Looking at the squib below, it occurs to me that "I fell off the Rock of Gibraltar"

scans perfectly with "My Bonnie lies over the ocean."

A propos de rien.

Dream Journal 3/30/13

An odd snippet this, in the little piece of sleep grabbed occasionally between the 0400 dog-tending rise, and a more sensible (0500) time to engage with waking life. It involved a farm conveyance of some kind, with a flat bed and a steering wheel mounted ahead of the bed, with a hand throttle and brakes that made the front wheels turn hard left. We (a wife was present, and though I don't remember getting a good look at her, I'm pretty sure she was my real wife) were promised a gleaning opportunity in some farmer's cornfield. We started out in the whatever-kind-of-wagon-it-was, confident that we knew where the cornfield of interest was. In the first leg of the trip out, I rode on the flatbed and the wagon seemed to propel and guide itself. Then I discovered the controls, down and in front, so I mounted down there and drove. I turned it down a dirt road and realized I had no idea where we needed to be going. The road was through woods and we came upon a group of kids - adolescents and pre-adolescents, say between 10 and 14 - I don't know how many of them; mixed boys and girls, perhaps a dozen of them but again not sure because I don't remember actually seeing them in the dream, more overhearing their conversation. Then I saw a car, perhaps a 1950s or 60s station-wagon but not identifiable as to make or year, with a large treelimb on it, roof caved in, windshield broken. I'm driving this wagon/tractor conveyance and I hear one of the boys saying to one of the girls something about "I'm a full-grown adult male and I don't need..."

It was at this point that my dreaming self started getting a little lucid and realized that whatever was going on in this dream, it wasn't going to wind up pleasantly. Then the five o'clock alarm went off, and rather than hit the snooze, I was glad to be rescued from that particular dream.

How odd that I felt that way; nothing bad or threatening had happened, really, but the dreamed components of that particular setting and circumstances made my dreaming self uneasy, and I was glad to be out of there.

I'm told by Wikipedia today

that there's a cave on the Rock of Gibraltar that's named after a guy who discovered it after he "fell off the Rock." Fell off the Rock of Gibraltar.

Imagine...

I do, from time to time, get on genre kicks on my Netflix queue

     Recently I've watched "Invasion Of The Body Snatchers" (the original with Kevin McCarthy - terrific flick, really, if you can put yourself back into your 1950s self; that's true of all of these titles and no doubt explains tons). The other night I watched "It Came From Outer Space." Last night "It Came From Beneath The Sea" and tonight "Beast From 20,000 Fathoms."

     "Beast" and "Outer Space" share a Ray Bradbury connection, and I'm looking forward to savoring Ray Harryhausen's work in "Beast." I'm contemplating  the 1953 "Invaders From Mars" which scared the bejeezus out of me at about 7 years old (when it was new) and might even revisit "Them" just to see all the later-famous/now-dead TV stars (Fess Parker, Jim Arness, James Whitmore, and Leonard Nimoy is even rumored to have an uncredited role, but of course he's not dead yet, is he?)

     I saw these movies when they were new, and of course I've seen them on TV a zillion times since, and corny an crude and primitive as many of them are (I've only mentioned the cream of the crop, but I include all the really low-level stuff like "The Mole People" and maybe even "Plan 9 ... ") they never cease to entertain, probably because they never cease to return me to Saturday afternoon at the Bing Theater, anytime between 1952 or so, and 1955, my earliest memories that don't directly involve my parents, my earliest memories being "out & about" with pals (always with one or two older pals, my brother being five years older which is why we were allowed to walk up to Sumner Ave to the Bing, or to the Phillips at The X).

Since there's no meeting of my writing group tomorrow, I've been a little lax

in my writing this week. I'll have to stop that (then I'll be ex-lax, - rim shot). However, something has been rattling around in my head for the last couple of days. It is, I guess, a notional equivalent of an earworm.

A bit of background: while I've been working on the shed in my backyard this fall ("the bahn" as I've described it to John), one of the delights it has afforded is to have NPR blaring from my boombox all day long on Saturdays & Sundays. Two of my especial favorites (beside Car Talk & Prairie Home Companion) are "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" - the news quiz, and "Says You" which is a word-focused quiz-cum-folderol chance for people with big vocabularies to show off.

Back in September sometime, in connection with a series of puzzlers called collectively "You're so smart...", a question had to do with the "speed of dark." In fact I believe the question was "We all know the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second (or thereabouts) - what is the speed of dark."

Well the official answer was a bit of a letdown, being something along the lines of "dark doesn't have a speed, it doesn't travel because it's the absence of light." Fair enough in terms of physics, I guess, but philosophically, this has put me over the edge. Here's what I've come up with, and don't be surprised if you read it coming out of Mortie's mouth soon - "Dark doesn't go anywhere, because it's always everywhere; you just can't see it when the light's on."

I am not happy with the notion that dark isn't something of its own accord. It ain't right - it goes against common sense. And besides, it also opens up a new vista on being afraid of the dark vs. nothing to be afraid of in the light, because... how to put this. Remember when we were scared of the dark as kids (I was anyway), and our Dads said "Don't worry, there's nothing there in the dark that isn't there in the light."

Well, that's true. But the point isn't that "nothing's there" - the point is that when the light's on, it's STILL THERE but you can't see it!!!

It's characteristic of "blogs" I suppose, that they are

"occasional" in the classic sense of the term, i.e. often specific to occasions. Today (the 28th of October 2012), is the occasion of the 73rd anniversary of my parents' wedding. October is a full month around here, with our own anniversary (29 this year), and Jake's birthday (26 this year), and George's birthday (101 this year) and MY birthday (66 the other day) and George &  Bunny's anniversary (73 as stated above), and #2-daughter-Kristin's birthday (40 this year).

And then of course, Halloween. As if I weren't scared enough.

Booga-booga!!!

Well damn, once again

Just found out Arlo Guthrie's wife died the other day, cancer of some ilk. I've always felt a kinship with Arlo for some reason, don't know exactly why, other than that we're roughly the same age (he's about 8 months younger) and I'm very fond of a lot of his music and I think he's got a terrific sense of humor. He also seems to have dealt with the specter of possible Huntington's Chorea rather intelligently, by refusing to live his life for the future but instead living it in the here & now, all the time, apparently. There's a note on his wife's passing on his website that stresses that philosophy. I feel sad for Arlo (it was a very long marriage), but I also admire the way he (seemingly) deals with the events of his life, one at a time, here & now, then move on. Much to admire in the guy, I think, and he has my sympathy for his loss.

It's raining again dammit, October has turned into what November used to be

weatherwise. I got a few hours work into the shed yesterday (cold but sunny) so got about 25% of the sheathing up on the roof. All the sheathing is up on the walls except for a couple dabs over & under the rough openings for the doors. The nastiness of the change in late-season weather around here lately is threatening to put an early kibosh on the shed project, but I should be able to get the sheathing up and a protective covering of 15# felt (tar paper) on it to hold off the winter. Then some improvised door coverings - not sure what to do about the stuff in the old shed: I don't think it'll hold up another winter.

The Fiction Writing Group is evolving well; sad to have lost two of our early mainstays though we hold out hope that they'll rejoin at some point (who knows) - I think the notion of writing occupies a different place in the life & priorities of each of us. The ACT of writing is a whole different proposition from the notion of writing of course and therein lies the explanation for the fact that many of us can manage to get it together for a few hours twice a month, but not for the hour or two (or more) a day to actually be as productive as we'd like to. I include myself in this "unable to be as disciplined as we'd like to be about actually writing" crowd, but I'm working on it.

Dream Journal - another odd dream involving a house and water. The house was, as is typical of these dreams, not actually my house - as if, in the dream, my house was being played by another house. And water was collecting on the floor around a ratty old toilet (not in the least resembling either of the toilets in my ACTUAL house). I vacuumed it up with the shop vac (handy thing that wet-dry shop vac). Then it got wet again. Then I woke up & checked the actual toilet and it was fine. Then the dogs had to go out (it was about 0400) so I fed 'em & let 'em out for a minute, then went back to bed and had another snippet of a (completely unrelated) dream the details of which escape me but it involved a car (not mine) crashed into a brick wall and a search for some fugitive or other who was discovered hiding in a recess in the brick wall above. Or something like that - it wasn't completely clear to me where the guy was actually hiding; someone got their hands on him & dragged him out. Then I woke up.

The other night, in the midst of our weekly nine-ball and whiskey symposium

A good friend of mine, I guess my "furthest-back" friend, in fact, mentioned that I appear to avoid socialization.

An anniversary and some Andy Rooneyisms

Why is "wordsmith" a verb? Since when? And WHY is "wordsmith" at all? What's wrong with "write?" Why (too) do we have to "craft" things instead of "writing" them? Is "crafting" a chunk of text somehow different from "writing" it? Is it a higher form of activity? Or lower? I don't understand this at all. And why can't we "contact" someone, or "call them" or "write to them" (or would we have to "craft" a note or email, or even "wordsmith" the note or email.... see what this does to us?). Instead of having to "Reach out" to them? Am I the only one who recalls that this whole "reach out" blather is Telco propaganda from the 70s? ("Reach out and touch someone") - and it was icky then, it's positively creepy in a business context.

Why does some narrator on The History Channel pronounce "armistice" with emphasis on the second syllable - ar MIS tiss. This is just plain wrong, isn't it? I heard someone on NPR say something really dumb the other day but I forgot what it was, and neglected to write it down, dammit.

Finally, forty-three years ago on this date (13 August 1969) Class number 70-01 of the Officers' Training School of the United States Air Force graduated, and unleashed a shitload of brown-barred second lieutenants, among whom was yours truly but you knew that otherwise why would I be writing (crafting/wordsmithing) about it, right? So as I often contemplate, even if I'd stayed in for the proverbial "twenty", I'd'a been out already over twenty years ago. Jeezus.

So we're back, and glad to be - a fun road trip indeed.

Bah Hahbah was delightful, if indistinguishable from Ogunquit, KBP, Rocky Neck and a bunch of other places. We caught an improv comedy show Saturday night, staffed by refusgees & wannabes from Second City - in fact it is apparently their Class A training team. Lots of fun. 

St. Andrews NB is home to Kingsbrae Garden, well worth a slight detour off the highway, and a couple of hours peruse.

Amherst NS is well worth stopping in on the way from someplace to someplace else if you've run out of energy and just need to pull in somewhere for the night. Windy as a bastid though, and home to windfarms.

Moncton was a mere sign on the highway.

Halifax is biggish, and urbanish (it's easy to get hooked on the "ish" like in Antigonish). Some interesting architecture, some history, buskers (girl about 13 with braces & uke, any number of fiddlers). Took the "Harbour Hopper" tour, the Haligonian version of Duck Tours - was fun. We lost in Halifax, ventured out without streetmap, got turned around & took 45 minutes on foot to find the car. But - it was fun (NOW it was fun).

Annapolis Royal was delightful - small, entirely manageable on foot, interesting (but not fascinating) late 18th & early to mid 19th C. architecture; terrific earthen fort (Fort Anne, French, 18th C).

Visited the historic Gardens in Annapolis Royal - absolutely lovely.

Visited the Fundy Tidal power facility & learned that as a prototype it has taught us that tidal power on the B of F is not practicable with turbine technology.

Visited Port Royal (Habitation) 1930s recreation of the buildings from 1605 that the French fur trappers built, and that the Brits destroyed when they sailed up from Jamestown and stole all the trappers stuff (they - the trappers) were not home at the time.

Drove down to Digby NS (scallop capital of Canada, perhaps the world) & caught the ferry to St. John. Digby is notable ONLY as a town you have to drive through to get to the ferry.

The ferry was a nice boat ride indeed. Good WX, windy as a bastid.

St. John is largeish, industrialish, gritty, not worth going to, but worth passing through.

Straight shot home from StJ - back down to Calais, across to Bangor on Rte 9, I95 down to 101, home again, home again, jiggety jog.

Ya gotta love this.

I had a tag line on my work email; lots of people do. We shift them and change them around. Lately I've had a quote from John Barth:

"In art, as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal, as does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity." - John Barth"

It's been there for a few months now. I was just told by my boss that HR complained (didn't say whether someone else had complained, but I suspect that's the case). So I've removed it, and put "this space intentionally left blank" - I suspect I'll be told to remove that too.

Well they (writing coaches, teachers, fellow writers, people who write books on writing like Stephen King, etc.)

Well they (writing coaches, teachers, fellow writers, people who write books on writing like Stephen King, etc.)
always threaten that it'll come - the "AHA!" moment, when you've been wrangling and wrestling with a plot point (or an entire story arc) or a character issue or some continuity glitch, whatever - you'll hassle with it and worry it to a nub, and walk away fuming, time after time, and then leave the WHOLE GODDAM MESS to just lie there and ferment - all the while promising you'll get bck to it (sincerely promising, I might add, this is not an exercise in procrastination but real, dedicated effort frustrated by "process"). So you walk away. Then you walk back, and you poke and you tinker and you bitch and you moan and you walk away again, and you mutter and you grumble, and then you sit down again and look at all the shit you've got, and you maybe start another "Yet Another Take on the Plot Issues of my Great American Yatta-Yatta" and if it's the right time of the right day, you type out "What if...." followed by something that screams back at you "YES!!! That's IT!!! And what took you so long, you DUMB SHIT???"


I got a great deal done today, between reading & critiquing on group members stuff, and working toward pulling the trigger on the "real" D2 of TWD. I had the "AHA" moment, and I know what the real macguffin is, now just sorting out which plotlines to tweak and which to ditch. I think I'm onto something, and it was obvious, and archetypal, and staring me in the face all along.

So I tried this other writing group

in addition to, not instead of, the local group. Meets in Barnes & Noble on Wednesday evenings (2nd & 4th Wed. of each month. What is this fascination with semi-monthly instead of biweekly?) so I've been to three meetings of this group now, and I'm puzzled. I'm often puzzled, but... So there are four other people in the group.

One of them is not a writer, but likes to come anyway. She's a chatter. Nice lady, but contribution is sketchy at best.

Another is apparently writing something - she's shared a couple of chapters - but doesn't share much regularly. She's also one who has yet to be prepared by actually having read anyone else's work in time for a meeting. To be fair, she does pass along commentary outside the meeting, but I sort of expect that when someone's taken the trouble to share something ahead of time for comment, the members would read the work & prepare some comment.

Another one is a guy who has apparently written (and I gather published) some stuff, but he's already shared his entire current novel-in-progress, so doesn't have anything to put on the table. He also hasn't yet had time to read anything & prepare comment in advance.

Then there's a lady who's writing stuff, and shares it, and reads whatever's put on the table and prepares comments. This is great, but offering commentary to her on her stuff is an adversarial battle (she's a defender), and getting commentary from her implies that she will NOT leave a topic until she feels you've acquiesced to her comments and will make the changes she suggested as soon as you get home.

So it's an interesting dynamic, this group, but it makes me wonder why people who don't have time or inclination to write, or read and prepare commentary, are bothering to be in a writers' group.? All sorts of speculation available of course, but it's fascinating, innit?  I"m undecided as to whether to continue in this group. Dragging my sorry old ass out on a Wednesday evening on a ten-mile hike to sit and listen to chat, and get (and offer) a little bit of commentary, and WRANGLE over some of it, in both directions, might not be in the cards as a profitable exercise for me.

The novel seems to be back on the rails,

since I've decided that "the new piece" is in fact "draft 2" of the original piece, and work on the new one is in fact work on the original piece - it has settled my mind considerably, and stopped me from wondering whether I should be focusing on the first one and whether I was procrastinating on the first one by starting the second one. So maybe it's all one big chunk of writing and everything fits in somewhere and I really shouldn't be worried about "what" I"m working on, I should be concentrating on working, and on making that "work" (writing, the act of, the care and feeding of the process, etc.) the most important thing in my day. This is the toughest part of picking up this passion after perhaps 50 years of deferring it. It's a shift of mindset from "where do I fit writing into my day" to focusing on getting some writing done. Then I've devoted some time & energy - at the top of the day - to what's really important to me; whatever else happens in the day after that can be good, bad, or indifferent, but I can look at the day and say "I've gotten some important work done."

It has just occurred to me that "The Willing Detective" - my novel-in-progress

that I thought was "stuck" transitioning from Draft 1 to Draft 2, may well be making the jump into an entirely different piece. That "TWD" is in fact chunks of text to be harvested into the new piece, which promises to be significantly better organized.

At a certain age, I suppose we need to start expecting

to stop being shocked at the news that (another) old classmate - college, high school, whatever -  has died. Loudon Wainwright III's new album Older Than My Old Man Now contains a bunch of tracks more or less themed on the contemplation of getting on in years (he and I are nearly exactly contemporaries, missing by six weeks or so) including a track called "Somebody Else" (a collaboration with Chris Smither) which opens with "Somebody else I knew just died." Well in my case it's a guy from my high school class ('64), someone I knew somewhat but was never pals with or anything. What's got me writing about it is that I'm wondering how I feel not about poor Tom's demise so soon after retiring to his refuge in Vermont, but how do I feel about the guy who has more or less appointed himself the guardian of the class of '64, and operates under the assumption that we ALL want to know EVERYTHING about what's happening to EVERYONE in the class. Now this guy's a decent sort, he really is, heart of gold, yatta yatta. And he has a cohort of (female) minions (well, two, actually, so maybe a pretty small cohort) with whom he conspires to keep mailing lists up to date, and concoct reunions, etc. etc. And more power to them, really, but I foresee that the "Somebody else we knew just..." emails are going to accelerate as we start pushing 70 with shorter & shorter sticks. And I really don't want to email the guy and say "Hey Joe, I appreciate your thinking of me but..." because I don't want to be included out of news from 50 years ago. On the other hand, a LOT of those people didn't matter to me then, and they're not likely to matter more to me now simply because we've topped the crest of The Hill in parallel and are now progressing down it simultaneously. I had a great time in high school, had some good pals, smoked shitloads of cigarettes and burned tankfuls of gas roaming around doing nothing, got my share of nookie, etc. and have warm fuzzy feelings about some of the folks I shared that with. But it's going to get really tiresome hearing about the snuffles and farts of the rest of the 150-some-odd geriatrics as they begin to wheeze and waddle their way down the red carpet that leads out the door of the here & now into the what's next (if anything). I'm not annoyed or anything, just conflicted. More about this, no doubt, as the emails from Joe (or Fran or Pam) begin to become more frequent.

Reading & Writing Journal

I finished the Barth blurted about below (Every Third Thought). Now that it's over with, I didn't like it as much as I was liking (most of) it while I was reading it. It felt like Barth ran out of gas, or interest, about 90% of the way through, and he bailed out with a cheap trick. Don't get me wrong, as ever with John Barth, the writing is superb, finestkind, none better. He is one of the masters at stringing words together; but that - I am discovering - is only part of novelizing, (or fictioning, fictionalizing/ficting???) (And it might be the easy part) (and someone like Barth can probably do it in his sleep). But there's more to the text than the words, of course, and no one knows that better than a pre-eminent Postmodernist like JB. It feels to me ("it" being ETT) as if he has sucked me in by using the (obvious and explicit but probably untrustworthy) association of his narrator/protagonist with the author, led me up to a cliff that he makes me think he's going to jump off, and then sort of trips me at the brink, only to grasp me before I plummet; and then he doesn't (quite) pull me back to safety. (This is all analogy of course, there's no literal cliff at the end of Every Third Thought.) I'm sure that's more or less what he intended, but there's no resolution here, and I'm not enough of a Postmodernist (yet) to think that's satisfactory to the reader (at least not this reader). I'm annoyed with him, he's way better than that.

My own novel is in a phase a bit like buried kimchi. It's put aside temporarily to "rest" like bread dough, or ferment, whatever.  I hear Barkis and Mortie and Evangeline nagging my ass raw, but they know I haven't abandoned them, and I haven't. They know that in the first place I couldn't - I've never abandoned anything, however fragmentary (or stupid) that I've written; sooner or later pieces get picked up & added to or incorporated into something else.

This is a "percolating" time for Barkis. I've read that some writers need to put a piece aside for a while after completing a first draft (or most of a first draft) - taking a break so to speak, letting it ferment.

The key for me is not to get frustrated by it - I know it's not abandoned, and I know it'll get finished (this is something I did NOT know prior to participating in the fiction writing group). The most important thing for me right now is to be writing, not WHAT I'm working on, so I've got new stories cranking up - small ones, shorts, probably 3000 - 5000 words, to fill in and keep the juices flowing; "stringing the words together" is what keeps it alive for me - I'll get back to Barkis, both the one I've got well underway and a couple others that I have the outlines or notes for.

I've joined another fiction writing group as well - we're trying to figure out how to either merge them or at least get some cross-pollination going, but it's tough since almost everyone from my group (which has dwindled to three of us) can't possible do Wednesday nights two towns over, and almost everyone from the new group can't possibly do Saturday mornings. I have a feeling there's a great deal of inertial resistance behind those "can'ts" - the security & safety of a known group is something that lulls one, and makes it really tough to want to barge into another setting with a whole new bunch of dragons.

Barth 2.0

I've sort of rediscovered John Barth recently. Turns out it's more like "the new (though not necessarily 'improved' since there was nothing wrong with the 'old' John Barth) John Barth" or to be more up-to-date, John Barth 2.0 (maybe an even later dot-release). I was introduced to his work in about 1966 or '67, in my junior year of college; the first piece of his I read was The Sot Weed Factor, and it impressed me so much I moved immediately to Giles Goat-Boy, then The Floating Opera and The End of the Road. None of these latter impressed (or entertained) me as much as SWF however, and GGB, especially, got very tiresome. Opera and Road were downers. I took a stab at Lost in the Funhouse, and it was more enjoyable, but Letters and Tidewater Tales failed to engage me completely, and I drifted away from Barth, though retaining my huge admiration for his talent. All this over the first 20 of the last 40 years or so.

Somewhere (on the Lannan Foundation website) recently I stumbled across a video of a 'conversation' between JB and some professional "admirer of artists" so I watched it and was entertained and informed - considerably - about the personality of the now-80-something Barth, so I picked up a recent effort, Every Third Thought - A Novel in Five Seasons, and it's on my Kindle as current workout reading. I'd forgotten how discursive, digressive, and just plain prolix Barth can be, but he does it so well it isn't (at least in this case) as tiresome as it might threaten to be. I've recently taken a whack at David Foster Wallace (Pale King - a sample on the Kindle) and it's exhausting. But I'm delighted that Barth is back (or rather, he's never been away, I've just been wandering in sort of a Barth-starved wilderness of my own making, I guess). Every Third Thought is a glorious example of postmodern confusion (or integration) of narrator, author, and character. I'm a little over half-way through and will offer a full response when I'm done, but for now - if you're familiar with Barth then I recommend it. If you're new to Barth, I recommend Sot-Weed Factor first, it's a glorious entertainment and a highly accomplished work of deeply considered fiction.