Back with a vengence

Recently wrote a pretty nice story, but it's not going here. Rather, I think that this is the right place to put some quips that I've jotted down in my Moleskine (it's so damn spiffy, all reporter-style and black; I just get and idea and flip!!). Here's one for now, from a particularly downsome day a few weeks ago:

This is what reality is--it is when you look at a rose and call it 'red', and you are sure that it is, without question. Because if there is even the slightest doubt in your mind that the rose is not red, if your belief falters in any way, then reality is shattered, then all is chaos and black spots on a white canvas. Reality was probably invented when someone tried, vainly, to call a rose red without wanting to be inclined to call it anything else. Reality is refusing to say that the truth might not be true.

It's fun to look through something that you wrote in months or years in the past and go "Huhm! What got me into that mood?" I've become so tired and embarrassed of this that I throw away notebooks that I recognize as being more than six months old. Of course, this is coupled with The Great Notebook Dilemma. The Great Notebook Dilemma is when a writer--say, for instance, myself--is sitting down with a notebook one day and begins to what is, at the time, possibly the beginnings of the greatest collection of words in Literature. However, like all great works, this is abandoned within the hour. A few weeks later, the notebook is picked up again, and I realize that those six or seven pages are the most uninspired dreck imaginable, and God Forbid anyone should chance upon them. Sensible, I rip them from the notebook and throw them in the fire. Immediately I am struck with another fantastic idea that I write in the now purged notebook....and the process continues. Eventually, I am left with nothing but the cardboard spine of a notebook, within which tiny specks of paper still cling like refugees to the binding, some with half-letters still prominent. My dilemma comes when I open an old drawer months later and find several notebooks that are completely torn, save for a few sheets of paper near the back. What to do then? Keep them for the paper? Find a way of binding them all together? No, I think, best to throw them away, or, as I usually do, shut the drawer and forget it for another year.

You know, there's something about Schubert's Ave Maria that makes me feel a little lonely, a little light. I think that it might be how the phrase "ave maria" is so damned beautiful.

All right, gotta wrap this up. I'm halfway through Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel. Though it is quite good and contains a great deal of detail about the world in which it takes place, the lack of emotion within the actual characters bothers me. A modern writer, no matter how much she wishes to emulate Victorian writers, owes it to a feeling society to talk about, well, feelings.

Night before last, as a break from Clarke, I read and finished "Seymour: an Introduction" by J.D. Salinger. Very self-referential, amusing, human. The only questionable aspect was how the narrator, Buddy, kept acting as though he really wanted to talk about himself instead of his brother. Such asides would amount to nothing and distract from the actual progression; things like Buddy alluding to his being/not being homosexual (I had no idea what that was about).

Still, nothing is coming close to my recent favourite, Everything is Illuminated. Read it.

Still to read this summer: some more Joyce, Water for Elephants, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, maybe Vonnegut or Keroac. God be damned, I will never read The Lovely Bones.