Friday 10/18/24
I'm reading back "Words of Rain" ten, twelve, twenty times, before calling it finally done. It's sick how good this is. I mean it's like disturbing how good it is. And I wrote it. That ending...the most savage human beauty.
This is the letter about to go off with it to some people I know:
Hello, it's your friend Colin in Boston. This wasn't necessarily the story I thought I'd have next, but it's the story I have next, one that is called "Words of Rain." It's among the new additions to There Is No Doubt: Story Girls, which as you may or may not know is being overhauled--or altered, anyway--and worked on extensively and intensely.
"Words of Rain" is among the shortest works in the book--quite likely the shortest--but there are certain things which render the concept of length as suggested by word count irrelevant. I think you will see what I mean.
I hope all is well for all.
I read Jimmy Breslin's "It's an Honor." That was good. The piece is told from the perspective of the man who dug Kennedy's grave. Or that's how it presents itself--that's not really the perspective.
This is the best paragraph:
Yesterday morning, at 11:15, Jacqueline Kennedy started walking toward the grave. She came out from under the north portico of the White House and slowly followed the body of her husband, which was in a flag-covered coffin that was strapped with two black leather belts to a black caisson that had polished brass axles. She walked straight and her head was high. She walked down the bluestone and blacktop driveway and through shadows thrown by the branches of seven leafless oak trees. She walked slowly past the sailors who held up flags of the states of this country. She walked past silent people who strained to see her and then, seeing her, dropped their heads and put their hands over their eyes. She walked out the northwest gate and into the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. She walked with tight steps and her head was high and she followed the body of her murdered husband through the streets of Washington.
This was also good:
Clifton Pollard wasn’t at the funeral. He was over behind the hill, digging graves for $3.01 an hour in another section of the cemetery. He didn’t know who the graves were for. He was just digging them and then covering them with boards.
“They’ll be used,” he said. “We just don’t know when.”
You wouldn't see anyone write nonfiction like this now. They'd just be repeating the same vapid shit everyone else repeats and trying to change the words just enough so that they weren't technically plagiarizing from Wikipedia.
I saw a post where a woman said, in effect, "I just got kicked out of my running group for being sixty-years-old. They said they don't want someone like that."
Despite this being an obvious lie--no one tells you the whole, actual truth in a post about their life--hundreds of people did the "I'm so sorry that happened to you" thing. Why? Because people will believe anything on the internet. They automatically believe anything stupid and obviously made up. What they might struggle with is the truth, because they see so very little of it, and creates this sensation of the deepest animus inside of them.
Imagine that, though? "So, Sally, we're asking you to leave the running group now that you turned sixty the other day, because we don't want your kind."
Chances are, this woman is crazy. Most people are disturbed and all but gone mentally. Rare is the person who is not awash in mental illness. That's just the natural result of what our society has become and how we live now, for lack of a better word. The ways in which we live, the ways in which society work--that is, the environment--result in mental illness. It's far more likely she abducted someone's dog, pissed on someone's doorstep as some middle of the night revenge for a perceived slight and was caught on a ring camera, or was never in a running group.
Also: You can tell--as if you didn't know--how little people read and have ever read in their lives by what they'll believe. The most implausible things but they can't even tell that they're implausible. That they don't track. They lack an ability to be able to tell. And, of course, people are so horny to get in there and white knight or whatever they need to do or say to get a follow back. Our society is so gross and childish and pathetic. It's something to be ashamed of and do something about, but the only thing people do is contribute to making it even worse.
I had a really great talk with my niece Lilah the other day. I had called thinking Grammie--my mom--might have been out with my buddy, Amelia, because Amelia had a half day of preschool. Instead, Lilah answered. Her school was off for parent-teacher conferences.
Well, unbeknownst to me, she had been talking to my mom about how she didn't like school this year because of the teacher. Not that the teacher had done anything wrong, per se, but it sounds more like she and Lilah don't have any kind of relationship. All the kids are just all the kids. Whereas Lilah is someone who wants to have connections. She's sensitive and emotional. She gets stressed. She has a stress ball she squeezes and she asked my sister about seeing a therapist. My sister said why, and Lilah said for her stress.
She's really smart. Taught herself how to read, basically, when she was in kindergarten. Her brother, Charlie, was having his Zoom classes--because this was during COVID--and Lilah sat in the background and picked up reading from what she overheard. Charlie is smart in that he's common sense smart. Lilah is a thinker, a reader. We talked for--as Lilah later said, because she told a bunch of people--sixteen minutes (I was on my walk back from the Monument). What did we talk about? Feelings and changes and school and how she was getting her ears pierced (which happened yesterday).
Kids like me a lot. It's adults, who measure themselves against me, which you can't do, who don't like me. That's when envy and self doubt and feeling inferior and fear takes over. But kids aren't doing any of that. I make them laugh, I ask questions, I give out some bits of advice that no one else can give them. She said to me, "I'm in a big period of change"--that's how she talks--and I replied, "Well, Lilah, you know what they say: The only constant in life is change. And by that standard, among others, you're someone who is super alive, which is a good thing."
She liked that. I was talking to my mom a couple days later and she told me how Lilah had been down when I called and then she just brightened so much. But we have a problem because no she wants to be known as my buddy now and everyone is trying to switch titles! If we start doing that it will be chaos. I must be firm.
The Boston College football team had looked like an improved operation earlier this season, but now they resemble what had been the norm during the last coach's tenure. Lots of mistakes, turnovers, unforced errors. The quarterback play is dismal. They were stomped by Virginia Tech last night and kept coughing up the ball as if they were doing so voluntarily. You can't be a part of a competitive football game that way.
Looks like the Mets have gone as far as they're going to go, but you never know. Taking three in a row, though--which would include the series' final two games out in LA--is a tall order. They're getting crushed in these games, which I hadn't expected. Figured they'd lose the series but it would go six and there'd be some tight games in there. But, the carriage usually does turn back into a pumpkin. Was also surprised that the Guardians (stupid name) clawed their way back and avoid going down 3-0 last night.
Watching their studio show, it's apparent to me that Alex Rodriguez is a fake person and Derek Jeter doesn't like him very much. David Ortiz gives you nothing except that you can say, "Oh, look, it's Big Papi." He doesn't offer any insight. Jeter sort of looks unhappy to be there, which makes me wonder why he's there. I actually wonder that a lot. Like Brady--why does he want to broadcast those games? Is that fun for him? Is it something he wants to be good at? He's not invested in being good at it. I can't believe he's enjoying himself. He's not awful, at least going by the one time I heard him.
I feel like Ortiz should have something for the viewer, but he doesn't. I've heard him talk about what was going through his head as a hitter in certain situations in other contexts. He'd say, "Okay, I faced this guy a couple before, and he got me out with this backdoor slider, and I knew if he got two strikes against me he was going to try it again, so I was waiting on the pitch," etc. But maybe he can only provide insight when it comes to his own experiences. On this show he just comes off as this "That's my boy!" ex-teammate-cum-fan.
I see a number of author photos simply because of the need to supply images for the prose offs and Everything wrong with publishing series of entries in these pages. It's amusing how old those official author photos usually are. Which is fine, if the person looks the same, more or less. But they never do. How they look now is much worse. It's like there's only one direction you can go in physically, and that's downhill, which, of course, is not true at all. But you have to try. People who try are people who are apt to try in all areas. Or many, anyway. People who don't try in a given area of their lives are people likely not to put much effort into anything. Just like these people put no effort into writing well. They simply collect what is undeservedly given to them. And use those author photos from ten, twelve years ago. Maybe go for a jog? Maybe try and write something that someone might actually have a reason to read? You also shouldn't have more chins than the number of things you've ever honestly earned, either.
Downloaded a number of those Lucinda Williams cover albums, a Beck, Bogert, and Appice live box, bunch of Pogues sets including a 1983 gig from the 100 Club, and some Sex Pistols box sets.
The first fifteen minutes of Them! (1954) is a perfect quarter hour of horror. It suggest to me an elongated version of the opening of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943). Differences being that it plays out in different places (down the road from each other) and at different times (day, then night). This is from a piece on the film that I wrote this morning:
Edmund Gwenn is on hand, which tells you this is a classy affair, not just some “Let’s squish those bad bugs!” atomic-age, super-sized insect monster rumble. A pre-Gunsmoke James Arness shows off some early acting chops, but it’s the foreboding mood that is the main character; unrelieved tension, until the very last. Director Gordon Douglas treats the movie at first as if it were a mystery—an ecological whodunit, because we know that no madman could have been responsible for this level of destruction. The sugar is a deft touch. If you can make an ordinary household item creep out your audience, you’re doing okay.
Big bugs tend to detract from critical acclaim, which is why The Thing from Another World has always been talked about as the superior film between these two early 1950s stalwarts, but Them! makes for an altitudinous anthill to surmount. The sound of the ants is arguably the most disturbing noise—an eardrum bifurcating fanfare of advancing ecological hell—in all of horror cinema. You don’t even need to see these guys to be terrified of them, given that they’ve already overran your imagination.
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