Today is my birthday; Borges was also born on this day.

Which is relevant here.

Because last week I dreamed in detail about a literary work that doesn’t exist, a lost novel by an obscure writer of fin-de-siècle Vienna, part ghost story, part a story about sexual jealousy and lust, about two couples whose members are all having depraved sex with one another “secretly,” though everybody knows everything that’s going on, of course. That’s the first half. In the second half, one of the men dies — he’s named Otto — and he doesn’t realize this until he figures out that nobody is taking any notice of him — except one of the women, who continues to maintain an awareness of his existence, or at least appears to, though she can’t speak. The novel was named Teslie, after this character. Later on in the dream it became clear that it had been made into a movie in the 70s — it could have been a great film in the right hands, but it was made by second-rate people who downplayed the psychological drama and played up the depraved sex, so that it ended up being one of those soft-core porn movies, full of soft focus and naked bodies, that were billed as art films in those days.

Obviously (to me) my unconscious — to use a term introduced by Freud, a contemporary of my fictional forgotten author — was partly on Elective Affinities, partly on Arthur Schnitzler, partly on Freud (I’d just read the Harper’s essay about positive psychology from this month), and partly on Easy Rider and Red Desert, because actually Jack Nicholson and Monica Vitti came up in the dream as actors who could have redeemed the film had they chosen. But they turned down the project.

When I woke up I thought this dream was so amazing, I wrote everything down that I could remember (there was much, much more), and I thought about writing a critical essay about Teslie, à la Borges, and posting it here today as a kind of joke about the shared birthday. But I also realized that this could be the seed of a much more ambitious piece, maybe even a novel (there, I said it), so I think I’m going to save it for that. It has a lot of potential, as the whole gestalt combines so many interests of mine: depraved sex (obviously), Freud’s Vienna, ghost stories where the dead narrates the action, the messy, ambitious, libidinous, overreaching, pretentious sprawl of American cinema of the 70s, and of course, critical works on books that don’t exist.

Yesterday morning, nearly a week after having this dream, I shelved a copy of Freud’s Vienna by Bruno Bettelheim. Synchronicity? (To use another term introduced by a Viennese psychologist.) Maybe I’ll buy it when I go back to work tomorrow.

Lately I’ve been writing a lot. Most of it by hand, on sheets of paper. And I’ve been throwing a lot of it away, all the inane garbage I spout when I’m looking for something interesting to say. Today I’ve been working on this short story I mentioned — I finally figured out how I want to describe the approach I’m taking. I’m attempting to write a piece that presents itself as an essay written by the main character. Though a work of fiction, it will read like a memoir, and will be allowed all the liberties of the essay, to offer quotes, to lay out information, to pursue lines of thought, to ignore scene and story and character when convenient, and take it back up again when convenient. None of this is new or revolutionary, of course, and it’s all been done before. But I’m in the process of figuring out how I can do it with this story, I think.

It couldn’t be more beautiful in San Francisco — the evidence of the last three years shows that it’s always warm here on August 24th — and I need to leave the house now, I can delay no longer, various projects having either been left incomplete or delegated. Goodbye Internet, I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon.

That last video wasn’t meant to imply that I spent yesterday procrastinating on a project. Far from — I spent the day getting ready for the next few months, which, if you care to see it that way, will be a project in itself. Because I have this vision of how I want to live for the next while, which involves early rising and healthy eating and lots of exercise, lots of long walks and violin practice, frugality from day to day but weekly splurging on time out with friends, a lot of staying in at night, not too much booze, not too much coffee, plenty of water, enjoying my job, saving money. And of course plenty of writing. Plenty of reading and movies and plenty of blogging about both.

So I cleaned the office and cleared my desk, and dealt with my email and my bills. It feels so liberating to have an empty inbox. No demands you haven’t met, no debts or obligations owed to anyone in the world. I listened to Adrian Sherwood and then Ljova. I went online and bought six new T-shirts and six desperately-needed pairs of socks, and an army-brown cotton hoodie. I made rice and beans and ate some of the tamales we made the other day, drank two glasses of wine and two glasses of water and two cups of coffee (not in that order) and caught up on back issues of the New Yorker. The trivial things you do to prepare yourself for the week and the month ahead that aren’t actually trivial at all.

And I sat down at my desk to do some writing, yesterday’s blog post. My desk is a pine dressing table that belonged to Torrey’s grandmother, Maxine. I never met her but I think about her all the time because of this desk. It has a drawer to the left, and next to it, in front of me, there’s a deep compartment with an open front. There’s no evidence there was ever a drawer to put there. Inside the compartment I store a ream of blank writing paper and my current notebook. It’s where I do almost everything when I spend the day at home. The corner is conducive to writing and reading and watching movies, and conducive to writing about reading and watching movies. Torrey calls it Command Central because of my dual-monitor setup.

And now I’m thinking about this writing project I’m back to working on. It’s a story superficially about a long-past breakup, the scene revisited by the guy in present time. I was going to get feedback on it from two different friends, but before I could do so they started going through their own messy breakups and I didn’t want to impose on them. August is breakup season in San Francisco, as everyone knows, so I really should have known better. But anyway that’s just the surface movement. What it’s really about is the work of uncovering the past — or not so much recovering memories as going back to the scene of an event to create a mental version of the past that seems richer, more true somehow, though it’s probably just as false to the past, in its way, as your original impressions. We all do this whenever we visit a place we lived for a few months, or a year. It looks different but it reminds you of things you’d also forgotten, and you create a different narrative on the spot.

Paul Collins writes about how Richard Booth scorns the people who come into Hay, buy up local properties and renovate them:

A visitor like me sees nothing but quaintness in Hay, and a certain stark beauty in ruins; but a longtime resident sees … well, ruin. And yet to harangue against their renovation seems hopeless too. Decay might be the best growth industry left in Wales. The damaged past, artfully reused, is all most of us ever have to work with anyway.

That’s exactly what I’m trying to get at in this story, how we artfully reuse the damaged past — not just writers, but everybody. And I’m not sure I’m getting there, quite. But the only thing I can do is my best.

Yesterday and the day before, at the book sale, as I helped to move the overstock outside, and then inside, and then back outside and back inside again, and shuffling around the books and making them presentable, I’d been thinking about something Paul Collins wrote in Sixpence House about certain books that just won’t sell. His employer, Richard Booth, has complained that his castle is stuffed to the ceiling with them, and he stalks off. Yet, writes Collins:

the great thing about Booth’s is that it is full of stuff that won’t sell in a thousand years. You need to keep your ratio of the utterly obscure and the instantly familiar in careful balance: have too much of one or the other, and bankruptcy or insipidness is sure to follow. You need some odd “worthless” books because, like bending back lines to a vanishing point in a painting, the vanishing recognizability of a few titles in your stock gives the whole selection an appearance of depth. And there really is no telling what people might actually want. [...] Still, some titles truly are worthless, cannot even be given away. Among the many banes to a secondhand dealer’s existence, four unloved genres reign supreme: textbooks, theology, celebrity autobiography, and military history.

That list made me laugh; even the Friends of the Library won’t take donations of textbooks, and there are other genres that I imagine would sell as slowly as the above, like outdated computer manuals. But in all it seems like a pretty complete list. It makes me very glad that where I work, we evaluate every book offered us, so these genres aren’t the problem they seem to become when you purchase books by the ton. Our sale was basically made up of great books that we just hadn’t found a new owner for yet — I picked up a couple for myself, one of which was Vermeer in Bosnia (hardcover), and there were many, many more I would have bought were I not practicing restraint.

But when I read “military history,” I did think of one amusing book I’d seen inside the store. Read more »

My brief review of this book is up over at the Barnes & Noble Review:

The history of American film criticism has been covered before, in monographs limited to particular critics or time periods, but Jerry Roberts is the first to attempt a comprehensive single-volume history of the field. The result is a significant and useful book that fully lives up to its billing as “complete.”

Read more–>

Speaking of books that have found me recently, one them was Thomas Mallon’s book about published journals, A Book of One’s Own. I skimmed the whole thing, decided to read it carefully, and got about fifty pages into it before Sixpence House found me. So it was with great happiness that I discovered a brief convergence of these two books on page 95 of Sixpence House, as I sat in a far corner of the back patio of Wild Side West, sipping at a beer, reading, and resting my feet for an hour before making the 25-minute walk home from work.

There is some basic human need to read through other people’s journals; otherwise, why would they leave them in unlocked desks? Sitting brazenly in the bottom of a drawer, barely hidden beneath a ream of paper, a stapler, and a Trapper Keeper? That, at least, was my reasoning as a teenager. But now, as an adult, it is unseemly to go rooting about in people’s desks, under their mattresses, and on their upper closet shelves — I must settle for published journals. I’m sorting through the rest of the fiction and essay section today at Booth’s, and a number of the misfiled books are journals by British writers. One in particular catches my eye: The Journal of a Disappointed Man, by W.P. Barbellion. How can you not open a book with that title? For I once came across a book in a library titled Recollections of a Happy Life; it was about a century old, and it had never been checked out. You may wish to infer something from this.

Indeed you may. It’s interesting that Collins happened to come across that particular journal, the one from the Disappointed Man; I came across it too last year, online (follow the links on this page to read it for free), and it’s even possible that Collins himself led me to it via his blog, though I no longer remember the details. Barbellion was a talented naturalist, and a prodigy, who died at the age of thirty from MS (which lately claimed Tony Judt and still hasn’t claimed Stephen Hawking). I read and skimmed much of it one sleepless night last fall and thought about linking to it on the Rumpus, before finally concluding that it was too depressing to be a general item on the blog.

But the reading wasn’t depressing for me personally. Read more »

It’s been a long couple of weeks. Between starting at a new job and being the stand-in managing editor of the Rumpus for a week, and then going back to the job for a couple days, all before Isaac was safely back at the helm of the Rumpus, I just worked ten fairly packed days in a row. But finally 3 o’clock on Sunday afternoon arrived, and the striving could stop for a little while. I’d have a couple days off and no reason apart from whim to work on anything in particular. So I bought a Sunday Times and another book from my store (Sixpence House), then I bicycled home, showered, made a martini, and sat on the couch in my bathrobe and relaxed. Tried to write a couple times but couldn’t muster the right frame of mind, and I finally decided to just settle into a “weekend” (Monday & Tuesday) of making music and seeing friends and reading.

The Times has been pretty dull so far and I regret having bought it, the way you regret buying a disappointing sandwich. (Should have gone for the tunafish.) But Sixpence House, by Paul Collins, cost half as much as the newspaper did, and it has given me ten times the pleasure. Read more »

In keeping with the spirit of my “books read” and “films seen” page, I have decided to create a page listing all the fiddle tunes I have memorized. Dated performances of each one will be posted in time, after I get a better recording setup.

Today the Rumpus published my interview with Mac McClelland, about her book on Burma, For Us Surrender is Out of the Question:

Rumpus: Since you bring up the war in the east, which is obviously a big part of the book, could you describe the Karen and their situation a little bit?

McClelland: Basically you’ve got this ethnic group who were the darlings of the British Empire when the British colonized Burma. And the Karen also fought on the side of the Allies during World War II, and then were promised autonomy as a reward for that, basically their own Burmese state. But they didn’t get it, and the British and the Americans just sort of bailed on them. And so, since independence in 1948, some members of this group, the Karen, have been fighting in this armed insurgency against the government. Over time, as is usually the case, the government has been winning in a major, major way. So now, their numbers are dwindling, their resources are dwindling, they don’t have as many weapons, they don’t have as many guys, they don’t have much money. So now, you just have just a few thousand scrappy soldiers who refuse to give up the fight in the jungle, versus 350,000 Burmese Army soldiers of the oldest military dictatorship in the world. And so as payback for this fight that’s been going on for such a long time, the army has started trying to wipe out civilians from this group, in addition to the insurgents themselves. So now, nobody is safe. Its not a matter of just the soldiers fighting, it’s a war on anybody of that minority who is unfortunate enough to live in that area.

Read more–>

Because this week I’m filling in for Isaac Fitzgerald on the Rumpus, while he gallivants around in the Scottish Highlands. There is no genuine substitute for Isaac Fitzgerald, of course, but I’m doing my best. Hopefully I won’t accidentally delete the site or anything like that.