Out Across the Rooftops, Out Towards the Hills
A friend of mine recently lamented that reading this blog "made [him] want to slit [his] wrists, it was so emo." I suppose, despite my recent streak of happiness, I haven't exactly been writing the most uplifting things around here, and for that I blame my silly mind, which tends to lose confidence the longer it allows a topic to ruminate.
The truth is that, over the past week, I've already tired a bit of letting things stay too long in strict contemplation mode. It's been a week since I returned home to New Jersey and, in that time, not much has transpired worth noting. I've been applying to some jobs--all of which have yielded, thus far, no responses. I've been running errands with my parents, one of which resulted in one of the finest acquisitions of recent memory, but most have which have simply burned up my time. I've been doing a lot of sitting and relaxing, along with a fair share of walking and music-listening. All told, the status quo has been pretty, well, uneventful.
The spare time I've had on my hands has been both a blessing and a curse. I came home from Penn State with an enormous pile of books on my To Be Read stack. And while the TBR pile has been relocated from the third shelf of Billy bookcase to the corner of my room (perched carefully on a makeshift dais of the Neverender: Children of the Fence Edition), the time I've been idling since graduation has done very little to put any kind of dent in it. I partly blame the fact that for a while I was far more interested in spending time with my friends than sitting alone reading, but that's not the only factor.
While visiting Detroit two weekends ago--yes, that was Mystery Destination #2, for my Facebook and Twitter followers--I brought along a pair of books, the last two I took out of the Penn State library. They were Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse and Youth by J. M. Coetzee. Combined, they numbered scarcely more than 300 pages. Nevertheless, it took me WEEKS to finish reading them. They just did nothing for me, and few books in recent weeks have been able to grab me the way I'd like one to. A book that digs in its claws, won't let me go, and makes me turn the final page begging for more--I haven't read one that's done that for me in too too long.
The latest book in this trend has been William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch. Now, I know what you may be thinking: if you know me, I've actively voiced my dislike for Burroughs since first reading him in late 2007. At the time, I recall thinking The Soft Machine and Nova Express were filthy, nonsensical, and completely devoid of meaning. The fold-in and cut-up methods he used were things I just didn't understand. I didn't know what was happening, why it was happening, or why I should give a shit. All I knew was each was filled with drugs and body parts and fluids and other things that I just don't feel need to be mentioned here. I'd heard better things about Naked Lunch, though, and besides, it was on the list of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, so I figured why not?
Big mistake.
In a number of ways, the book is practically unreadable. One of those ways, of course, is the filthiness, the vile descriptions of things that I gather are the reflections of someone so far gone on drugs that they're willing to believe these things can exist. But I've got a strong stomach for that kind of stuff (hell, I LIKED Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted) and it's not like I'm finding myself physically incapable of reading on. I'm just frustrated by the lack of plot and general coherence--the exact same complaint I had about his other books. In other words, just another book that was supposed to be great that I simply can't get through.
And I know what you're thinking. Why don't you just put it aside and read another book instead? There are two answers to that. The first is that, because I'm stubborn (and because I've never NOT finished a book I've started), I'm going to eventually finish it anyway, so why not do it now while it's still fresh in my head? The second is that I've already done that three times already, leaving four mediocre books off to the side, and I'd feel bad having five books going at the same time when I have a hard enough time keeping track of one.
But last night, my reaction against Naked Lunch was so strong that I came to a realization and, surprisingly enough, acted on it. I thought to myself, "Fuck, I could write something better than this shit!" So I put the book down, picked up my laptop, opened up my long-neglected manuscript, and started working on it.
It had been a while since I'd worked on it, a few months at least. It was hard enough motivating myself to write the papers I needed to finish to get my degree, so I figured a personal project that had no impact on my academic work was a bad thing to focus on. But it was also the same nagging issue that's been keeping many of my creative projects from getting off the ground: the feeling that I would never be able to pull it off, so why even bother trying.
Well, with nothing else on my plate for the foreseeable future, that attitude registered as bullshit. So off I went. And in one night, I added about 1000 words to the manuscript, doubling its current length. And when I reread those new pages this morning, they sounded good--not great, but they sounded up to par with what I'd expected of the work.
It was at that moment that I realized that this wasn't just a tiny step, a nudge in the right direction. I was doing it. I was writing that novel I've been talking about for so long.
Then I started chatting through Twitter with a fellow Princeton alumna who'd participated in last November's National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). She received a paperback proof of her book as recognition of her accomplishment, and now she's looking to work on a second novel, as well as try to get the first one published. This was a person with a shockingly similar background as my own, doing precisely what it was I hoped to do, and we've been talking for much of the day about how we can both reasonably try to get our respective projects off the ground.
So even though the economy sucks and my job hunt is totally stagnant right now, I genuinely don't feel the need to see this as a bad situation. I've got a work in progress that I'm proud of, encouraged about, and excited to work on. I've got three other ideas in the works that all have varying degrees of seriousness, all of which I can put in work on whenever I want because of all the free time I have. And I figure all I need is for one of those four projects to be completed and become a success--then I'm right on the fast track to the life I've been craving all along. All I needed was to put something into a little bit of action, and now that I have, I'm way more excited about the potential these new projects possess.
I commented many months ago to the effect that I felt like my life was in a condition of permanent stagnation so long as I was still in grad school. Now I'm out, at long last, and instead of seeing the malaise carry through, I find myself instead possessed of creativity and motivation for things I haven't wanted for far too long. I'm glad to see that I was right, and I'm thrilled about where things can and will go from here. I haven't felt this excited in forever--instead of holding back, hoping that one day I'll see it, sitting and waiting for these things to come to me until then, I'm actually working towards them. It feels real. It feels possible. It feels almost inevitable.
And yes. It feels good, sir.
The truth is that, over the past week, I've already tired a bit of letting things stay too long in strict contemplation mode. It's been a week since I returned home to New Jersey and, in that time, not much has transpired worth noting. I've been applying to some jobs--all of which have yielded, thus far, no responses. I've been running errands with my parents, one of which resulted in one of the finest acquisitions of recent memory, but most have which have simply burned up my time. I've been doing a lot of sitting and relaxing, along with a fair share of walking and music-listening. All told, the status quo has been pretty, well, uneventful.
The spare time I've had on my hands has been both a blessing and a curse. I came home from Penn State with an enormous pile of books on my To Be Read stack. And while the TBR pile has been relocated from the third shelf of Billy bookcase to the corner of my room (perched carefully on a makeshift dais of the Neverender: Children of the Fence Edition), the time I've been idling since graduation has done very little to put any kind of dent in it. I partly blame the fact that for a while I was far more interested in spending time with my friends than sitting alone reading, but that's not the only factor.
While visiting Detroit two weekends ago--yes, that was Mystery Destination #2, for my Facebook and Twitter followers--I brought along a pair of books, the last two I took out of the Penn State library. They were Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse and Youth by J. M. Coetzee. Combined, they numbered scarcely more than 300 pages. Nevertheless, it took me WEEKS to finish reading them. They just did nothing for me, and few books in recent weeks have been able to grab me the way I'd like one to. A book that digs in its claws, won't let me go, and makes me turn the final page begging for more--I haven't read one that's done that for me in too too long.
The latest book in this trend has been William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch. Now, I know what you may be thinking: if you know me, I've actively voiced my dislike for Burroughs since first reading him in late 2007. At the time, I recall thinking The Soft Machine and Nova Express were filthy, nonsensical, and completely devoid of meaning. The fold-in and cut-up methods he used were things I just didn't understand. I didn't know what was happening, why it was happening, or why I should give a shit. All I knew was each was filled with drugs and body parts and fluids and other things that I just don't feel need to be mentioned here. I'd heard better things about Naked Lunch, though, and besides, it was on the list of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, so I figured why not?
Big mistake.
In a number of ways, the book is practically unreadable. One of those ways, of course, is the filthiness, the vile descriptions of things that I gather are the reflections of someone so far gone on drugs that they're willing to believe these things can exist. But I've got a strong stomach for that kind of stuff (hell, I LIKED Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted) and it's not like I'm finding myself physically incapable of reading on. I'm just frustrated by the lack of plot and general coherence--the exact same complaint I had about his other books. In other words, just another book that was supposed to be great that I simply can't get through.
And I know what you're thinking. Why don't you just put it aside and read another book instead? There are two answers to that. The first is that, because I'm stubborn (and because I've never NOT finished a book I've started), I'm going to eventually finish it anyway, so why not do it now while it's still fresh in my head? The second is that I've already done that three times already, leaving four mediocre books off to the side, and I'd feel bad having five books going at the same time when I have a hard enough time keeping track of one.
But last night, my reaction against Naked Lunch was so strong that I came to a realization and, surprisingly enough, acted on it. I thought to myself, "Fuck, I could write something better than this shit!" So I put the book down, picked up my laptop, opened up my long-neglected manuscript, and started working on it.
It had been a while since I'd worked on it, a few months at least. It was hard enough motivating myself to write the papers I needed to finish to get my degree, so I figured a personal project that had no impact on my academic work was a bad thing to focus on. But it was also the same nagging issue that's been keeping many of my creative projects from getting off the ground: the feeling that I would never be able to pull it off, so why even bother trying.
Well, with nothing else on my plate for the foreseeable future, that attitude registered as bullshit. So off I went. And in one night, I added about 1000 words to the manuscript, doubling its current length. And when I reread those new pages this morning, they sounded good--not great, but they sounded up to par with what I'd expected of the work.
It was at that moment that I realized that this wasn't just a tiny step, a nudge in the right direction. I was doing it. I was writing that novel I've been talking about for so long.
Then I started chatting through Twitter with a fellow Princeton alumna who'd participated in last November's National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). She received a paperback proof of her book as recognition of her accomplishment, and now she's looking to work on a second novel, as well as try to get the first one published. This was a person with a shockingly similar background as my own, doing precisely what it was I hoped to do, and we've been talking for much of the day about how we can both reasonably try to get our respective projects off the ground.
So even though the economy sucks and my job hunt is totally stagnant right now, I genuinely don't feel the need to see this as a bad situation. I've got a work in progress that I'm proud of, encouraged about, and excited to work on. I've got three other ideas in the works that all have varying degrees of seriousness, all of which I can put in work on whenever I want because of all the free time I have. And I figure all I need is for one of those four projects to be completed and become a success--then I'm right on the fast track to the life I've been craving all along. All I needed was to put something into a little bit of action, and now that I have, I'm way more excited about the potential these new projects possess.
I commented many months ago to the effect that I felt like my life was in a condition of permanent stagnation so long as I was still in grad school. Now I'm out, at long last, and instead of seeing the malaise carry through, I find myself instead possessed of creativity and motivation for things I haven't wanted for far too long. I'm glad to see that I was right, and I'm thrilled about where things can and will go from here. I haven't felt this excited in forever--instead of holding back, hoping that one day I'll see it, sitting and waiting for these things to come to me until then, I'm actually working towards them. It feels real. It feels possible. It feels almost inevitable.
And yes. It feels good, sir.
posted by Dave at 6/04/2009 02:18:00 PM
1 Comments:
Mein Kampf was the first book I didn't finish (and with good reason). Not only is it morally repugnant, it's also terribly written. After that, since I could no longer claim the "I've finished every book I've started," it got much easier to stop reading books that are awful.
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