Saturday 4/6/19
At this time--11:40 AM--seven days ago, I did not even have the idea for the book that I am going to finish today. I wrote two and a half more chapters this morning. I am composing at a very high level. This book is something I have not even put much time into this week. More time has been given over--far more time--to the pitches, the begging, the bill collecting, trying to find my way around a blacklist--than this book. Probably as much time has been given over to new entries in the pages of this journal. Yesterday I came up with a new idea for a screenplay, which would be a film involving that Duke Ellington Newport performance, Paul Gonsalves and his life, and Elaine Anderson, the white woman from Boston who started dancing during the beginning of Gonsalves solo. I sent a pitch last regarding Ambrose Bierce and his Devil's Dictionary--speaking of satire--to The Daily Beast, and a pitch to The Barnes and Noble Review regarding the unearthing of a play written by a teenage Orson Welles that features a framing device similar to the one later employed in Citizen Kane, and is a powerful civil rights meditation, a cause central to Welles even at this early age. There was that op-ed I wrote, too, on how the word "rant" is misused these days and in truth used as an attempt to quell critical thinking. I came up with some new NPR ideas last night, pertaining to Keith Moon and Tommy, the misunderstood aspects of Herman Melville for his bicentennial, the guitar duel on the Beatles' "The End," and if Miles Davis's Kind of Blue really is the greatest jazz album ever made. On Kimball this week I think I will do a combo kind of deal, talking about having just written a book inside of a week and what that book is, along with a Stanley Cup playoffs preview, perhaps, and also something pertaining to either Miles Davis or a noir film and book, depending upon if something runs tomorrow in The Daily Beast. Oh--I also pitched The Daily Beast on a piece for the start of the NBA playoffs on how Kyrie Irving is not even one of the top fifteen players in the league but he is an awful teammate and coach-killer and far more of a pain in the neck than he is worth as a basketball player, but how the Celtics--Team Dysfunction--are this year's NBA wild card. I also pitched the Globe on doing something as a kind of literary travelogue for Cape Cod, given that the publication of my Buried on the Beaches: Cape Stories for Hooked Hearts and Driftwood Souls is imminent, with me as a kind of seasoned tour guide providing cool book recs relevant to various parts of the peninsula. Imagine if that guy was not in his prison cell and was out there? Imagine what is going to happen when he gets free? This book might get me free. I don't know. It might not. But something is. Then look out. When I compose at the level I am composing it, I feel like I could pick up a mountain range and balance it on my thumbnail and flick it flying around the world.
More anon.
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