Monday 6/22/20
Okay, let's bang out the Beatles stuff. Think we should start with "There's a Place." Some notes/thoughts for what we ought to get into: the 585 minute session for Please Please Me, Lennon's cold, how his voice actually cracks, the outtakes, the harmony portion, comparison with the Beach Boys' "In My Room," how "There's a Place" is related to "In My Life" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" and also the Plastic Ono Band record (1970); the drumming, Harrison's guitar tone, the BBC versions; the song was a prelude to the head space of psychedelia--we can extrapolate "There's a Place" to Pink Floyd's first album, for instance. It is proto-psychedelia, which no one has ever said. There is a lot to to get into with these Beatles ones, and maybe we should do an hour for each of the four. Give people four hours of amazing Beatles talk, between the four episodes. And we should mention how a lot of this is in the book I'm working on, Same Band You've Never Known: An Alternative Musical History of the Beatles.
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This time I have ideas for back-to-back weeks, to take us out of June. On Tuesday, let's discuss list-making. The value of it, the fun of it. We can talk about it as a concept, and let's focus in on three areas--favorite smells (and why), favorite animals (and why), favorite Beatles albums (and why). I recall spending a lot of time in my head ranking the latter, rearranging, with my favorites list being different than my list for best. And then the Tuesday after, I'd like to delve into something unique in human history. And that is what I have done over the last two years, beginning in June 2018, with the blog and the short fiction. Just these two things, so not counting the essays, the nonfiction, the books like Meatheads, the op-eds. By the end of June, I will be right around 700 blog entries in two years, 200 short stories in two years. The same two years. Together, that totals nearly twenty books' worth of material. I think it is all of a piece. I didn't write fifteen great stories--which would be more than anyone has ever written in two years--and 185 so-so ones. I make works of art like I'm pressing print on a printer. And this is another point of discussion--I believe I am the only person it is possible to know right now in the world. In terms of people you don't personally know. That is, one could not fake who they are, how their mind works, the depth of their mind, the quality of their character, if they are writing the equivalent of ten books or so about their thoughts, their life, their struggles, day in, day out, for everyone to see. Someone out there in society gets in trouble for whatever, and we think that we don't know them, not really, and we don't. What do we see? That person on their talk show, that person giving the occasional interview. If Tiger Woods, if Barack Obama, if anyone you care to name, did what I did with the journal, you'd see who they were, truly, you'd see the quality of their mind, or lack of quality. There is always more to me, and I am more complicated than anyone has been, but I am the closest one can come to knowing another person truly. That's why if something happens to me later, and people want to try to destroy me, they will not be able to--because when people are destroyed, their life is kind of a blank slate on which we can put anything we wish. We don't truly know them. We know polished sound bytes. We know how they seem when they stage manage themselves. You don't know how they think, what is in their heart, head, soul. Frankly, if anyone even had the ability to do this, they would never put in the time. I have done something unique with time. All told, discounting the letters--which is the majority of what I do write, to these evil bigots--I have created, if you count everything, thirty books in two years. We should also be clear that I write this journal as books, as material to be collected and made into books at some point. I am doing what Pepys did, but openly, in view of people. There just has never been anything like any of this, and you see the fiction--five new stories this past week, all made up on the spot. You see "Rain Dried," "Crossing Deer," "The Roll of Words," completely different from the five I just did, which are completely different from each other, and that is the same guy who wrote Meatheads. And then comes the discrimination. People think they know discrimination--they usually have no idea what discrimination can be like. So, the two-year thing for the week after this week. As for the smells, these are some of mine: the sea, cut grass, gasoline, hot road tar, wood fire, burnt smell of autumn, rink, cedar, anything suggestive of Christmas, black coffee, iodine, brush burning. They tend to be tied to the earth and regions and ecosystems I like. Among my favorite animals: beavers (I'm writing that kid's book), raccoons, black racers, snapping turtles, moray eels, barnacles, rock crabs (key figure in Dark March), river otters, abalones, blue jays, copperheads, jelly fish, bluegills, pike.
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