Thursday 11/19/20
I just finished an op-ed on Beethoven's last six string quartets. It's really strong--I hope it gets to come out. Came up with an idea for a New Year's op-ed, so I'll write that soon--it'll be about running stairs. Yesterday I wrote a piece for JazzTimes on Ella Fitzgerald's The Lost Berlin Tapes, which is a recording from a 1962 concert that was recently rediscovered after having gone missing.
I wrote what will be the concluding story--in terms of placement--in Longer on the Inside: Very Short Fictions of Infinitely Human Lives, called "Meteor People." Feels like ancient history now, but as I documented here, on Saturday I wrote a story called "Fireworks People," which will be the first story in the book. The book starts and ends with stories about the same people, narrated by the same person--a girl in the first instance (well, sort of), then as a woman--at very different points in life. I knew on Saturday that I'd written something one simply does not better, so there was a lot to live up to, but I was certain I would, and this concluding story is everything fiction can be. You could put them together and sell them as an individual work, but again, that work would just be so different from everything else in contemporary fiction.
I had a short story come out in the winter issue of F(r)iction called "Post-Fletcher." It’s about a fellow named Fletcher who is not dead but nonetheless has a ghost for whom he becomes responsible, and the ways in which we say goodbye. One of my fifteen or twenty favorite things I've ever done, which was given an assist by the people at this magazine--they helped make it a better story.
This is Tuesday's Downtown segment, which ranged far--from 16th century masses to a lesbian vampire film to Zeppelin to the finest radio actor this country has produced to Matthew Lewis's The Monk.
I pitched an op-ed to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Stan Musial. 11/21 is his centennial, and you can argue that he had the greatest single season in the history of baseball. I reached out to a publisher about possibly doing a book that collects my writings on jazz, which I've had in mind now for a couple years. A lot of the jazz work I've taken on has been with an eye towards this book--that is, what would work well for it, be effective in book form. I wrote various pieces, too, that I thought might not end up in magazines, but which would work well for this book--like a 6000 word piece on the brilliance of trumpeter Freddie Hubbard.
Mailed my mom her birthday card the other day. Sunday marked 1610 days, or 230 weeks, without a drink.
I'm not sure if the heat works in here. I'm scared to try and turn it on. Can't put it off much longer. I'm pretty cold.
The problem with Wix about updating the site is still not fixed. This means that the News tab has remained stagnant since October 15. So it's missing things like a short story, lots of radio, a high profile op-ed, a couple features. The Books page has also not been updated, which is a a design issue, something thus far beyond my (paucity of) skills, so Meatheads is not there, which is obviously not good. Of course it can be found easily enough on Amazon, but it has to be up where it should be on this site. I'm going to make a list today of all of the problems with the site that need to be figured out, fixed by me, fixed by Wix, or have been reported to Wix and are not getting fixed. I can't put off hiring someone to help me much longer either.
The only things that don't seem to cause me vomit-inducing, heart-palpitating anxiety and terror are running stairs and composing.
