs. Why does he want to hit lead-off? I think it's because less is expected of him. He's more comfortable that way. And what yahoo gave Chris Sale an MVP vote? And I'm sorry, but Mike Trout is so freaking overrated. A product of the obsession with the new stat wave. Years after he is done no one will look at him like everyone tells you you need to look at him now.
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Was talking to a charming twenty-five-year-old artist today, who was from LA--and UCLA--who had come east, and was working in her studio. Talk of books came up as we discussed what we were each working on, and as I ready myself to devote a full month to composing this volume on Scrooge, the 1951 film, she said that she loved the movie, had seen it often, that it had scared her out of her mind as a kid and was a big part of her cinematic history. Very interesting. A good sign.
The good people at KINO are righting a wrong and releasing 1945's Dead of Night--one of the very best ghost films--on Blu-ray. Mervyn Johns--who is Bob Cratchit in Scrooge--has a central part in linking together the various stories of this omnibus undertaking. He's an architect who comes to a country house to do some work, and finds upon arriving there that he recognizes the house guests from his dreams. It's a very good picture, and not the kind that usually works, where the different segments have different directors.
Been listening to this. It's basically the Mexican White Album.