This post heralds a … lazier bitch. No, that’s not entirely true … but I am both a more tired bitch than when this blog started out, in 2004 … and am funneling more writing energy into, like, you know, real writing. God, I used to write here with such passion. And it’s true, there are periods in my life—it varies from month-to-month, for various and sundry medical reasons—when the flow of words just won’t quit. When I end posts more out of mercy to the reader than because I’ve run out of things to say.
But back when I was new at this, and shy, terribly shy, I used to write very short posts, if I wrote anything at all. Often I just clipped something clever or particularly awful from the web—but in five years, one would be hard put to find the particularly awful. For all the championing of this marvelous new medium, are we also agreed it’s a giant trash bin, and there was a reason not to give every hateful crackpot a platform—in print?
Now that print is come begging at this wretched portal, so has its authority dwindled, sapping reason itself until we are just a collection of quarreling voices. Nobody on the Left wants to read the far Right, and oh boy, vice versa. We all just enrage each other.
I don’t know why anyone reads me—a feeling I suspect more common to writers than is admitted, for reasons having to do with being the creator of all this stuff, never the reader. You can never come to your own work with freshness and the ability to be surprised. Except for my novel, The Last Time Anyone Was Happy. Which I wrote, in the main, a long time ago, and have recently tried again to sell. Last time out, a while back, I was tripping on the edge of stardom. Time and illness do humble a person, and I don’t remember who my so-influential friends were. But the book is a delight, in parts, every time I reread it. As Salinger said, or ought to have, No laughs for the writer, no laughs for the reader. Of that novel, I am still a reader, because it’s best parts felt as if they arrived from on high. I always say I couldn’t have written them if you held a gun to my head; I read them as they were set down on the page—okay, by my typing fingers—with as much amusement as anybody.
Hell, I was going to write today about something else entire. About why my posts may be interspersed with smaller items, again. Instead, well, just call me the best writer who hasn’t been published in many a moon. I promise to not take out my frustrations upon you, and may even post some of that book.
Anyway, my question for today is: I watched Closer again last night, and I want to know, just as I did the first time, why did Mike Nichols make that turkey. It is a movie that begs an answer.
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He lost a bet? I vote for a book excerpt from you!
This is how slow I am, it took me a while to get it. Lost a bet. V. funny.
I think the fatigue you mention is widespread. God knows I’ve been thinking similar things this winter.
I don’t know if it’s because everybody’s been watching big business ruin the world but still manage to win, or because the web is finally shedding the last vestiges of the personal, idiosyncratic and humane.
Which are also, I might add, the reasons why I read this blog. It’s personal, idiosyncratic and humane.
The more connected the publishing industry becomes, as they flood into every digital market as the offline industry declines, the more disconnected online media becomes. Their aspirations are almost all either commercial or roleplay: to be a ‘published’ writer or editor, the identity, ‘being’ or owning a role matters more than whether they manage to entertain or inform.
They need money to keep up the performance, but beyond that….
I’m feeling rather cynical these days, and rather saddened by the fact that most of the stuff I find interesting to read is decades old, and usually out of print in the UK.
And, irony of ironies, even in the very very few cases where they are available as ebooks, geographical restrictions mean I can’t buy them anyway.
Which is so far away from what I initially planned on commenting that I’ve completely lost my thread.
Might as well stop, then, before I get completely lost in the wilderness :-D
Baldur, Thank you and oh, no, please wander on as long and as far as you wish!
Well I would scold you for being lazy, but that would be hypocritical. And I haven’t seen Closer, so no idea why he made the Turkey. Why does anyone make the Turkey? He wanted a sammich?
But you need to keep writing as much as possible here for one reason, and one reason only. To entertain ME! That shall be your driving force.
Now peel me a grape.