I'm done for the week. Probably. I've been using Saturdays like a swing day--they can be the end of a week, or the start, or both. To think that it was a week ago today that I started "Funny Lines TK," which was complete by Wednesday at 4700 words. This morning I wrote 1800 words towards an essay on The Ox-Bow Incident and its relevance in our age for The American Interest, completing that piece, also from the past week, at 2400 words. I then put another 1700 words towards the second new short story of the week, "Nacho Cheese," which I had begun Thursday--after writing 500 words for two JazzTimes reviews--and is now at 2900 words. Following this I went to the cafe to have a latte and to read for the Edward Hopper piece on his 1943 painting Hotel Lobby that I would like to begin tomorrow. These word counts, of course, do not take into consideration the words for this blog, nor the approximately 10,000 words I wrote this week to people begging them to do their job. Can you ask people to be less hateful, envious, governed by pettiness and resentment? Less in love with cronyism? Probably not. Not yet, anyway. (We'll be getting into specific names with individual posts focused on a single person or a single venue on here soon enough. Obviously, I'm not talking about everyone. The people I'm talking about know who they are. You might want to knock your shit off before you get publicly called out for it.) But Christ: imagine if these people actually had to write and produce every day? Even just produce pure shite. But produce something. What would happen then?
The Buster Keaton "playlist" for the September seminars went over well at the Coolidge. Now I have to get them a bio and I'd like, too, to include some words on what I'll be selling, so to speak, Buster-wise, in terms of what we'll be focusing on with his art. One thing I've always liked about Keaton is how he deals squarely in reality, and yet, whimsy and wonder, the seemingly impossible, are never off the table and present when they need to be. It's a way of seeing the world that children possess, and only the smartest of adults, though some of those adults can help others to see the world--reality--in this way, too. Keaton was large-hearted and broad-souled. For all of the heartbreak and what someone might erroneously term surrealism, Dark March walks over some of the same ground, or its version of that ground, anyway. I tend to detest surrealism, because it's usually human-less. We don't call Alice in Wonderland surreal because it's too human. Even if we don't talk to mischievous drugged out cats in real life. Well, maybe we do. But they don't talk back. If you're calling something surrealism that is probingly human--such that it takes us to the furthest edges of our own experiences and feelings, and adds others that are new for us which add other layers through which to view both our old ones and our future ones--I think you're off in your terminology. Surrealism is meaningless crap like Salvador Dali. You should grow out of that when you're out of your teens. Ooooohhh, melted clock. Right. Got it. Moving on.
I ate some old fish from Rockport back in the spring today. Why did I do this? Because I had it and I'm poor. The key with these things is microwaving for a long enough period. That allows you not to become ill.
I sent out a strong pitch last night to the op-ed editor at USA Today to do something on Ted Williams for his centennial on August 30 and how it's cool to want to be something awesome and great and significant and fucking go for it. Enough of this "I don't mean to do a humble brag" BS. Go for it, if you have the ability and faith in yourself. Talk your talk, walk your walk, and let's all compete. Let's have a meritocracy and let's all try to beat the bloody bag out of each other. You don't think if you were Wayne Gretzky or Michael Jordan or Mozart you could not wait to light people who did what you did, much less effectively, the fuck up? Of course! That is a good, glorious time in the pursuit, too, of something that creates value, is value. Ted Williams used to tell people that someday he wished to walk down the street and have people say, "There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived." And he stuck to this. Never backed off of it, would tell you it mattered to him, though he could do it, and then did it. I first read Williams' The Science of Hitting and My Turn at Bat when I was in fifth grade in Mansfield, in January 1987, before we moved to Connecticut the next month. it was the usual thing: I had finished my writing assignment before the others, and I had to wait until they were done, so I read.
I've been a lazy C-Dawg and have not climbed since Monday. I will try to get off to a good physical start for the week tomorrow as well, and also hopefully make it to the Brattle for a double feature of Guy Maddin's The Green Fog and Hitchcock's Vertigo.
And now, to drink hibiscus tea for my blood pressure, watch the Red Sox, and transition into an early start for tomorrow.
