Howl At The Moon - on Monday Night

The deal was supposed to be a Toy Drive. I was supposed to bring a draw- fans with me- to get toys donated. So, on a Monday night, the day before Christmas eve, my fans are supposed to go to Universal City Walk, pay 10-20 dollars for parking, bring a toy so they wouldn't have to pay a 15 dollar cover and buy a 10 dollar beer to watch me sing for a 30 minute set (which I was told when I signed on was going to be a 45 minute set.) Anyway, it was fun. My son went with me and did the video. We were looking for the place which was on the second level above the City Walk and he pulled it up on his phone to find it and the web site photo looked like it held three hundred people. I started to hyperventalate a bit. The bar could hold maybe a crowded 100 people. The act before me came to get my CD and said they loved me. T

This is a marvelous book!

Bird

It was passed from one bird to another,
the whole gift of the day.
The day went from flute to flute,
went dressed in vegetation,
in flights which opened a tunnel
through the wind would pass
to where birds were breaking open
the dense blue air -
and there, night came in.

When I returned from so many journeys,
I stayed suspended and green
between sun and geography -
I saw how wings worked,
how perfumes are transmitted
by feathery telegraph,
and from above I saw the path,
the springs and the roof tiles,
the fishermen at their trades,
the trousers of the foam;
I saw it all from my green sky.
I had no more alphabet
than the swallows in their courses,
the tiny, shining water
of the small bird on fire
which dances out of the pollen.

Pablo Neruda

Styron and the lost prize

So, with Christmas and with War and Peace over, I read Sophie's Choice in three weeks. I was Stingo, I had lived in a small apartment in New Orleans, exactly like the apartment described in the book- different city.. I had upstairs neighbors I was friends with. Sophie sat in my apartment and talked to me. The book is lovely, real and I couldn't put it down Styon is troubled always. I could not watch the movie for a good year and a half because that's not how Sophie looked. And the apartment wouldn't have looked like my apartment. The Confessions came shortly afterward. I can recall finishing the book at a little hotel on Geary Street where I moonlighted (actually daylighted- I was working graveyard full time at the St. Francis Hotel)) as a morning desk clerk and was brought to tears and got all choked up behind the desk in the empty lobby of this little hotel.

You should read all of Styron. I plan to. I think I have three left. There's still plenty of time

 The books let you know how troubled he was. The photo makes you realized what he overcame to live.

He shoulda won a Nobel. 

Been neglecting this blog again- sorry

Owe you guys Styron, but until then

Art is conversation. You can sit in your room and talk to yourself, but what's the point? Some people get paid for talking. Some even get prizes. If you don't start the conversation, who's gonna start it? I do it because I love to hear myself talk. But you have to listen too.

 

I wrote the above in response to a Facebook posting about art. I left out the part about how I started talking to prevent myself from being self-destructive and as a reaction to a crazy non-communicative father who abused all of those around him. Laughing is more fun than crying.

The Longest Novels -leaving out the asians

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_novels
The Longest Novels

I have read Atlas Shrugged, but to be honest I did skip quite a few pages of John Galt's speech at the end, as I did in Hugo's tome.

This is Balzac. It could be said that this might be the longest novel ever written.

Page from 1980

So this is the page of my reading record from around 1980. My arrows reflect the three books above as real big time keepers. I probably had been reading War & Peace for a while. I tend to read more than one book at a time. I was living in San Francisco and after my daughter was born in August of '79 we had settled into a small apartment just behind the St. Francis Hotel where I worked. I can recall reading it out in the rooftop patio area that some of the tenants had put together. It was windy up there most of the time but there could be good days.

I was working graveyard at the St. Francis and moonlighting as a Security Guard at a bookstore a couple of afternoons and later working at another hotel. Cynthia didn't go back to work after the baby was born. We had no money. I think that 1980 Christmas we found a twenty dollar bill on the sidewalk and made that our Christmas fund. I got cardboard and wrapping paper and made us a Christmas tree. I can recall immediately after the baby was born, I'd walk the hill back home in the morning, and sit on the front stoop and smoke for a half hour before going up. It was overwhelming, but I got through it. We used to take long walks around the hills pushing the stroller. I'd make runs to Sears on my motortcycle for more diapers.

The book is very long and if you put it down for very long it's hard to remember who is who. It's mostly Pierre's story. (Henry Fonda in the early movie version) I had a hardback copy with a list of characters and their relationships. It was the Maude translation. I don't think I've read anything but the Maude translations of his books.

Tolstoy creates a world, populates it, makes it breathe, and will take you places you have never been and will make it visually part of your memory. This is a sweeping thing of a book. More of a history than a novel. Two or three months of devotion will take you there. Even the talk of ideas a bit later on didn't bog the progress. I took to skipping great sections of Hugo and Melville in their digressions of ideas, but not Tolstoy. As I am writing this, I'm thinking about Anna Karenina, Resurrection, Hadji Murad, Sevastopol, etc. All better novels. One should read it if one is doing Tolstoy. I have always considered him one of the top few. Flaubert belongs with him. I've finished all of Flaubert, still working on all of Tolstoy.

Working graveyard always gave me extra time to read. Having that luxury is great boon. Wikipedia says its really the 16th longest novel ever written. There no other ones of the long nature that I've completed. I only have managed the first two volumes of Proust's. Only the first book of The Tale of Genji, and only the first of the Story of the Stone.

A movie version to watch first might help with orientation.

This was our mayor then.

I can recall Cynthia beginning to critique my writing style then and we did comparisons of those authors I loved and my own work and I began to realize that certain principles had to be learned and applied. That was the beginning of the pursuit of the perfect paragraph and seamless prose. She always felt as if she was smarter than I was because she had finished her bachelor's degree. We decided later to move to Arizona so I could go back to school to get a degree in writing.

All through this period I was writing regularly on a long book about a drunk printer in New Orleans that went on and on and had just a little plot and a lot of where nothing really happened. I think I ended up with a 60,000 word first draft. Then I was going to rewrite into a Joycean structure like Ulysses except base it on the 12 labors of Hercules. I never rewrote it. I didn't know it at the time, but I needed to learn about dramatic tension- which Tolstoy has plenty of.

Oh and we had a cat, Herbie (Herbert Gold) that would sit on my desk in the evening when I wrote in long hand.

I'll get to Styron next time.On the same page, there's Langer & Pound- worth reading for understanding it all.