What Mr. Vonnegut said.
Friday September 7, 2001
Which we’ll get to in a minute. First, what Mr. Ryman said, which is quite a bit, all of which has only a tangential bearing on what I’m talking about: things that appear to be going into the writing of the “Sex and Violence” story mentioned earlier. Having read “The Unconquered Country”—oh, don’t read that; it’s a mawkish, limited summary. Go read the book itself, darn it—having read it, and vaguely remembering a creepy Connie Willis story about students in an orbiting boarding school with these—pets, that, well. I’m not misremembering it; I just don’t remember it too well, and I’d tell you to go read it (and re-read it myself) if I could just remember what it’s called. But even though my foetal story has nothing to do with boarding schools or Pol Pot, those stories are doing interesting things to the other vectors already mentioned: bringing in images with undercurrents I like. —Keeping in mind that we are talking about something that as yet exists as half-formed images, a vague sketch of a plot, a Situation, and two openings, one an unusable kaleidoscope of dialogue, the other a paragraph that might be tight enough to build on, if it weren’t on another hard drive in another building altogether at the moment. It’s going to be interesting to see where this one goes. Always assuming I can find some time to write it. To say nothing of the other writing commitments which I think this one is an attempt to procrastinate…
As for Mr. Vonnegut: I was making dinner (spaghetti; Newman’s Own Basil and Tomato with a little dill; olive bread from the Pearl; that bean spread which is maybe on its last legs; the bottle of wine we got over a year ago when we closed on this house, but never opened for a variety of reasons too tangled to get into here and now) and, as is (sometimes) my wont, I had the television on in the backgroud, and it happened to be tuned to a channel carrying a rerun of Friends, and it was one of those episodes where Rachel gets back with Ross, or maybe it was vice versa, I’ve already forgotten, not that, after a while, I was paying all that much attention in the first place—and anyway, I suddenly remembered that thing Vonnegut says in—I’m pretty sure it’s in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater—he says something along the lines of (and I’m paraphrasing horribly here): every life has a structure to it, a story, a novel, and every novel or story (or structure) must at some point come to an end, and so it stands to reason there must be millions of people wandering around, long past the ends of their novels—
Ah, enough uncharitable snarkiness. The “Ava” movement of David Byrne’s The Forest just began, and it’s the whole reason the (admittedly uneven) disc exists. So away with you all while I listen:
Uan end Tu end Sfri end vor.
Aj dont keer end I dont nou.
Hold on tajt end dount let gou.
God, hes left as on aur oun.