Misc: How Not to Write a Novel

Because the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, I've started working on my novel again. From the beginning, of course; grave-robbing the old dead novel would make far too much sense. Actually, while I'm still calling it The Amateurs and it's still a caper story with overtones of magical realism about two professional jewel thieves trying to leave the business, everything else about it is so different that there is nothing left from which to rob. And that's OK.

I've been working very sporadically on the new outline for several weeks, and I finally started the first-draft composition on Monday. I'm up to about two thousand words, which is practically none, but I can't think too hard about how many I still have left to write (78,000!) or I'll stop cold and start doing useful things with my spare time, like keeping my apartment clean or learning carpentry, and that would never do.

In any case, I probably won't allude to it very much here. I found the running word count on How Not To Write A Novel to be a failsafe ambition-killer -- like dieting, it made me focus totally on results to the detriment of any healthy or effective process. I learned from it though, and the most important thing I learned is that I am so bogged down by fear of failure that I have to put myself through some amazingly gymnastic head-trips in order to get anything done. Also like dieting, now that I think about it.

Reading: My Family and Other Animals

I have loved Gerald Durrell's work since someone gave me a copy of A Zoo In My Luggage for airplane reading in my very early youth; to me, Lawrence Durrell is merely Gerald's older and less funny brother, a viewpoint which would no doubt pain them both. These days, A Zoo In My Luggage makes me a little uncomfortable, being about a white man who goes to Africa and surrounds himself with Cameroonian servants who call him "Masa," but I still read it for the animals, which are classic to the point of being immortal.

In the introduction to My Family and Other Animals, Durrell writes "This is the story of a five-year sojourn that I and my family made on the Greek island of Corfu. It was originally intended to be a mildly nostalgic account of the natural history of the island, but I made a grave mistake by introducing my family into the book in the first few pages. Having got themselves on paper, they then proceeded to establish themselves and invite various friends to share the chapters."

They are also what makes the book laugh-out-loud-till-your-nose-runs-and-people-on-the-subway-look-at-you-strange funny. The passages on Corfu's animal and plant life are indeed beautiful, almost poetic, but the crazy people in and surrounding the Durrell family are the kinds of characters who could only have been invented -- it astonishes me that they actually existed outside someone's fevered imagination. Larry, obsessed with books; Leslie, obsessed with guns; Margo, obsessed with herself; Gerry, obsessed with animals; and towering above them all (only in the metaphorical sense, as she was apparently about four feet ten), their indomitably eccentric Mother: passively but surely focusing all their individual oddities into a grand, tidelike surge of family strangeness.

My favorite thing about Durrell's style in MFaOA (also its sequels Birds, Beasts and Relatives and Fauna and Family) is that, while the book is written in the first person, he never quotes himself. Everyone else "talks," but Gerry merely tells us what he said. The effect is one of a slightly drunk raconteur telling the story of his childhood long, long afterward.

Misc: John Williams and the New York Philharmonic

Last night I thought I would humor my husband by going with him to Lincoln Center, to watch John Williams conduct the New York Philharmonic in a program of his own and Bernard Herrmann's film music, with guest speakers Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. I was pretty tired and the place was packed to the rafters, which was where we were sitting, and I'm not so big a movie fan of late so I didn't know if I would have a very good time. I was quite wrong and how glad I am.

The first half of the program was Williams conducting Herrmann's music and Martin Scorsese talking about it, which was just sufficient degrees of separation that it was more informative than entertaining. Scorsese was reading pretty evidently from a prepared script, which was perfectly fine and very educational, but once or twice I wondered if he'd glanced at it at all before he came out or if that was his first gander. The music was great, of course -- there was a wonderful Psycho montage with accompanying film -- and Williams is obviously an enthusiast. It's just that it was a little academic: an homage, but not a particularly emotional one. Scorsese loosened up a little talking about his own Taxi Driver, which was Herrmann's last score, but all in all the most interesting thing I learned before the intermission was that Martin Scorsese is not a tall man. At all.

But the second half, with Steven Spielberg, was magic, my God. John Williams conducting his own film music that he wrote for that guy right there in what is surely one of the most prolific collaborations in the history of the medium, was something almost otherworldly. Spielberg came out, acknowledged the earthshattering applause that must follow him wherever he goes, and when we all shut up, began "Movies are made from flashes of light," and I immediately got chills that I haven't lost yet. He loves movies, and hearing him talk about them is like a master class. He talked a lot about process and creative decision-making, which seems very active, but the thing that struck me most was a sense not of creating a story but of finding the story and giving it the space to tell itself.

The best part of the program was the last fifteen minutes of E.T., with accompanying film. The movie's so good that I managed to forget for long stretches that the orchestra was there, until I glanced away from the screen and realized "Oh! You guys!" What's funny is that everyone in the audience was there because they'd seen the movie over and over again, but we still all totally lost our shit when E.T. made the bikes fly. What must it be like to be Steven Spielberg and experience that from an audience? Twenty years later.

Star Wars wasn't on the program, but Williams gave it as one of the encores. It was the last one -- people were just about throwing their underwear at him before he finally put out -- but it paid off, is what I'm saying. Nothing like it.

Knitting: Splash accent scarf

So I finished the skinny accent scarf in Crystal Palace Splash. It looks like I cruelly lopped a really long tail off of a really short Muppet, but I don't care.

Thus:



It took me three tries, embarrassingly. The first one, knit lengthwise, I had to rip up because it was too short. The second one, also knit lengthwise, I had to rip up because in the middle of casting off I dorkily got distracted and began straight knitting again, and I couldn't figure out how to save it because I can't see the stitches in eyelash yarn. The third one worked, because it would take some stupid that even I haven't seen in years to screw up the "cast on 4 and knit till the yarn's gone" technique.

Here it is on a model, before the model stopped cooperating:



You can tell from the ears that he's not quite diggin' it.

Reading: To the Lighthouse

I've discovered that reading Virginia Woolf puts me in kind of an irritable mood. So far I've only read Flush, A Room of One's Own and now To the Lighthouse, but they all feature cultural bondage in one form or another, particularly the bondage of love. After awhile I begin to feel as though the mere presence of other beings in the world imposes an unbearable pressure on me, and it gets worse and worse as I go along until eventually I have to take the cat off my lap and put him in another room.

I'm not sure what Woolf felt so damn bound about, in the matter of love at least, since her husband was by all accounts supportive to the point of self-effacement. Maybe it was just that she was nuts -- the mental illness that led to her suicide was manic-depression, I believe. Personally, if I'd been asked, I would have chosen a wildly successful marriage and taken my chances on mediocrity in everything else (which is fortunate because that's pretty much how it's worked out for me so far).

I was about to continue "so it makes even less sense that I'd be affected that way," but on thinking about it I realize that I'm exactly wrong about that. If you love happily, your actions are influenced by the people you love down to the very last nuance, whether they set out to influence you or not -- even more so, I believe, than if you're unhappy. I can see why someone like Virginia Woolf would feel bound by that.

Knitting: Veroniguel bootees

I have made a pair of bootees out of Kid Merino with a Splash embellishment for the impending baby of my dear friends Veronica and Miguel. I haven't checked with Guinness on this, but I'm pretty sure I've managed to make the cutest bootees of all time.

Thus:



It's kind of hard for me to make things that come in twos because, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person with this problem, I make one of them and it's interesting and fun and a challenge to see if I can make it come out, but then the second one is a huge damn chore. These took me two weeks, which is ridiculous, and the only reason I finished them at all is that the baby is due, like, any second and will undoubtedly have two feet, unless Veronica and Miguel have extraterrestrial DNA that they're not telling me about, so there was no way to avoid it any longer.

Anyway, Splash is my new favorite novelty yarn. I'm making a skinny accent scarf out of it next.

Here I Yam

I couldn't keep posting at How Not To Write A Novel when I stopped writing a novel, because there's really not much more to say about it after that, but one has to have someplace to discuss one's interests, doesn't one, and I only know two people in real life who I can talk to about reading and only one and one-half people who I can talk to about knitting, and in any case I'm not too crazy about real-life people, let's be honest, living in New York as I do and riding the subway with hundreds of them every single day of my life, and out of a couple of hundred people there's always one who hasn't showered that morning and another one who farts.

Where was I? Oh, right.

So from the ashes of How Not To Write A Novel rises ratty blue stockings, a title I chose because it conflates my current interest in knitting with my perennial interest in reading. I've always liked the designation "blue stocking" because I was born to be an old maid librarian who keeps twenty cats, but added "ratty" because I'm a married library school dropout with only one cat, so I'm clearly not very good at it.

Reading: To The Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)
Knitting: Kid Merino baby bootees (sage green)
Cat: Cranky, because it's winter again out of fricking nowhere and he hates being cold.