So, I’m back from California. Maybe tomorrow you will get to see zoo pictures, which are incredibly depressing. As you well know, I was incredibly sick over the trip, so that didn’t do very much for me. I received Sartre’s Nausea in the mail today, so it’s an ironic highlight to the past few million years of my life.
I’m working on two separate science fiction stories. One is about a military man, and the other is about a girl who folds herself into a flower. I don’t really know where either are going right now, but hopefully I’ll figure it out.
Will Self, who I don’t know anything about, has a fantastic interview here that contains this quote that I mostly agree with, though I have an incredibly difficult time writing about things that happen in the present:
If it’s not written now, it’s like when you see a film of The Great Gatsby that was made in the seventies: it looks like the seventies. That’s always going to be the case; there’s always going to be that built-in obsolescent decadence about it. It’s important that writers who can write write about now. Maybe the death of the avant garde is just a punch you’ve got to roll with. Whichever way it falls, you’ve got to accept that.
This is a poem that I wrote on the plane:
and I realized
that I had been barking
woof woof
up the most disgusting tree
Not too sure what Self meant about the death of the “avante garde,” pretty sure he’s not sure either.
TOG
I’m not sure either. That sentence is really out of place, and I think he might have just been rambling. I like his sentiment about fiction writers needing to write about their own time, though.
Stumbled across your poem above – loved it!
Thanks a lot. I’m not a great poet by any stretch, but I liked it.
He writes in that interview that the death of the avant garde lies in the fact that there is nothing shocking to uncover in literature. No taboo that demands to be writ of, no true modernism… supposedly, he IS getting to be a little of an old fart
perhaps the youth has something more, I hope so.