New Table of Contents

Lately I’ve been loaded with projects that are for the camera and not the page, which is my turf and the place I should be staying.

But past desires need to be tended to before I do that lonely writing thing. Still at night, I return to some of these projects. And I think as time passes, they keep getting better.

Strangers & Sojourners is now shaping up to be strictly essayistic, literary criticism. The intro that I sent to Gray Wolf Press had my two best essays and two throwaways…The introduction I think needs to have more imagination. It bordered on the didactic I fear. I may opt to create a more inviting picture of a Living Library…a sort of introduction of my instinctive attraction to books, why they’ve helped me figure out key concepts in growing into an adult. The problem is that the current cultural landscape is completely immature, crude and fun. It’s very fun to be alive, young and stimulated today. But in the end those kinds of thrills will not bring us to a spiritually better place. When I say spirit I mostly mean conscience and a native desire for truth, beauty, etc. What is it to do a thing in good faith or bad faith?

Mostly my book addiction has felt more like a journey. Stealing away into my room or into the stacks of the Norman library, or showing up at my jobs late, looking at the paintings of writers on the wall. I was never doing it so that people could see that I was doing it. I was doing it, and am still doing it because I believed I was supposed to be figuring some things out, because I had access to words, impressions and personalities that not everyone could access as well as I could.

So the ten or eleven persons, “strangers,” that I attempt to understand in this book are rich. But nothing I can articulate about them is going to instantly make my reader’s life better. There will be no translation. I fear that the best I can offer is “cultural capital.” The goal would be to provide something more pragmatic though. But I think there will be an inward thing gained as each chapter unfolds. A certain sense of self possession is what I needed before writing this book (well, sort of). I know so many smart people who are aimless and adrift. And I figure if the nucleus of our intellectual life remains as bitter and dispersed as it is now, and full of bad faith, then the real idiots are going to sneak back into the core and tear us back down. There will be no new ideas, no new jobs, and not much spirit to build something new. I could be wrong about this. If my book fails it would be literary masturbation. But I’m convinced it is not so, and that keeping at least 10 percent of the time in a week reserved for literature would help the educated person learn much about themselves and their world. How to make a library a living library? Hard to say b/c I’ve always done it so naturally.

 

My tactics for making appeal to current lit people are to include David Foster Wallace. Tonight I decided to add Susan Sontag, a woman who will provide the namesake for my cat if he/she proves to be a girl. Her last book Regarding the Pain of Others takes us back to the language of responsibility. By viewing the atrocities committed often times by our country, we are “co spectators” and have more a sense of caution in our ideas and decisions. I don’t just want to talk about horific pictures, but I’ll probably use that book to lead into an inquiry on current media consumption. That is, if we don’t want to see pain, then we don’t have to. We just don’t have to go to that web site, right? People’s attentions being diverted,e tc. When Susan talks about the pain of others I’d also want to talk about her years fighting cancer. Anyone who knows me knows that Sontag cuts a heroic figure to a person who’s seen some of the things I have in the medical field at this time, with a mom who is fighting the same disease. She fought it, because she asked questions. And then she wrote this book that opened many people eye’s to just how bad Americans are at talking about illness. Or if seeing the ugly realities of nature in general.

 

I also am going to write about Clint Eastwood now. I’ve watched Hereafter three times and it has moved me with a staggering, quiet force.

 

Saw my first acting performance. It’s practically a lead role in an hour and 30 minute picture. I felt vaguely uncomfortable after it. Like I hadn’t done a good job. LIke my voice was annoying to listen to. And it’s supposed to be of course, that’s my character. But others, a visiting actor from L.A. and a pretty good (and gay) one from Norman, gave me very generous compliments after we finished watching the crazy thing. Those two alone, and how close a lot of me and the case got, was really the reward in itself. What happens now is really not up to me, nor is it any of my business. Letting the firefly out of the jar as it were. Can’t scrutinize it any more when the work has been done.

And more work has gotten started in film land. Director wrote a cameo for me in his Bail Bonds movie. For whatever reason these bail bondsmen are very Mad Men ish. It was a blast speaking that fake super confident language in hallways with a power suit on. Should be, like all of his movies, funny without exactly trying too hard to be funny. Just being strange on its own.