Servusamanu.com

I have them occasionally.  Rarely.  Almost never.

Of course, as usual, I haven’t written a thing.  Not a word.  Later.  Today.  Soon.  Tomorrow.  Famous words of the pathologically incompetent.   Still, it hasn’t been entirely a loss.  I’ve got some ideas rumbling around, a few of them might even be good.  Soon.  Soon.  Always soon.  I’ve got the file already up and saved with a nice working title.  That means the project is started!

In lieu of writing I’ve been reading.  Three books this week.

Monday I started Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs.  I’m not going to pretend that I understood a word of it.  Half On The Road, half Henry Miller.  It’s one hell of a skip-around drug adventure.  I’m not sure how it slipped through the cracks before now, but I finally got it reading it.  Interesting, fun, mind-boggling, also completely useless for anyone trying to get better at writing.  There’s nothing to pick out there, no skill one can marvel at.  It’s simply a hundred and change pages of crazy nothing held together by either madness or genius.  It was a quick read, and easy one to mark off the list.

What sort of unadulterated weirdness could follow that?  As of Tuesday morning, I knew nothing about  Vernor Herzog, the German director, or his eccentric actor star Klaus Kinski.  A coworker of mine mentioned sent me on my way with Kinski’s biography, All I Need is Love, and Herzog’s Kinski retrospective, a documentary called My Best Fiend.  I watched the dvd that evening.

Insanity.  That appears to be the running theme.  The back-story behind Fitzcarraldo is fascinating.  He actually dragged a boat over the mountain.  There is a line from Herzog, “I am sane, clinically sane, but Kinski thinks I’ve lost it.  He does have one thing in mind when he says that.  This one time when I was especially fed up with him, I did legitimately consider fire-bombing his house.  I was all ready to do it, but the plot was foiled by his Alsatian shepherd.”  Herzog offers no further explanation.  Why did Kinski have an Alsatian shepherd?  It’s not a dvd for final answers, also it’s in German with subtitles, but it’s well-worth the price of admission.

Following up on Herzog’s dvd, I read Kinski’s version.  Again, nothing but insanity.  The man was either a epic liar, a playfully insane chronicler of non-truth, or genuinely the most absurd person to have ever lived.  Again, I won’t give anything away, but it’s a fun biography to read as long as you’re prepared for a lifetime of rambling sex, insults, and movie magic.  It is an absurd book.

To round out my week, I started reading Rainbow’s End, by Vernor Vinge.  It’s cyberpunk, speculative science fiction, hyper-tech, all the usual sorts of things that I normally read and, despite the post-singularity technology, the most grounded thing I read this week.  Without going at the plot with any especial gusto, it’s a combination of Neuromancer, Snowcrash, and an action director’s take on Eco’s Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.  There aren’t too many authors who can pull off the recovering Alzheimer patient protagonist, but that’s what science fiction is made for, yes?

I’m not sure if I was tired of reading or tired of the genre, but it failed to capture as fully as some other books.  In truth, I think it was better written than any of them, but I’m reading this story last so it takes third place.  As a writer, it has finally solidified my mind on something that I could and should have seen a thousand times elsewhere, namely, that in any longer work it seems absolutely necessary to have multiple viewpoints.  It is simply no longer optional.  The modern novel appears all but unsustainable  when forced on a single voice, a single character, a single point of view.  Perhaps novels have become too influenced by movies?  Movies used to have longer cuts than they do now, for sure.  Have we lost any ability to follow a long narrative?  I don’t think so, I just think multiple viewpoints has become a better method for telling most stories.  It opens up the fictional world in ways that a single viewpoint could never realistically compete.  Rainbow’s End used a half a dozen characters for the primary view without any especial pattern.  It picked up a person when it needed them and then let them become secondary once their part in the mosiac was finished.  The umpire in me finds it unbearable, but it’s literary genius when used correctly.  I’ve obviously got a bit to learn.

Which is where I intend to do now.  Soon is finally?  Probably not, but the week is over and it’s time to start looking at the next one.  I don’t think I have any books on the docket, but I am considering Splinter Cell: Conviction.  I get too distracted, I know.  My one short story came back rejected.  Such is how things go.  I’m off to mail it on to the next future-rejector.  Wish me luck!  Adieu.