Friday, April 19, 2013

The Glass Character: an excerpt (the glove scene)




The Glass Character:  an excerpt (the glove scene)

My third novel The Glass Character is a fictional account of a young girl’s experiences in Hollywood from approximately 1921 to 1932, in which she develops a relationship with silent film comedian Harold Lloyd which evolves into an obsession.


The story:

Muriel Ashford, a. k. a. Jane Chorney is working as an extra in a Harold Lloyd movie and will do anything to be close to him. Lloyd's right hand was badly injured in an explosion at the start of his career in 1919.  In this scene, Muriel comes upon him preparing his prosthetic right hand before facing the camera.





One day while I was trying to find a hat I was supposed to wear in the next scene (a hat with a veil, meaning my face would be totally obscured: what a great opportunity for an unknown actress like myself!), I stumbled upon Harold preparing himself to become the Glass Character.

He was usually quite secretive about this, so I was taken aback that he was dressing in the prop room. His character was only half there, still wearing the white pants he often wore on the set. His sweater was off, revealing a hard but hairless chest. Once again, without his glasses, I had the impression of a much-better-looking Douglas Fairbanks: all that was missing were the riding breeches and the self-important smile.

He was at a quarter turn with his back to me, and didn’t hear me at first. I began to literally walk backwards, knowing I should not be there, but unable to stop looking at him. Then, stupidly, I ran into a large metal pole (what was that doing there?), banging my head hard. My scalp began to smart so much that tears rushed into my eyes. At the metallic ringing noise, he started, suddenly turning around.






For half a second I saw confusion, even alarm in his eyes. Then he quickly covered it with his usual smiling graciousness: “No, no, come in, Muriel. (He knew my name?) I’m just getting ready.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean. . .”

“It’s all right, don’t be.”

There was something strange about Harold’s eyes. You couldn’t get away from them. But he was so pleasant most of the time (I had never been at the receiving end of one of his famous explosive tirades) that you wondered if you were imagining it. His eyes tugged hard, drew you in as if you were being pulled on a chain. I gave way to the tug, and stood shyly while he fiddled with his prosthetic glove.

All the while he talked to me in the most flattering way, asking about where I had come from, how it felt to be working in movies, about my aspirations.  I am afraid my responses were stilted and not very truthful. The fact was, I wanted to be Mary Pickford, and fast. This sitting in the background reacting as a choir with two dozen pretty but untalented girls was wearing thin. Most days I did not even see Harold.

While he worked at the glove, which had to fit as tightly as a second skin, I saw what was left of his right hand. I was very surprised that he would allow me to see this, though I knew he did not wear the prosthesis in public, rightly believing that hiding it would only make it more apparent. Oddly enough, maybe due to his magician's sleight-of-hand, nobody ever seemed to notice it.

I had assumed there would be some vestige of thumb and forefinger left, but they were sheared off clean, with half the palm gone. Later I was to find out that the doctors had to keep removing tissue to prevent gangrene.








The glove was hardly just a glove. That was only the part that showed. What held it on was a tightly-wound bandage reaching all the way up to his elbow. At times the edge of that bandage showed just past his cuff, but the primitive cameras of the day did not reveal it. 

When the glove was on, he held both hands out in front of him.

“Quite a sight, eh?” he said, with a little Harold smile. Not a trace of self-pity. There were certain emotions he simply would not harbour.

“So what do you think?” It was an impossible question, even a bit cruel. What was I supposed to say?

“It looks fine, Mr. Lloyd. I’m grateful you recovered so well.”

“Please – “

I knew what he meant.

I fought to get the word out. “Harold.”





He gazed at me a moment with a speculative look. I allowed myself to wonder if he was going to kiss me, or do worse, which seemed to be his way of breaking in new girls. But I knew I was too far down in the pecking order (so to speak) to receive this kind of favour.

“Muriel, would you do something for me?”

In my heart, I said: anything, Harold. Anything.

“Would you dance with me?”

My heart dropped. Dance, as in the razz-ma-tazz contests he and Bebe Daniels used to win almost every night with their fire-breathing versions of the Charleston and the Black Bottom?






“I – don’t know what you  - “

“Like this.” He reached out with his good hand, touched my shoulder, drew me to him very gently.

My head reeled. I could smell his white makeup, the pomade in his hair. He pulled me into his orbit, and propelled me around so lightly that I soon forgot my utter incompetence on the dance floor. I was reminded of Arab sheiks who controlled their steeds with a silk thread.

This close, I could feel his radiant body heat. Harold wasn’t very tall (he had fought as a bantam-weight in his youth), so we were almost the same height, and at one point his forehead lightly bumped against mine.

We slow-danced (as slowly as Speedy could ever slow-dance) for one complete turn around the room. Thank God it was early enough that no one came in.

Then he put me away from him. Did not step back, did not push me, but  put me away.

“Thanks, Muriel. Just wanted to see if I could still do it.”

“You can do anything.” As soon as the words had escaped, I knew I had gone much too far.




(CODA. It's rare to find a photo of Lloyd without his prosthesis, but a couple of them do exist. In this one he is bowling with a custom-made ball to be used with three fingers.)





http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html



Thursday, April 18, 2013

Is it Friday yet?




Though I swore I wouldn't post any more Harold Lloyd gifs, here I am doing it again. I'm making my own now, along with Facebook banners (yes, I am actually dipping my toe back in the poison waters of Facebook) and stuff. And this one turned out so well, after about a billion tries. As the rain teems down - no, not rain, but a sort of solid jelly of water suspended in the air which seeps into every crevice of your being, including your ass - I find I don't want to go out, don't want to hope, but somehow Harold has jumped up again.

I just miss him, is all. I fell deeply in love with him while writing The Glass Character, and never got over it. Nobody else gets it, apparently, or cares. I have this awful feeling that if anyone else had written the exact same novel, tlhey'd be at the top of the bestseller list. There's something about me. It's bad. Karma? Karma always reminds me of Carmen, a girl in Grade 5 I couldn't stand.




Harold Lloyd actually lived. He wasn't a fictional character, so making him into one took some doing. I wanted to capture all the paradoxes, the apparent contradictions in his personality. He came from this hayseed rural Nebraska background and was a hard-working, uncomplaining, roll-up-your-sleeves type, yet at the same time he could step out on the town looking as elegant as any leading man. When he took those glasses off (and by the way, he was the one who invented the term "glass character", though everyone else said "glasses'), nobody recognized him, and far from being insulted by it, he liked the fact that he could go about Hollywood and remain in cognito.

I am in danger here of telling his whole life story. I couldn't, there's too much of it, some of it kind of loony. There is no doubt he was eccentric, and became more that way as he got older. He fancied his Greenacres mansion was a sort of Heffneresque retreat for curvaceous young beauties whom he photographed in the nude (in 3D! Harold was always ahead of his time.) They were all there to sample like so many chocolates in a box. Meantime his wife suffered from loneliness and depression. How much do we pay for fame?




Hmmm, these gifs ain't bad. I spent a long time on them today. For almost a year, I turned away. I turned my back on all the failure, having my work thrown back in my face, or (worse) totally ignored. It seems I wasn't going to make a go of this, after all. The angel cake fell flat, the elation that had lasted a year and a half just died.

So why is it returning now?

I have this relentlessness in me, but I am not sure it is good. It's this inability to give up, even when I probably should have long ago.

I tell myself, look, I proved to myself that I can be published. So that must mean that it can happen again.

Even though this is bullshit, part of me must believe it.




It's not in the cards for me to be successful, or so I tell myself. I had that one little taste (well, two. But as with any peak time in life, did I really appreciate it? I assumed it would be that way "from now on".) But I realize this is just a load of complaining and I have to get on with the task of writing.

I cannot imagine writing another novel, but I couldn't imagine Harold until he jumped into my head. I thought researching a novel would be agonizing, but it turned out to be the most enjoyable part. I wanted to use everything I could get my hands on. Natural curiosity became obsession, the most enjoyable obsession I have ever experienced. 

I could lose myself in that world. My own world is boring and frustrating and I am left with the feeling I will never get what I want. 

But why did I think I could buy my way into happiness with a book? Aren't writers just about the most wretched people on earth (next to actors)? As for success, can't I be just as unhappy without it?

It bears thinking about.


http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html






Spring, spring, it's SPRING!








Spring

NOTHING is so beautiful as spring—




When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;




Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;




The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.




What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. Have, get, before it cloy,





Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,




Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid's child, thy choice and worthy the
winning.

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Gay, but not OK: The secret life of Gerard Manley Hopkins




Oh Lor'! What have I gotten myself into? Gerard Manley Hopkins?

Gerard Man-friggenly Hop-friggen-kins?

Though I suspected it from some of his imagery, it turns out the poor blighter (who stood only 5'2" on his tippy-toes) suffered all his life from repressed homosexual longing. Reminds me a bit of the E. M. Forster book/movie Maurice, though in that version the protagonist eventually consummates his lust with the gamekeeper, a la Lady Chatterley's Lover.  (It seems that literary figures have a certain need to "fuck down"). 




Even  Wiki-friggin'-pedia has a whole section on this. I was enthralled. Even more enthralling was one of his more homoerotic poems, excerpted below. (Believe me, you would not want to read the whole thing.) Several of the juicier poems were un-find-able, likely because they were not published during his lifetime (kind of like that W. H. Auden poem, The Platonic Blow, which I will NOT reproduce here. I do have some standards. You can, however, look it up yourself, you dirty old thing.)




Erotic influences

Some contemporary critics believe that Hopkins' suppressed erotic impulses played an important role in the tone, quality and even content of his works. These impulses seem to have taken on a degree of specificity after he met Robert Bridges's distant cousin, friend, and fellow Etonian Digby Mackworth Dolben, "a Christian Uranian". The Hopkins biographer Robert Bernard Martin asserts that when Hopkins first met Dolben, on Dolben's 17th birthday, in Oxford in February 1865, it "was, quite simply, the most momentous emotional event of [his] undergraduate years, probably of his entire life."


Hopkins was completely taken with Dolben, who was nearly four years his junior, and his private journal for confessions the following year proves how absorbed he was in imperfectly suppressed erotic thoughts of him.




Hopkins kept up a correspondence with Dolben, wrote about him in his diary and composed two poems about him, "Where art thou friend" and "The Beginning of the End." Robert Bridges, who edited the first edition of Dolben's poems as well as Hopkins's, cautioned that the second poem "must never be printed," though Bridges himself included it in the first edition (1918). 

Another indication of the nature of his feelings for Dolben is that Hopkins's High Anglican confessor seems to have forbidden him to have any contact with Dolben except by letter. Their relationship was abruptly ended by Dolben's drowning in June 1867, an event which greatly affected Hopkins, although his feeling for Dolben seems to have cooled a good deal by that time. "Ironically, fate may have bestowed more through Dolben’s death than it could ever have bestowed through longer life ... [for] many of Hopkins’s best poems — impregnated with an elegiac longing for Dolben, his lost belovèd and his muse — were the result."



Some of his poems, such as The Bugler's First Communion and Epithalamion, arguably embody homoerotic themes, although this second poem was arranged by Robert Bridges from extant fragments. One contemporary literary critic, M.M. Kaylor, has argued for Hopkins's inclusion with the Uranian poets, a group whose writings derived, in many ways, from the prose works of Walter Pater, Hopkins's academic coach for his Greats exams, and later his lifelong friend.




Excerpts from The Bugler's First Communion:

Here he knelt then ín regimental red.
Forth Christ from cupboard fetched, how fain I of feet
To his youngster take his treat!
Low-latched in leaf-light housel his too huge godhead.

There! and your sweetest sendings, ah divine,
By it, heavens, befall him! as a heart Christ’s darling, dauntless;
Tongue true, vaunt- and tauntless;
Breathing bloom of a chastity in mansex fine.




Frowning and forefending angel-warder
Squander the hell-rook ranks sally to molest him;
March, kind comrade, abreast him;

How it dóes my heart good, visiting at that bleak hill,
When limber liquid youth, that to all I teach
Yields tender as a pushed peach,
Hies headstrong to its wellbeing of a self-wise self-will!

Ye gods, eh? Shall we count the ways? I don`t really know where to begin. `Knelt`might, to some, indicate a certain sexual posture, a la Monica Lewinsky and her Presidential knee pads. This cupboard thing, I don`t know, maybe it`s just a miniature closet or something. "To his youngster take his treat", well. . . If Hopkins` muse was a 17-year-old kid, the term  "youngster" might indeed apply, but the poet wouldn`t be welcome at communion again any time soon.




"Tongue true. . . Breathing bloom of a chastity in mansex fine. . . `" Oh dear oh dear. I find it hard NOT to think of that as sexual.  The poem even has the word "molest" in it, though maybe it meant something different back then (but I doubt it). "Limber liquid youth"  is just too descriptive. "Tender as a pushed peach" implies all sorts of stuff, or it could. . . pushing "something" on "someone"? And doesn't a peach look just a little bit like a. . .  It just goes on and on.

All this repressed eroticism leads me to a different point. (A more serious one, this time - another hairpin turn).  The myth is that such repression is no longer necessary, that "gay is OK", that there is no need for the closet any more.

This is far from the truth.

If you are gay and come from a fundamentalist family of any stripe, Christian or Muslim or Jewish or Hindu or Sikh, there is a very good chance that your sexual orientation will not be accepted.




You might even be expected to "give it up" as you'd give up a favorite food for Lent. Except in this case, you'd be expected to give it up for a lifetime.

I've heard of those dreadful-sounding Christian anti-gay camps where people "pray the gay away". Young men and women (I presume most of them are young, but I could be wrong) are so contrite and guilty about what they feel, so sure that it's sinful and wrong, that they subject themselves to this anti-gay programming/propaganda. In one particularly repugnant Christian magazine, this was referred to as "healing".




The United Church of Canada is mighty smug about leading the way in gay acceptance, and the percentage of gay clergy is staggering (though no one keeps statistics on these things). Other mainstream Christian denominations are very reluctantly beginning to trot like lambs behind them, just beginning to "look at" issues like gay marriage.

So what do I think? We're in a weird place right now, somewhere between Gerard Manley Hopkins with his suffocating chastity and Oscar Wilde's galloping promiscuity (which, tragically, ended up landing him in prison). We don't know what to think. Celebrities have pushed hard to make being gay not only acceptable, but chic.




And yet, what's one of the worst epithets you hear in schools, particularly high schools? "He's so gay." "That's the gayest thing I ever saw." And so on. Not so accepting, is it? We wouldn't pretend to extend civil rights to everyone, and in the next breath say, "He's such a nigger."

This is a sick, confusing society, and I am sick of it. It's getting harder and harder for me to be happy in it. To some degree, unless you totally turn your back on it, you have to get along in it and within it. That means giving up a part of yourself, compromising. How much does that cost?

Certain poets knew.



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What in Christ's name does this mean?






The Starlight Night

LOOK at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! 
The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there! 
Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes! 
The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies! 
Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare! 
Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!—
Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.
Buy then! bid then!—What?—Prayer, patience, aims, vows. 
Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs! 
Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows! 
These are indeed the barn; withindoors house 
The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse 
Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.


So what does the poem mean?

What means this bizarre double-jointed curvature, this sharp hairpin turn from fireworks "ooooooohs" and "ahhhhhhhhs" into the kind of heavy and even suffocating religiosity that leaves me completely kerflummoxed?

I don't know much about Gerard Manley Hopkins except to say that when he became a Jesuit, he burned every poem he had ever written. Thus perhaps some of his best works were relegated to the ashcan.




He's the one who wrote about depression, that Carrion Comfort one that I find so harrowing, to the point that I think he must have been a true sufferer. But why must everything in Hopkins be Christified?

The poem starts off very much like an innocent Robert Louis Stevenson verse for children, a "how would you like to go up in a swing" sort of thing. But there is a sort of urgency to it, as if we'd better look now or we'll be too late. It seems to tug and poke at us, hey, take a look up there, look at Casseopeia (which I can NEVER see - I am the poorest of visual discerners and can't tell one bloody constellation from another). Then comes a flood of almost-precious elven description right out of Lord of the Rings. Cockle-shells and dingle-bells. Except that, because it's Hopkins, he can get away with it. It's a surprising, even shocking quality, the art of verbal daring.





Fire-folk sitting in the air, why yes, that's a line any poet would kill for. Quickgold: that's perfect, isn't it - why didn't anyone think of that before? The air swirls with magic, you can see your breath, you're shivering yet too warm, your companion's hand is like ice in yours. Yes, you're there, transported, borne up like a downy feather (take THAT, Gerard!) as the constellations wheel drunkenly over your head.

Where I go off-course is in the line, "Ah well! It is all a purchase, all is a prize." What can he be getting at? Taken literally, it makes no sense at all. Purchase what? Prize what? Does he mean we have to earn the right to get into heaven, so to speak - heaven represented by the rapturous star-filled night? Is immortality a kind of lottery, a spiritual 6-49?




Buy then! bid then!—What?—Prayer, patience, aims, vows.

I don't know if he's talking about "buying your way in", trying to bribe God (good luck!), or the cheapness and crassness of reality compared to the gasping celestial vision. It's one of those weirdball Hopkins-ian things that makes you want to toss the book across the room.

But then he gets back to the "look, look" stuff, which by now is getting a little old (can't help but think it!) in spite of the "Maymess" (a word I really thought *I* had invented) and the "mealed-with-yellow sallows".




But then come the strangest lines of all.

These are indeed the barn; withindoors house
The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse
Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.




I don't know, this grounds the poem with a thud, steals all its magic. Hopkins must have had some sort of a thing for Christ, and it's weird. When I first read this startling thing, my reaction was "what"? These are indeed the - barn? And what are "the shocks"? Kindly explain yourself, poet.

I can only guess - and I am really guessing here, because this is an odd thing that doesn't make much sense even after a lot of analysis - that he thinks of the heavens/nature and all that jazz as "housing" Jesus and Mary and all those holy folk who to him represent God. Or does he glimpse the holy/eternal in and through, are those starfolk sitting in the air little glints of God, God's little birthday candles maybe?

Is the universe just God's skin?




I might be reading more into this than I should. Hey, maybe I'm smarter than he was, or at least less obscure. But there are things I don't like here, words that may or may not be used for jarring effect: "barn" (barn? Haven't we just travelled to the farthest reaches of the universe? Why use the image of an outbuilding that is basically full of shit?); "shuts" (an awful word, implying "shut-in" and even "shut up!); "spouse", a sort of creaky word referring to one's life partner - oh, that's creepy! Oh, that's creepy! Is he married to Jesus, or his mother? I guess "espouse" can mean just believing in something. Or something.

Or surrendering to it? Oh God. I was never one for surrender, though in certain circles (does the term 12 Step Program mean anything to you?) it's considered the highest achievement.




And that word "hallows" is not one I am comfortable with either - all hallows eve, hallowed be thy name (which for some reason always reminded me of the inside of a pumpkin, that punky smell). So he throws in some language which could not be more at odds with the dazzling fluidity of those first few lines. What of buying, selling, bidding - what's he on about? Maybe it would be better to stop at Line 7. Can the Sunday school lesson; just dazzle us.


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Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Justin Bieber and Michael Buble have a stupid contest








We don't need Justin Bieber to remind us how inane celebrities can be. Not only that - they actually go on the record with it.

Claiming the legendary holocaust writer Anne Frank would have been a "belieber" (and does anyone under 50 even know who Anne Frank was?) is just the tip of the iceberg. This guy has no street smarts at all and has not thought it through in any area of his life and/or career. Why do I get that sickish creeping feeling that all-too-soon it will do him in?





But soft: what's this? Michael Buble has been around a long time now - he has almost 20 years on Bieber -and he's STILL saying inane, stupid things and everyone goes "selah, amen,  give me a ticket" because he's a "star". 

This is only an excerpt (because I can't stand the whole thing, and besides, this kind of sums it up) from an interview that I found particularly painful. I've got nothing against singers who can mimic a sort of melange of Sinatra, Torme and Vic Damone and bilk seniors out of their pension money. I just wish they'd THINK before they open their cavernous tonsil-baring singer's mouths. 









Singer, songwriter and lifelong ham, Michael Bublé lives his life through music. Through the ups and downs, breakthroughs and breakdowns, the 37-year-old, one of the world’s most recognizable artists and host of Sunday’s Juno Awards, has grown (up), thrown (up) and blown (up) (parentheses mine) to a soundtrack. While pop music fans await the release next week of his new disc To Be Loved, with tunes by artists including Randy Newman and Smokey Robinson, Bublé recounts (one of) the singles that have kept him comfort through his radical changes.





Seasons in the Sun, Terry Jacks, 1993

“I’d turned 18 and was working on my father’s commercial salmon fishing boat and we’d sing that old Terry Jacks song. At that time, I wasn’t thinking about melody or voice, I was having fun. We’d sing: ‘We had joy/we had fun/we had salmons up our bum/but the pain was too strong/because the salmon was too long.’ I thought that was hilarious — salmons up our bum! It was silly and stupid, but what do you expect? I was 19.”


(Salmons? Is that sort of like trouts or basses or pikes, or other assorted fishes?)





On his other interest, family life: 

 “Even though I’m in love with my new record, I have bigger fish to fry. In a few months, I’ll be a first-time dad and that means everything. I’ve waited my whole life for this and when I see my wife next, the first thing I’ll do is sing to her belly with my little boy or girl in there. ”

Boy salmons or girl salmons?






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Sunday, April 14, 2013

True confessions: is fiction really fiction?




So how much of "me" is in these stories? My three readers want to know (or not). Sometimes, *I* want to know, myself.

It's hard to unwind, unplait the strands of what actually happened (which is sometimes hard enough to decipher) and what was woven and knitted up to fill the gaps and holes. But it's never made up out of whole cloth. How can anyone write except through their own perceptions? These strenuous denials by authors who insist NONE of their real life ever spills over into their work are pure bullshit.






I think it's the rushing groundwater of emotion that always floods through, the rampaging cascades that dominate all our lives, whether we want to admit it or not. My work is emotionally driven, and sometimes I think the fiction I've presented here is nothing but "reaction", a character squirming and writhing and squirting squid ink in distress. (And that's another thing. What is a story? A story is something going wrong. If everything went right in a story it would be a crashing bore, and not even a story because nothing would happen. Is the same true in what we so chucklingly call "real life"?)






I've always had the impulse, even the need to "make story", but it's rare that I can keep my careening emotions and hairtrigger reactions out of it. The first novel I tried to write - it makes me wince now - I guess I thought it was publishable because I sent it to 65 publishers, and nobody would give me the time of day. Most didn't even read the manuscript but hated the outline so much that they immediately fired off a form rejection, with all the force of that cow being fired over the castle wall in Monty Python's Holy Grail. I finally understand why (I read about half a page of it recently and mentally barfed), but what scares me is that at the time I was SURE it was great and was going to get published and make me famous.

It was too much about me, probably, my wretched reactions, though the characters were either totally manufactured or heavily disguised. Each character narrated their part in first person, a technique which is as deadly as a ferret latching on to your jugular. So: failure, but other things came of it. A very wise writer once said to me, "When you're sending out your first novel, make sure you're writing your second one." This was advice that saved my life.







When I wrote Better than Life, I wasn't in it, not really, but so many of my ancestors were: they were given a twist of course, but the essence was there, all these half-cracked Irish people feuding and drinking and generally carrying on. And it worked. Took a while to sell it, but someone wanted it. What happened? Did it improve the novel's chances that I wasn't "in it"? 

I have had the experience of becoming so desperately in thrall to writing a novel that I felt like I was being dragged behind a wild horse. This was exhilarating and frightening, and though there were (I suppose) some good ideas in it, I reread it now and shudder a bit. What was happening to me then? I wasn't eating or sleeping much, and my thoughts sometimes became very peculiar. Strangely enough, I do not believe I am in that one at all, not even remotely. It's all about people living in the Downtown Eastside, and I've never been near those circumstances. Nor did I show up in the next one, The Glass Character, though I think I identify with the main character (who is not, after all, Harold Lloyd, but a woman named Muriel Ashford who is so obsessed with him that nowadays we might say she was stalking him). 





The emotions, the blissful agonies of obsession are things I know too, too well. I have lived over half my life in my imagination. I don't know why this is and it isn't enjoyable and it isn't even "creative", unless we're talking about Dylan Thomas' frightening view of creativity:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
drives my green age
That blasts the roots of trees
is my destroyer

Yes, and other things: reading about the wretched genius Oscar Levant (speaking of obsessions - we WERE speaking of obsessions, weren't we?), I came across a couple of quotes that I've filed away with the good ones: "What makes you, unmakes you," playwright George S. Kaufman stated, and Clifford Odets, victim of an Orson-Wellesian too-early success, added this thought: "Success is the jinni (genie) that kills."





Yes. Gives you three wishes, grants them, then utterly destroys you. Or is it this way? It's granting the wishes that kills you, like someone poor and illiterate winning 6-49. Or is it the wishing itself, the scrambling around for something "better" and never being satisfied with what you have? Is it the human agony of always wanting? Of consuming, of eating and buying and taking in and taking in, hungry, hungry, always hungry? Why can't we rest, why can't we just be? All this meditation crap is just playing at stillness. We'd have to stop breathing to really be still. 





So we are left with the maelstrom, the bucking and heaving, the scrambling and never having, as years pour through our hands and the ground dies under our feet.


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