Think of the milking

Thursday 6/13/24

Been listening to recordings of Michael Hordern reading the stories of M.R. James when going to bed. These have grown on me. He reads them very well.

Speaking of Michael Hordern: When I've done good work and am about to head out to run stairs, sometimes I'll watch an episode of The Wind in the Willows, the 1980s British TV program. It's a work of joy. There really aren't as many as one might think. My favorite television show.

An interesting way, perhaps, of thinking about baseball: If you went back in time and took a baseball fan from the 1950s and brought him or her to the here and now and got tickets to a game, how do you think they'd like it? Conversely, if they took you back with them to return the favor before you returned to our current year, how do you think you'd like a game in 1955? I think after watching both games, the person in 1955 and the person in 2024 would be in agreement as to what they thought and liked best. For whatever that's worth.

There are surprises in life, certainly--it's the nature of the thing--but there are so few surprises from people. We get life surprises, but not many people surprises.

I do surprising things, but people expect surprises from me, so what does that mean?

If someone drank heavily, daily, for twenty years, and then stopped completely, no problem, that would be surprising. But with me, the doing of that would not have surprised anyone. Similarly, no one asks how I'm doing with that, if I'm still doing it, or anything at all. Not, "How do you manage to do that with your life being what it is right now?"

If I were someone else, much would be made of this, inquiries would happen, praise would be issued, melodramatic encomiums would be the norm. Attention would come my way on social media, which I would play up, seek, and try to capitalize on, with, say, a column or a book deal and a Substack blog with 200,000 subscribers full of shitty writing about my battle. I could pull an Emily Gould. If I was someone other than who I am.

Think of the milking. "I fought the temptation last night." "I had to check myself into an expensive clinic." Then anything I did of any substance and quality would be a great surprise. But me? I don't surprise people because I am constantly surprising in what I am and what I can do and what I do.

But yeah--no one even asks. "How are you doing with that thing? I know how hard things are right now." No one would ever ask me that. Those are words that would never be said to me. What does that say?

I've been making a study of the versions of "Dark Star" from 1968 and also the Grateful Dead's first forays into acoustic performance at the end of 1969 and early on in 1970.

I want to look at the page and see mathematical and architectural perfection. To see the equations behind and beyond what everyone else sees. I could point it all out. If you took the first page of "Finder of Viewers" and asked me to speak to you about this design and what I mean by these things, I could show you how much goes into it, all of the choices that are made, why they're made, and the nature of the math, the architecture, the physics of the thing. I want to see this form of this word here, at this coordinate, and this other form of that word there, at a different one. See that balance. All of the accordance. Words and letters have angles. It's like sculpture and there is one perfect way to get it. That others cannot see what I see unless I show it to them doesn't matter. But it is because of this design--among other things--that the work is doing what it is doing with and inside of the person who is experiencing it.

Worked on "By Water." It's at 3500 words.

Other works of joy: Powell and Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale and A Matter of Life and Death.

Two excellent audience recordings: Cream in Detroit 10/15/67 and the Who in Toronto 12/11/75.

Listened to that Vaccines Jo Whiley session half a dozen more times, the Strokes' The Modern Age EP, and the Nightfall episode, "Baby Doll."

Nightfall can be ridiculous. In this episode, a guy wants to get his wife an anniversary present--though they don't care for each other very much--so he goes to an auction in like this warehouse by the waterfront. Because that's what one does when one wants to get a gift for one's spouse--the ol' waterfront auction (run by a woman who may or may not be a witch).

At this auction he gets her a doll because she's childless and he figures this will provide her with something to do and give her an outlet for her "maternal instinct." No one at Nightfall ever said, "That's too implausible!" but rather like "Tell me more!" There's an element of Child's Play, which had yet to be made, with that idea of buying a toy in the shadiest, least likely of places.

Writers for Nightfall peppered their scripts with the words "damn" and "goddamn." They cut loose with it. Someone will say "damn" three times in a sentence in this normal setting where no one would use it once. "Will you pass the damn salt for my damn dinner that I'm having at this damn table!" I can imagine a producer reading over an initial draft of a script and saying, "Nope, not enough damns in here! Fix it!"

It's an unintentionally funny episode. The guy has a friend named Loomis, who is that type of friend who fancies himself this worldly guru that a wife is apt to think is leading the husband astray with his counsel, and for some reason Loomis has these "come on, man" type lines though I think he's meant to be like fifty-five (but we also learn he passes out in the couple's guest room). Nightfall is weird. Things never quite come together even in the best episodes, but all the same, one like "The Porch Light" is among the scariest in all of radio.

Downloaded Songs of the South, a collection of field recordings made by Alan Lomax during 1959 and 1960, and Artur Schnabel's cycle of Beethoven piano sonatas from the 1930s, which was the first complete recording of the works. Also downloaded the Bobby Fuller Four box set, Never to Be Forgotten: The Mustang Years, which contains one of the first great live rock and roll recordings with a set from LA in 1965.

I saw where a woman wrote, "I believe in Jesus," which is like saying, "I believe in George Washington," or George Wendt, for that matter. Yes, there was that guy.

I find that most people have defeatist attitudes. That that's the standard setting.

People have no problem being with someone who would usually be thought of as physically out of their league. They'll think, "Hooray for me." But basically no one is open to being with someone out of their league mentally. In publishing, the empty, soulless, and unintelligent marry each other. Nothing crossing with nothing. John Freeman and Nicole Aragi, for instance.

I like when the two Bavarian brothers, Hans and Conrad--or one of them--turn up in a Three Investigators novel. You like how everyone likes each other and also how quickly liking happens. If the boys have another boy with them because of a case they're working on, the term "friends" will be applied as if they're also and automatically friends with the older Bavarian brothers because they're good and loyal friends with the Three Investigators themselves. It's a small thing that makes you feel good.

If meatheads had better taste, I feel like they could select Dizzy Gillespie's "Hey Pete! Let's Eat More Meat" as an unofficial anthem.

Tuesday and Wednesday I walked three miles, did 100 push-ups, ran seventy-five circuits of stairs at the Connecticut gate. On Tuesday a man was trimming the edges of the grass and blowing up a lot of dirt, dust, and pollen which I inhaled. It's the season of this kind of thing.

The other day I saw two guys riding on the same scooter, neither with a helmet on, both wearing masks.

The ice cream man's truck is always in the same place in Charlestown during the warmer months. I don't partake of any of his fare, of course, but I do like seeing the truck. The old fire station is right down the road and a Monument commemorating the locals who were lost fighting for the Union Cause in the Civil War.