Wednesday 2/12/25
Ambrose Bierce was given the moniker "Bitter Bierce," which I always thought was unfair. Bierce cared a lot. That's why he said what he said as much as he did.
Chances are, the Pulitzer Prize means the opposite of what you think it means. I say this on account of the inevitable virtue signaling--"I got it! I got it! I got the seventh grade-level symbolism! I'm one of the good ones! What time will my cleaning lady be coming tomorrow!? Did those landscape guys seriously forget to trim that bush by the fence!?"--that followed from the Kendrick Lamar halftime performance.
Made me think of David Brent reading one of his poems--"Excalibur"!--with its cliched, splattered-across-the-nose symbolism and asking Dawn if she got the double meanings.
Is anyone dumber than an American who goes in wanting to be fooled?
Junot Diaz also won a Pulitzer Prize. How are we feeling about him after that recent prose off? Yiyun Li was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize. How are we feeling about her after that recent prose off?
Someone said to me, well, maybe Li used to be better at the whole writing thing than she is now.
Nope. There is no better, there is no worse with these people on account of their dearth of ability, which makes for an unvarying result--then, now, in future, whenever. They are working with nothing and they don't really work at all.
What don't you get? And if you're unwilling to accept what you eyes so clearly tell you, what are you doing and what does that say?
We will have another prose soon featuring a racist who was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2024.
I've been listening to the Shirelles sing with Little Richard repeatedly of late and am floored each time. I should write about this performance. I think I will. That, recordings made by rock and roll bands at high schools, and a guide to live garage rock recordings. I'd planned to do an entry on here about the latter, but I'll see if I can do something else.
Also have an idea for a piece on songs that would've been perfect for the Beatles to cover on BBC radio in 1963, but which they didn't. There's one song in particular--by a girl group--that may have numbered among their best performances if they'd only done it.
People have terrible memories. But when there's something they very much want to be right about that they are not right about, all of a sudden they act as if they possess complete eidetic recall. They cannot compartmentalize. Emotion--and often anger and a defensiveness that stems from being wrong and in the wrong--which are two different things--overrides their thinking. They don't think. They are bleating at that point.
You could write them a letter calmly spelling everything out. You'd have to make the time to do that. But you couldn't have a productive conversation with them in that moment. Would you want to try later? Their hostility may have deepened. They may be more entrenched in what needing to say what they are wrong about. They can be factually wrong. They will simply make things up. They possess little mental discipline.
Mental discipline is that which allows us to say, "Okay, this thought goes over here, and this thought goes over there, now let me walk over and ponder this idea, and now that I've done that, I'll walk over and ponder this idea, and I keep space between them so that I may see each all the better for what it is."
Mental discipline. People do not have it.
A thought: Were someone to caustically rejoin, "How does it feel to be perfect?" which is something they say when someone else gets many things correct which they get wrong, what I would say--knowing the spirit in which they meant these words, and that they don't mean literal perfection--is "It makes for a bad time, actually. A very bad time. A bad and lonely time."
Being wrong is an opportunity to get something right and do it better.
That does not strike me as a bad thing, but rather a good one. People do not view being wrong this way, and double down or create distance or cut someone out of their life. Why? Is an opportunity to get things right and do better not a good thing? How is that not a good thing? So what causes their reaction and behavior? Hurt feelings? To a degree more than a person can take? Are we really that weak?
I see many posts from women pretending to be writers--as so many people do--in which they issue this ostensible statement of warning, which is really all about something else, and say that if you come into their life, be prepared to be written about in their fiction! It's this combo threat and boast at once. Women are the ones who post the likes of this remark. If it were men as well, I would say that. I am simply saying what is there to be seen.
That's not how it works. If you are "fictionalizing" your life, you are not writing stories because in order to write stories, we must invent. This seems to be an idea lost on just about everyone--whether it's a woman like this, or the hordes and hordes of "writers" in and coming from MFA programs.
I can't think of a more basic, fundamental idea than that you need to invent, but that's a mind-blowing concept here, going by how few people do it or have any inkling that that's how it has to work.
From the Happy Mondays' "Wrote for Luck":
I wrote for luck, they sent me you
I sent for juice, you give me poison
I order a line, you form a queue
You're trying so hard is there anything else you can do?
Well not much--I've been trained
I can sit and stand and beg and roll over
I don't read, I just guess.
Effective, pithy, telling, prescient. The "I just guess" part may be said to refer to what I've called the "ass voice" in these pages.
I wrote pieces on the 1941 film The Devil Commands with Boris Karloff which is based on William Sloane's 1939 novel, The Edge of Running Water; 1962's The Brain that Wouldn't Die; and 1932's The Mummy.
A sports op-ed ran in the Chicago Tribune as well as a piece looking at seven horror films that make for apt Valentine's viewing in Bloodvine. This was a fine piece which I undertook with the intention of including it in a book of either writings pertaining to horror across the disciplines of art, film, music, literature, and television, or else a book of just my horror film writings. I never write anything at this point unless it is also by design for a book as well. Those specifics can be figured out, but that's always the mindset. I wouldn't write it if it wasn't for a book.
Bit better effort on the fitness front but still not good enough. Walked six miles and did three Monument circuits on Saturday as well as 100 push-ups; another 100 push-ups and 5000 stairs at City Hall on Sunday; nothing much to speak of yesterday save 100 push-ups; and then another 100 push-ups and 3000 stairs yesterday morning again at City Hall.
Sunday marked 3136 days, or 448 weeks, without a drink. Incidentally, I've ran 455 circuits in the Monument since August 15. I mention this here because that's likely as close as the number of circuits since then and numbers of weeks without a drink are going to get to each other.
Yesterday morning I also wrote an op-ed on the Beatles' "In My Life" for Valentine's Day which I'll be unlikely to be able to move.
More work on "Hero of Mine" after a few days away from it. Now we're getting there. The story must create a spell over the reader. Get them in its hold--its sway. There are spaces in stories--all kinds of spaces, which doesn't have to mean gaps--and you need to decide how you want to use those spaces. This story requires a legato through-line, these strips of light across those spaces so they're there but also like they're not there.
Further work on "Friendship Bracelet"--the first page again. Someone could ask how am I possibly still working on that given how much I've worked on it and how outstanding it is, or was. And spent much of the weekend working on "Still Good," the story about the woman in her car in the remote parking lot shooting videos of herself.
Saw a post from a woman in which she wrote, "Ugh, this man will not let me ghost him. He wants to talk about my problems and feelings…so weird being in a healthy relationship."
I click on the bio and see that she's "neuro-spicy." Of course. I wonder how that relationship will go. It will probably be healthy and awesome and long lasting.
Self-awareness basically no longer exists. Everything that we do and almost all that we construct is to put distance and barriers between ourselves and self-awareness.
A disappointing performance Monday night from the Boston College men's hockey team who lost 4-1 to the BU Terriers. I'd say that Eagles coach Greg Brown is no Jerry York. I thought he was out-coached last night, which is what I thought in the National Championship game last spring. BC struggles in this tournament. BU doesn't. BC just beat all of these good teams--including BU twice on a weekend home-and-home series--but they get into that Garden in early February and they falter. BU made a goalie change and that's been paying off for them. They've become a dangerous team.
BC has struggled all year--as they struggled last year--at the face-off dot. You can't be starting without possession of the puck as often as they do. I don't know what's going on there. They should be able to win more draws. They get killed in that department. They'll lose twice as many draws as they win. A shift is only so long. You are making the game that much harder for yourself by losing draws like that. You're boiling off a lot of a shift and your chance to score while spending time and energy attempting to gain possession. Face-offs aren't a small thing.
Downloaded a number of albums: Bear Family's Ernest Tubb box, Walking the Floor Over You, Mosaic's The Atlantic New Orleans Jazz Sessions, Frank Sinatra's twenty-one disc The Capitol Years, a concert by A Certain Ratio from Groningen in 1980, The Sarg Records Anthology: South Texas 1954-1964, George Harrison's The Apple Years: 1968-75, the Grateful Dead at the Fillmore Auditorium 11/19/66, King Crimson's The Complete 1969 Recordings, the Arctic Monkeys bootleg, Acoustic 15, Green River's 1984 Demos, Woody Guthrie's My Dusty Road, The Harry Smith B-Sides (it's a collection of the flip sides of all of the records from Smith's An Anthology of American Folk Music), Django Reinhardt's Djangologie, and The Last Shout! Twilight of the Blues Shouters 1954-1962.
Was watching a tape of a broadcast of a baseball game from May 1982 between the A's and the Red Sox at Fenway--a game of the week kind of deal. Bob Costas was on the call Sal Bando and and he's notably better than what he was in the last few years when he'd do a few postseason games.
It was refreshing, too, to hear how much franker both announcers were than what you'd hear today. At one point, they just pick apart Cliff Johnson's game. Rickey Henderson did his thing on the base paths. This was his season of 130 thefts. There's something about seeing a game at Fenway from this time period. People went there for baseball. It was its own experience. There weren't phonies and selfies. Norm could have been in attendance before heading over to Cheers.
Jalen Hurts is a game manager. Do not be fooled into believing he's something else. The Eagles were a strong team--Hurts is a system quarterback, not a player who elevates a team. The Eagles' lines won them that championship. And the running back. Championship success isn't sustainable when your running back is your best offensive player. You can win once. Most teams can only win once no matter how they do it/build it.
Sports history is full of all of these teams that won that people and "experts" all talked about as teams that would be winning more titles and have a bunch of them when it was all over. The Mets in the 1980s were like this.
I find myself reassessing the radio program The Six Shooter with James Stewart. I've been listening to it for the past couple of weeks when I go to sleep. I balk at the idea of Stewart Britt Ponsett character as some legend-in-the-making, which is the show's premise, or as if these were the greatest hits of a legend.
Ponsett is actually pretty ordinary. He doesn't do anything remarkable. We are with him nearly the whole time in these episodes, so we feel like we know him, and we don't understand why everyone knows of him as this legend. That's a sticking point for me.
But, if you get past that, the show is solid. The serious episodes are better than those that are lighter in tone, as a general rule. I recommend starting with an episode like "Cheyenne Express" to gauge one's interest.
Ponsett is off-screen for the opening sequence, which is well-written and well-produced from a sound design standpoint. That's Barney Phillips on the narration for that scene. One of the great character actors of radio. He's one of those guys in everything. People less familiar with radio will know him as Haley the cook in the "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" episode of The Twilight Zone.
Got a haircut yesterday morning (there's a lot of time in a day, isn't there?) Said a barber to someone else or others who were there (I couldn't see from where I was): "It's one thing to get hit once or twice, another to be chocked out." I suppose that's true.
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