Gotham Diary:
Taking Inventory
3 July 2014
It’s the eve of a holiday weekend, I’m going to be in the kitchen all afternoon, and all I want to be doing is reading The Silkworm. What could be more sublime than a screwball comedy, stripped of its pratfalls, and planted in a scary murder mystery? The mystery is gripping, but not as gripping as the screwball comedy — which, if you’ve read The Cuckoo’s Calling, and why didn’t you?, is astonishing simply for having continued. Robin Ellacott is still engaged to Matthew Cunliffe! Matthew, a handsome but priggish accountant, continues to throw hissy fits about Robin’s working for Cormoran Strike, the rogue detective who lost a leg in Afghanistan. So Robin has actually been reduced to fibbing to her fiancé! So often, that’s how trouble starts! Plus, they have rows all the time. Wait, there’s more! In a chapter that I read before I fell asleep last night, Strike is really impressed by Robin’s handling of their vehicle when a large truck jackknifes on the highway in bad weather. I’ll be interested to find out who killed the nasty old writer, but I can’t wait to see how the romantic complications among the sleuths work themselves out, and I won’t mind if JK Rowling takes seven books to sort them.
Kathleen asked me if I was thinking of reading the Harry Potter books after all. Certainly not, I said: they’re for children. But I’m grateful that they propelled Rowling into the bestsellersphere where she belongs. As a first-class writer and engineer of satisfying fictions, she restores a touch of dignity to the very idea of best-sellers. One thing the Cormoran Strike books have in common with the Harry Potters, though, is that you ought to read them in order.
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Two weeks ago, I began reading old Daily Blague / reader entries, beginning in 2010, when the site was introduced. It did not take long to get through the first year’s entries; they were mortifyingly skimpy. I was a new grandfather! — my one and only excuse. Last week, however, when I started in on 2011, I noticed an immediate change, which was both gratifying and dismaying. As the entries were more substantial, they took longer to read and to appraise — I’m compiling a set of Evernotes, with links, comments, and snips — and it was impossible to read more than two months’ worth. Yesterday, I had to stop after just one. At this rate, I won’t catch up with the present until the beginning of next year.
Whether or not I’ll be able to knit a book out of old DBR entries remains to be seen, but I’ve got a framework for the project; I call it Inventory. If I were an ordinary writer, without a blog, I could just flesh out my outline, but a good deal of what I’d be writing has already been said, and possibly better said than any attempt at recapture. There are several subjects that I’ve addressed more than once, but with varying felicity; I was startled, yesterday, by a statement about my childhood that was sharper that anything that I could think of having said more recently. The appeal of editing existing texts is, for me, enormous, even though I suspect that material drawn from blog entries will make up a good deal less than half the length of a book. There is the possibility that I don’t really have a book in me, that the connective tissue linking ideas expressed in burst of blog will merely be lifeless filler. There is also the much brighter possibility that the mass of entries, as such, will inspire new connections.
It appears that some glitch in the updating of the code that governs the presentation of the site has garbled characters that require entry via the numeric keypad, most notably the em dash. My system operator is trying to determine the cause, and then we shall consider solutions. I was quite upset about this disfigurement when I discovered it, about a month ago, but it has certainly fired up the book project. Correcting garbled characters isn’t the only editing that those entries need. As a blogger, I’ve allowed myself a great deal of freedom to concoct long, complex, and frequently interrupted sentences. I’ve been like a child playing with blocks, seeing how far I can go before everything topples over. To some extent, the play is vital, for it opens up possibilities for ideas as well as for verbal curlicues. But it makes for tiresome reading in the long haul. I would become sick of my own writing if I were not so keen on tightening it up. A few of the entries that I’ve re-read stand out as perfectly presentable, but most seem to be sketches. Which is right and proper: that’s what a blog ought to be.
Writing this particular entry today, I’ve felt a strange self-consciousness: this isn’t the sort of thing that I’m going to want for my book! It’s true that “housekeeping” entries — writing about blogging — are the dreariest of all to re-read. They’re even worse than attempts to describe a dream. It may have something to do with how I process experience. (This was, indeed, the subject of the remark that I found so surprising in yesterday’s reading.) If, looking back, I see something that, as it turned out, contributed positively to the way I’m trying to live now, then it’s a good thing. Everything else is relegated to a dump of regrets that I do not frequent. Writing about blogging almost always betrays confusion on some point or other that eventually works itself out in practice. This confusion might be evidence of something interesting, but, as experience goes, it belongs in the dump. Is anything more fatuous than confusion?
Speaking of housekeeping, I was chatting with Ray Soleil on the phone yesterday, complaining about books that I can’t shelve because there’s nowhere to put them. “There’s no room for another bookshelf,” said Ray, and my immediate reaction was to see that another bookshelf would just make the problem worse. It’s like building extra highways: they just increase traffic. I know that I am mortal and that I shall die, but I can’t seem to understand that I must also make my library smaller. I must raise my standards by yet another notch; each book must make a somewhat better case for my holding on to it.
Such fun.
Daily Blague news update: Corporate Sleepwalking.