After listening to Demolition early last week, Ryan Adams' new one and his Whiskeytown work Strangers Almanac arrived in the mail near week's end. I'm not sure if the new one, Easy Tiger, beats Cold Roses for me. I don't think it does. But the best of the new bunch are the kind that draw you in like Come Pick Me Up. When you break them apart from the album's noise, I put Sun Also Sets and Pearls on a String up there so far. They're open but obscured, where Cold Roses was open and unadorned. Both moods are viable, and the former is harder to write. Not harder to write alone, but with a narrative.
Strangers Almanac is good there. There's not a bone in its wax that would let it ignore the narrative, because the narrative is everything. Music's just a way to get there, and obscured and unadorned are whatever it takes. Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart Tonight has been the song on my lips the last week or so, pretty much since the moment Demlition night ended in a forfeit. It's the version from the Faithless Street reissue, but the Strangers cut — newer to me — fortifies it. It's the anchor on the first listen, and it's destruction for a purpose.
The comments here were on their way back almost from the second they left, and I think I got it pretty quick but not quick enough to hold up the whole thing. Couldn't have if I tried, or wouldn't have wanted to. Some days you just lower your arms. Yesterday I archived the old comments, preserving them, and put in Blogger's comment system. The old one, YACCS, had stopped upgrades and support a year-plus ago, bowing to systems like Blogger's and desiring to invest time elsewhere. It was great while it lasted. But I was ready for it to go too and was glad to get the high sign to walk away. The new system offered comments on a per-post basis, which was what I needed.
When I write in Blogger now, the interface has passed me by. The words hit the keyboard a couple letters after my head, and they hit the screen a few more frustrating letters behind. By the time all the letters are down and they with the words are in the right order, the feeling to get them out the door is strong. If that feeling was the feeling sitting down to write, the emotion is double. In those times, I don't want to stick around and I don't want to come back. I want to push the chalkboard into the street and let an unexpected big-rig smash it to bits. It's a different contract of interaction, building and clearly noting an exception. Turning a post's comments off, every once in a while, satisfies the clause.
When comments weren't here, I went looking for them. If only mentally before cutting myself off, I checked. They had never come in bunches, but the chance was there. They'd also predicated my yesterday. I went to bed Saturday not knowing what I'd done, and woke up today with at least the interactive contract in hand. It would've been helpful a day or a week earlier, and it was too late except to go forward. I spent the day with Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, recommended in comments here by a couple friends. The book, the best about reading I've ever read, was what I needed to come back to zero.
You need it too, as long as you can sit still long enough to read every word. Maybe you can read it, find your legs stretched at full extension and wonder with the sensation how long it'd been since you'd let them do as much. You then switch positions and spots dozens of times; as much as you enjoy the stretched feeling, you're doing what you can. You watch the reflection of the sun go down, especially gold on the cap of the new high-rise down the street, and you remember that poem and how it was sad. You wait for the thunderstorm and type out the excerpts that mess with your head, the ones on comments and control that begin to sample the book. None of them describe anything fully, and you know you have to do better than description.
And just as I watch her while she reads, suppose she were to train a spyglass on me while I write? I sit at the desk with my back to the window, and there, behind me, I feel an eye that sucks up the flow of the sentences, leads the story in directions that elude me. Readers are my vampires. I feel a throng of readers looking over my should and seizing the words as they are set down on paper. I an unable to write if there is someone watching me: I feel that what I am writing does not belong to me any more. I would like to vanish, to leave behind for that expectation lurking in their eyes the page stuck in the typewriter, or, at most, my fingers striking the keys.
How well I would write if I were not here! If between the white page and the writing of words and stories that take shape and disappear without anyone's ever writing them there were not interposed that uncomfortable partition which is my person! Style, taste, individual philosophy, subjectivity, cultural background, real experience, psychology, talent, tricks of the trade: all the elements that make what I write recognizable as mine seem to me a cage that restricts my possibilities. If I were only a hand, a severed hand that grasps a pen and writes … Who would move this hand? The anonymous throng? The spirit of the times? The collective unconscious? I do not know. It is not in order to be the spokesman for something definable that I would like to erase myself. Only to trasmit the writable that waits to be written, the tellable that nobody tells.
Perhaps the woman I observe with the spyglass knows what I should write; or, rather, she does not know it, because she is in fact waiting for me to write what she does not know; but what she knows for certain is her waiting, the void that my words should fill.
—
Idea for a story. Two writers, living in two chalets on opposite slopes of the valley, observe each other alternately. One of them is accustomed to write in the morning, the other in the afternoon. Mornings and afternoons, the writer who is not writig trains his spyglass on the one who is writing.
One of the two is a productive writer, the other a tormented writer. The tormented writer watches the productive writer filling pages with uniform lines, the manuscript growing in a pile of neat pages. In a little while the book will be finished: certainly a best seller — the tormented writer thinks with a certain contempt but also with envy. He considers the productive writer no more than a clever craftsman, capable of turning out machine-made novels catering to the taste of the public; but he cannot repress a strong feeling of envy for that man who expresses himself with such methodical self-confidence. It is not only envy, it is also admiration, yes, sincere admiration: in the way that man puts all of his energy into writing there is certainly a generosity, a faith in communication, in giving others what others expect of him, without creating introverted problems for himself. The tormented writer would give anything if he could resemble the productive writer; he would like to take hm as a model; his greatest ambition now is to become like him.
The productive writer watches the tormented writer as the latter sits down at his desk, chews his fingernails, scratches himself, tears a page to bits, gets up and goes into the kitchen to fix himself some coffee, then some tea, then camomile, then reads a poem by Holderlin (while it is clear that Holderlin has absolutely nothing to do with what he is writing), copies a page already written and then crosses it all out line by line, telephones the cleaner's (though it was settled that the blue slacks couldn't be ready before Tuesday), then writes some notes that will not be useful now but maybe later, then goes to the encyclopedia and looks up Tasmania (though it is obvious that in what he is writing there is no reference to Tasmania), tears up two pages, puts on a Ravel recording. The productive writer has never liked the works of the tormented writer; reading them, he always feels as if he is on the verge of grasping the decisive points, but then it eludes him and he is left with a sensation of uneasiness. But now that he is watching him write, he feels this man is struggling with something obscure, a tangle, a road to be dug leading no one knows where; at times he seems to see the other man walking on a tightrope stretched over the void, and his is overcome with admiration. Not only admiration, also envy; because he feels how limited his own work is, how superficial compared with what the tormented writer is seeking.
On the terrace of a chalet in the bottom of the valley a young woman is sunning herself, reading a book. The two writers observe her with the spyglass….
—
You fasten your seatbelt. The plane is landing. To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in any place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and the when in which you vanished. Meanwhile, what do you do? How do you occupy this absence of yourself from the world and of the world from you? You read; you do not raise your eyes from the book between one airport and the other, because beyond the page there is the void, the anonymity of stopovers, of the metallic uterus that contains you and nourishes you, of the passing crowd always different and always the same. You might as well stick with this other abstraction of travel, accomplished by the anonymous uniformity of typographical characters: here, too, it is the evocative power of the names that persuades you that you are flying over something and not nothingness. You realize that it takes considerable heedlessness to entrust yourself to unsure instruments, handled with approximation; or perhaps this demonstrates an invincible tendency to passivity, to regression, to infantile dependence. (But are you reflecting on the air journey or on reading?)
