Category: Personal

You will be missed, Dirty. Farewell.

It occurs to me that what with all these posts about my NaNoWriMo novel, some of you might want to read the thing. To you, I say two things:

1. ARE YOU INSANE?

2. If you really wanna read this beast in its current wandery form, in which tone shifts every four pages and I go into nightmarish detail about transferring trains and ordering dinner, let me know and I’ll consider emailing it to you.

Okay, I recognize that if there’s anything worse than a self-indulgent novel, it’s someone talking endlessly about writing a self-indulgent novel. Nevertheless, it’s my blog, and I’ll cry if I want to. Plus, I admit that I just really like seeing that blue bar of woids get longer and longer. However, at the end of this month, while the NaNo novel won’t be done, the NaNo posts will be.

In the meantime: progress today was good. I was getting bogged down over the last couple of days, but I freed myself up, remembered I was writing fiction, not my memoirs, so I could do whatever I wanted. That helped.

So far, this new comment feature is working out well. I’m a little sad, though, that some of the most interesting comments are anonymous. Come on, folks! Leave me some sorta clue! I mean, at least if you’re someone who actually knows me.

Some days, the writing just sucks. Today was one of those days. I’m feeling certain that much of what I’ve written yesterday and today will have to be deleted. But hey, it’s words. I made my minimum total for today, although not my daily quota. Ah, well.

After taking three days off from the novel, writing today was like pulling teeth. I was unsure where exactly to go with the novel, what the next step was. What got me going again was a complicated chain of associations: my main character (again, a proxy for myself) is in a Hindu temple town, so I sent him to visit the temple. This led to a digression into Hindu theology and how bizarre my MC finds Hinduism. And that, in turn, opened out into a long section, still in the process of being written, on his (my) curious religious background, a mixture of New York secular Jewish, California hippie and Chassidic orthodox Judaism.

That should keep me busy for a few thousand words.

So here I am on Day 15, still ahead of schedule, and up over the 50 percent mark.

Almost half way!

The latest issue of The New Yorker has a poem in it that says beautifully something that I have thought for a long time but never quite had the words for. Unfortunately, the poem isn’t posted online, but here it is:

A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. the poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

– Jack Gilbert

It’s Pepero Day, that joyous festival when Koreans buy imitation Pocky Sticks for each other because 11/11 looks like a bunch of sticks, and also because Lotte, the maker of Pepero, hypes it. So enjoy your fake Korean holiday!

I’m still ahead of schedule, still cranking along, although by now I’m pretty sure that this won’t be finished at 50,000 words. As it is, I’ve spent a good 20 pages just getting my character from Goa to Pushkar by train, bus, rickshaw and donkey cart. God forbid he ever actually does anything interesting.