J.D. Salinger and my Facebook friends

My Facebook news feed, modest with my 147 "friends" or so, erupted today with the news of J.D. Salinger's death, before I'd even seen the obit on the New York Times web front page, which I check far more compulsively than Facebook. I have never seen this much outpouring of "RIP JD. S." or various quotes from an author's work. I saw one "RIP Howard Zinn" yesterday, which really I don't take too seriously. But to each his or her own. My friends in life and, reflected in that, my contacts on Facebook are a random smattering of the extraordinarily literate: writers, English graduate students, etc. and blue collar/service industry folks, all of whom I share something in common with in my own background. (And of course, my favorite people are somewhere in the middle, like restaurant people with master's degrees.) Anyway, when John Updike died last year, I recall very little in the way of any of my Facebook contacts even noticing. David Foster Wallace got a couple more pings, but only from young writers I know, people in graduate school. I'll admit, a lot of my writer friends are sometimes a bit reclusive themselves and hardly effusive on the social networks, but my point is: people from all walks of life went onto Facebook to spread their grief over the death of this American literary icon today.

And that's what he is, and probably the last one. Kurt Vonnegut or Norman Mailer, both very, very important American writers who died in recent years, and there's dozens more, but I wonder how far their reach really went with "regular people" my age. That is, it seems as though every-goddam-body picked up a copy of The Catcher in the Rye and read it when they were teenagers, and if they didn't read it then, they read it later. I know that isn't true, and that plenty of people outside of the literary discipline have read Slaughterhouse Five, and dozens and dozens of other important books that I have yet to read (for instance, I've never read anything by Dos Passos... it's on my list). But who else is still alive who has written a work of American literature as important to as many people as Salinger? Works in the class of Huck Finn, or The Great Gatsby.

Shit... I just realized that Harper Lee is still alive (and eerily similar to Salinger in her publication record and famed reclusiveness), so really my point is losing whatever slight bit of merit it may have had. I can only continue to brainstorm about who else out there is still kicking (I'm pretty sure I had something dismissive lined up to say about Roth's importance on this scale). If you've read this rambling nonsense this far, sorry to have wasted your time. But I'm going to hit "publish" anyway. It's my blog and I'll rant if I want to. I'm going back to Facebook now.

Just what I needed to hear

Today is a kind of anniversary. When my life began to change quite drastically and suddenly just three years ago. And again I find myself rooting against the Indianapolis Colts. I really hate that team.

This is just the kind of reassurance I need. Sometimes I forget.

I'm going to go watch this game now and hope that the Jets can win without making that bum from USC look good.

What I've been up to

I have been avoiding you. I began writing a post last week after I watched The Hurt Locker, which turned into less of a commentary on the film and more of a paper on verisimilitude in the war movie genre. A sprawling, rambling thesis-less essay with references to Baudrillard and postmodern stuff that I don't even understand. And since I half-wrote that and never posted it, I have been avoiding writing anything else here, for god knows what reason.

I have been doing some work, however. Some good old fashioned Southern fried fiction, which is not exactly the same project that I began when I began this blog, but it's work, so shut up about it. Southern fic is also what I've been reading lately. I read Provinces of Night by William Gay, which is a nice little novel about not much at all but very well written, and A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews which is the most brutal and disgusting thing I've ever read, and also probably my new favorite book ever. I mean, it's got racism, misogyny, animal cruelty, every kind of aberrant and abhorrent human behavior you can imagine, and it's only like 170 pages. I recommend that everybody read it. Or reads it. Is that subjunctive? I can't remember.

And I guess that's all I have to say right now.

Doing the artsy Chicago thing

The wife and I went to the Museum of Contemporary Art this evening, since it's free on Tuesdays. Free is always good, even when it's freakishly weird art. That isn't fair for me to say, though, since they have a pretty good exhibit of Italian art produced from 1968 to 2008. I have a kind of fascination with the year 1968, and it was interesting to see bits of why it was a pretty tumultuous and shitty time for everyone in the world, not just people in the United States, Vietnam, various Eastern European nations, etc. It seems that sometimes I only think about America, Czechoslovakia, and Southeast Asia, and tend to forget about all the other places in the world.

I also created some "art":



I've never really tried to edit video before. It's just a little joke, really. But it was neat to see if I could pull something like this off. I'm going to play around more in this medium. I'd like to try it with something a little better than a cell phone sometime.

As far as the writing goes, I'm getting to that next. This was a warm-up. Late-night seems to be as good a time as any for me to work.

Progress like marching through a swamp

Well, it's no surprise to me that after I went to all the trouble setting up this blog (picking out a template and changing the font from sans-serif to serif took a lot of careful consideration) and then writing that cheerless post yesterday that I am only three pages into the real work. It sort of makes this whole blogging project look like one of those documentaries about all the things that went wrong with something. The dark part of every episode of Behind the Music, where the drummer from Def Leppard loses his arm, or Nikki Sixx dies and is revived just to go home and shoot more heroin, or when Ozzy snorts ants.

If only my life were more like Ozzy snorting ants. All I'm doing is wasting time with stupid things like looking for a job and spying on people on Facebook. This takes us back to attention span, I suppose. I can drum up the energy to blather on here about myself for a couple hundred words, but without any meaningful deadline, I'm at a loss to complete some good work. Day Two, and this already seems like a bad idea. How does one keep the writing going without an arbitrary grading system attached to it?

I guess I could grade myself. D-minus-minus.

I should finish reading this novel that I've been toting around tonight. Maybe I'll write something about it.

Ok, here goes.

I've done this blogging thing before. I always run out of good reasons to keep up with it. I think maybe I have a short attention span, particularly when it comes to my own "creative" projects. There's another site out there with a bunch of garbage I've written which has a very nice little url and its own web hosting which is going to expire at the end of this month. Since I don't have a job, or any good reason to pay for it anymore, everything is moving here.

Except that nothing is moving here, apart from my own brain. Which is ok, since this is an altogether new project.

I began writing a novel this morning at about 3:30. It isn't the first time I've ever begun writing a novel. Or begun something absurd in the middle of the night. I have a feeling about this one though, a sort of optimism that I can't say I've felt before. A sense of internal organization about the project that might actually compel me to get beyond just a couple thousand words. And so I'm going to write on this blog about what I've been doing...not about the content of the book, of course, that would be insane. But to keep up with my progress. And I'm going to tell the world about it and invite all the literate and literary folks I know to follow along if they want to.

I am sure there are thousands of these kinds of blogs out there. People who get big ideas about their art and decide to keep a sort of journal to keep track of what they're up to. Probably most of them end in a fizzled-out pile of ashes, goals and dreams derailed and set aside. Maybe that's where we'll end up with this. But maybe, if I can keep it up, I can produce some interest and energy that will keep me motivated and end up with something better than a half-assed graduate thesis that doesn't come anywhere near being a book. There's only two ways this can go, really. Success, or self-destruction. The story of my life.