I do have lots of thoughts and ideas flying around in my head, which is usually evidence that I need to write a blog post. So here I am.
Watched a documentary about Montgomery Clift, whom I think of as the most beautiful man in classical Hollywood. His recognizability seems to be fading more than that of his contemporaries as the years pass, and I suspect it's because he was so picky about scripts that he turned down huge, enduring roles: Brando's in On the Waterfront, Dean's in East of Eden, Holden's in Sunset Boulevard (that last one made me protest aloud). Films he's made that have stuck around, even among old-movie junkies, can be counted on one hand.
The documentary was made by his family, and it disputes the most commonly known version of Clift's story: that he was a tormented homosexual. Evidently he wasn't tormented about it at all, just private. (And anyway he seems to have been that unicorn among queer people - a genuinely bisexual man.) The doc doesn't offer meaningful explanations about what did torment him, and why he consumed substances in such massive quantities, but other than that I found it believable. And there's so much Monty in it, visually, that it's a treat to watch. I want to write about it, specifically the problems with cooperating on a biography of a famous family member, and the dynamic of betrayal and resentment vs. public interest that I think inevitably results. I'll get to it sometime this week, with luck.
There's so much work left to do in terms of setting things right in our new apartment. Not unpacking, exactly, because there aren't many boxes. But books are piled everywhere, some of my office furniture is still in the garage, and there are no pictures on the walls. It's a full house but not yet a home. I have no enthusiasm whatsoever for this task after spending so much effort on moving. Also I can't seem to make solid decisions about how I want things set up here - how to arrange things in the kitchen cabinets, which way to organize the books. It feels at once irrevocable & important, yet so petty & dumb that I don't want to waste brain cells on it.
Lots of good news going on around Ceremonials. The first tour is in place, I'm starting to do interviews and articles, and I settled an issue about the book's appearance with my publisher to my satisfaction. (Our mutual satisfaction, I hope, but I'm not inside her head.) SPD is going to feature me in February, which should drive word of mouth nicely. Expenses are piling up troublingly, but I can write them all off - and if they don't reap returns, I'll have learned a lot for next time. Here's a taste of the good news: the event page for the launch at the Last Bookstore. If you RSVP and pay, you'll get a copy of the book; if you just show up, you'll still get in just fine but you won't be guaranteed a copy.
Next on my list is logistics of getting books, setting up the second tour during the summer, and continuing to spread the word to magazines and interested parties. And figuring out how the heck book club visits work. And maybe opening an account with Square. To paraphrase Smithers, releasing a book with a small press seems like a big job, but
Got a really kind rejection from an agent for Highbinder the other day. I'm starting to think I'm having the same problem with that book that I had with Ceremonials: it's too much in between things to categorize, and thus to accept. Agents who primarily sell genre books don't like the language, and agents who are interested in literary fiction don't have contacts with genre presses. I've had a ton of rejections from the former kind of agent but haven't tried many folks in the latter category. I think, she said, heaving a sigh that came from the soles of her feet, I must do a round of research into agents who do crossover genre books (i.e. The Night Circus). I really, truly thought I'd written a straightforward urban fantasy novel, but the pattern of rejection tells me that I did not.
Speaking of rejection, man. No one wants my hybrid film essays. I knew they'd be hard to place but I did not think they'd be so roundly rejected. It's been a really crummy few weeks for that, and it's made me worry a lot more about selling that book. I know this work is good, and new, and I'm not compromising for mass readability, and I recognize how that positions me: ego vs. the world, usually resulting in obscurity (and often in poor quality). Don't care. I'll send 'em out until I can't physically click the mouse anymore.
The final essay for that book is about The Misfits, and it's involving an unexpected amount of research. I rewatched the movie a little while before the move and I have a couple of theories about why it isn't any good. I read Arthur Miller's last play, which is loosely adapted from the experience of making the film. I'm also rereading a book about the filming I first read in 2013, and some of what I have to say about that (and will be writing about in the essay) was already said on this blog at the time.
 |
| Marilyn was extremely ill on this picture, from gallstones and pills, but she was rarely more beautiful. She looks untouchably lovely, especially compared to the gritty cowboy setting and her older costars. Her acting's also quite good - the part isn't great, but it's a woman's part instead of a girl's, at least. |
I thought this essay was going to be about horses and the American West & its lies, but I'm researching the movie and its personalities a lot more than I expected to. What usually happens is what's likely to happen: I'll do all this research and end up integrating a sentence or two of it into the 4,000 words, relying otherwise on my imagination. That's okay; that's fine; I tend to think that's what research is for, to lie embedded below the mind's activity on a topic, like nutrients in the soil. But I also sense that I'm dawdling, and if I could quit researching and write, it would be better. Yet I can't pass up reading the rest of Goode's book, in case the most useful item comes later on.
(This is why I was a poor legal researcher, btw. WHAT IF I MISS SOMETHING. Better spend all day on a really simple Shepardizing task.)
Mentally I'm gearing up to start the next book, which is going to be a collection of analytical essays about bad film. I'd prefer to write a novel in between the two, but my ideas on the bad film book are so potent and available that it's coming next whether I want it to or not. I've started telling people about it and they seem interested.
On Halloween I hosted an event at CSUN that turned out pretty badly. It was a film screening, and the volume on the film was so low that a guy with a jingling chain wallet getting up to throw his trash away drowned out the dialogue. We couldn't figure out a way to turn it up any more. Also, the room was badly suited to a film screening, with fluorescents we couldn't turn off and a skylight we couldn't cover. It was light as day in there. The students kept leaving and I didn't blame them.
Plus, I called out a couple of kids who were talking during my (brief! interesting!) introduction, and they stared at me resentfully for the rest of the time. It was a voluntary event, so I felt both justified (you can leave if you don't want to be here, but if you do want to be here, show some respect) and mistaken (this is casual, so why does it matter if you pay attention?) in telling them to stop, and agonized about it and all the other things going wrong during most of the screening. The next screening - two Fridays from now, in a different room - will go better, I hope.
 |
| How can it go badly when this is what I'm screening?? |
Editing-wise, I'm in stride, as far as I can tell. Trials and tribulations come and go regularly on that side of the desk, and sometimes they're just as dramatic as they are on the writer's side. I'm not learning a lot I didn't know mechanically; emotionally, though, I'm learning a great deal. Shaking off bad feelings is just as prevalent over here, but the reasons and thrust are really different. I had to reject a writer at a late stage of a review whose ideas were so literal that it limited her, and whose notes on my edits were petulant and short-sighted. I felt awful about doing this, because I so wanted to be of help, but working with her any further would have been a waste of my time and likely hers. There's a lot of balance in editing: between editorial vision and writer innovation, between quality and voice, between originality and useful structure. Between being of help and belaboring. I think that's the beginning and end of the knack I have for it, the balance part. Everything else is practice.
 |
| practice, practice, practice |
No comments:
Post a Comment