Saturday 5/7/22
A major breakthrough on EU, which I have not formally begun, but it's me, so it was begun a long time ago. They are telling me the story. EU is what I will be referring to this novel as. The letters refer to the two words of the title. I will not be sharing that with anyone until the book is done. I will not be sharing excerpts, I will not be posting any on here. This is mine until it is done. I can't say something like "This is the work of my life," because it's me. And any one of these works would be the work of some other great artist's life.
But certain things mean a certain thing to me. When everything is equally amazing, some things, to the creator of these things, can still feel a kind of special that is just different. No one knows so much as the name of this novel. Not my closest friend of twenty-five years, not someone I've known even longer who has read every story, every piece, and millions of emails. The characters will tell me all. That process has been happening and continues. This novel is going to have a significant impact on me. As much as anything ever has. I've said in this journal that I have this regret--which is misleading, because I am in hell's hell, so regrets don't even register given what everything else is for me presently--that the characters I come to know, who tell me their stories, cease being a daily part of my life quickly. They're always with me. But it's not the same as when we're together, in the work. I can do everything so quickly now. That's part of why I always have to have something else, because I'd be heartbroken if I couldn't turn to others. But then our time is short.
C.S. Forester remarked that Flaubert was the only writer he could think of who probably had his main character before he knew what she was going to do, in Emma Bovary. He spent time with her. He had her. Do you understand? Or, I should say, she had him. He'd tell you the same thing. And Forester adds something like, "Before he knew what she was going to do." I had these characters and I knew a certain amount of what they were going to do. Now they're telling me more.
More work on "Moony and Swoony."
Here's something amazing and unprecedented: Twitter gave me a Blue Check Mark. That's not what's amazing. What's amazing is that in the history of the platform, there is no one with so few followers--there's no one close--who has the Blue Check Mark. They had to give it to me, though, because of my success and where I have it, despite the blackballing. Usually the people who are given one have 80K followers, 800K, 2 million. I have 200.
One sees what we're doing here? This is science. I am proving what is happening and why via science. Because you can't be in the places I'm in and be followed by 200 people, unless you are me. Thoreau called it "absolute greatness." Remember? The public demands an average man. Then he goes on to say that one of greatness--especially absolute greatness--has the biggest problem. I am living it. Now, there's no one who thinks anyone is smarter, more entertaining, knowledgeable, interesting, etc. No one thinks that. Stronger, more moral. That no one thinks that, and because those things are so obvious, is the issue. The total absence of parallelism. It's not in my head, it's not paranoia, it is being proven and re-proven again and again. This latest development on Twitter is just another form of clinching evidence which no one can deny. Everything else has been boiled off, and we are left with this one major issue, which is the really the only issue, in which everything else can be slotted into sub-groups: But the problem is absolute greatness.
I wonder if one can understand what a nightmare that is to have as the problem of your life that makes your life a hell worse than actual hell? What drives the worst nightmares? It's how twisted they are, right? What is more twisted than this? What do I do, get worse at everything? Learn to suck? But that's pretty amusing: 200 followers and they had to give you the Blue Check Mark. Twitter's expectation, of course, is that it's impossible to be in any of the places I'm in, and not have a huge, huge, huge amount of followers. And it would be--if it was literally anyone else alive. This is not conjecture. This is fact. There it is. One can look it up. Actual fact. And truth, too, obviously. This is factually what is happening to me. One person, in the world, is being shunned, discriminated against as no one has ever been, because they possess qualities, virtues, that no one ever has, which everyone can see. And there isn't anyone who can say that's not exactly what is happening. Not with all that is out there, in terms of the work and who this person is, and also all of the evidence, such as the above.
This is the problem to be solved. How to get somewhere--how to get everywhere, really--while being this way.
I even have people I'm in business with--in theory--set against me and trying to sabotage me. There was a very long entry I wrote over the course of yesterday and this morning that discussed one such outlet, and there will be some collateral damage, as it touches on someone I do like and am fond of, which I took down. I have the emails as evidence, I have screenshots as evidence, documenting how they behave completely differently towards every other person they are in business with. I have all of the evidence. Things remarked to me that one would not believe. Unfortunately, I have to offer this outlet the projects I am completing that I will put in one package. That will be the last chance to dance, before I do what I'd have to do, if it goes that way, and that will be ugly and public and it will be impossible for anyone to see what occurred for anything other than what it was. Again, science. I have the screenshots. When someone else has something come out on the website of a literary journal that no one has ever heard of, which is their only "published" piece in six years, it's celebration day on Twitter, with this individual we are both in business with praising, using the adjectives, the exclamation points. Ecstatic tweeting, commenting, retweeting. I am the only writer at this joint in the kind of places I'm in. There is nothing of mine they will so much as retweet. Not pieces in the highest circulation venues in this country. It's someone standing against me, and I know why, and anyone who knows me, knows the work, reads these pages, knows why. It's the most systemic, specific discrimination there is. My loyalty is to my books. So I put this aside. I continue to prepare the books. Four of the books are done. The fifth is being worked on. You could not have five books more different from each other. Each is a masterpiece. We're talking There Is No Doubt, Longer, Just Like Them, The Root of the Chord, You're Up, You're Down, You're Up. In other words: all female story collection, story collection that invents a new form of literature, Beatles literary book, jazz book, unique essay collection about art. I need to be getting books out. Quickly, regularly, and in volume. That is the top priority right now. So I keep these other things back, while also fully realizing when they would have to come out, and I have to go to war on here. I know what will essentially prove to be the deadline that indicates I have no choice. There is someone I like and admire who could do something about this, who is not doing what must be done, and they know that everything I've said here is true, and they've also seen some of the evidence, which they cannot deny.
I took that entry on Lennon's vocals, and inserted it into Just Like Them: A Piece by Piece Guide to Becoming the Ultimate Thinking Person's Beatles Fan, having retitled it, "Sixteen John Lennon vocals to fall in love with and then only and ever love more." The book is now 64,000 words.
Someone wrote me to say that the bought Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 on the day that it came out. That must have been a fascinating experience. Because you wouldn't have known a lot about the record. You wouldn't have known what to expect. You definitely wouldn't have been prepped for what it did sound like. You'd take the record home--probably the cassette--and there'd be all of this attendant mystery. Total wild card. What on earth would Sam Cooke sound like at a club with a name that enticing? You'd probably have thought he cut it in Harlem. But even if you knew better, the title would have connoted something, right? Whereas, when I came to the record, six or seven years later, I had an idea what I was in for.
Watched Raoul Walsh's High Sierra (1941), which I'll write a piece about as what I call a liminal film.
