Cranky and Bereft

Theoretically, I am very happy that I ended the month with 53,347 words more than I started it with, but in fact, I am in kind of a shit mood about it, which is so dumb, because there are actual problems in the world to be in a shit mood over and waaah, I wrote a bunch of pages this month is not one of them. But I'm not here to defend my feelings; I'm just here to describe them. Sometimes I have felt very good at the end of a project. This is not one of those times.

Probably because this is not the end of the project, not by a long shot, nor is it the glorious first draft phase when you're flushed with discovery, and every hour spent writing feels like an hour of intimacy with a fascinating new love. There is so much hard work to go, and so much self-doubt and second guessing, and sometimes it feels like I get a good idea, but then I pounce all over it and smoosh all the goodness out of it until it's flat and squishy, hokey and overdone. (That happened, like, six times from 2006-2008.) And once I've botched it, I can never get back to that original idea that was so good, like when you wake up from a dream and start trying to describe it -- "We were in some kind of...place...a school, or on a office, or an auditorium or something" -- and with every word you apply to it, you ruin it more, because that wasn't it.

Books I read this month while writing this whatever it is:

Jessie Sholl's DIRTY SECRET
Coming out next month -- a very accurate, honest, and empathetic look at her mother's hoarding.

Rachel Lloyd's GIRLS LIKE US
Coming out in April 11 -- a vivid life story/manifesto about commercial sexual exploitation.

Piper Kerman's ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK
Ooh! She went to prison! I always sort of wondered if I could make it in prison. Turns out no. 

Rachel Reiland's GET ME OUT OF HERE
Borderline Personality Disorder from the inside. Interesting and honest, but not as good as Stacy Pershall's LOUD IN THE HOUSE OF MYSELF, coming out in January.

Caroline Kraus's BORDERLINES
Borderline Personality Disorder from the outside. Co-dependent Caroline suffers at her BPD BFFs hands. Emotionally gory! Fun stuff.

Steketee and Frost's STUFF 
An engaging non-fiction overview of the psychology behind hoarding. 

E.L. Doctorow's HOMER AND LANGLEY 
Fictionalization of the story of the famous Collyer Brothers, who were, coincidentally, hoarders. Very well-imagined, not a lot of action, just kind of a'ight for me, dawg.

Emma Donoghue's ROOM 
Yes, I read this icky bestseller, told from the POV of a five year old who's lived his entire life locked in a room with his mother by a psycho captor, and I'm sorry for being such a prurient sheep and so much Part of the Problem, but it was like a big dumb movie I couldn't resist, and it was secretly very satisfying, much like when I watched It's Complicated on cable.

Suzanne Collins' THE HUNGER GAMES, CATCHING FIRE, and MOCKINGJAY
Baa.

Sue William Silverman's LOVE SICK 
A woman's recovery from sexual addiction. Too much recovery, not enough addiction, but good enough to recommend.

Patti Smith's JUST KIDS
She was much cooler than anybody else ever has been or will be, so the rest of us can just give up. 

Likes

Subway reader, 2010, by Amanda Stern.

Also: Jersey Shore. I know, I know -- it's a minstrel show, it's offensive, and it glorifies steroids and violence.

But this was my young adulthood.

These were my friends, this is what we did: we pre-gamed before going out to clubs to dance half naked on bars; we drank ourselves sick and shouted at people; then we drunkenly hooked up with each other at 4 in the morning when all other prospects had failed.

And in between the fights, and the bullshit, and the couple who can't stay together or break up, and the one guy whose pickup tactics border on sketchy, and the cliques within the cliques, we had fun, often by singing stupid songs to make each other laugh.

As Paulie D says, at every opportunity, for no reason, at top volume, "Oh yeah!"

I'm not saying these Jersey Shore people should be rich or rewarded because they behave like obnoxious, drug-addled idiots. GOD FORBID someone had followed us around with cameras at that age; thank the lord there was no internet back then; we would have been even more criminally self-involved than we were. I agree with those who say that none of these people should be famous, nor should I have an opinion on the upcoming season of The Bachelor (that Brad guy again? bullshit...). However, it suits me fine that this show is on the air, because it's like watching myself at the age of nineteen, when I was, if I do say so myself, somewhat of a J-WOWW. As in WOWW, you should really wear more than that when you leave the house. WOWW, you probably shouldn't mix ecstasy and acid if you ever want to have a coherent thought again.

PICS OR IT DIDN'T HAPPEN:

There's something to the adage that ignorance is bliss. Or not ignorance, but a special kind of not-understanding that leads to a groping about the world with only feelings, no concepts or words, and not even emotional feelings so much as physical ones, sensations and pre-verbal desires. This was the world to get lost in, this world that sounded like drums in your ears that was really your pulse, the feeling of being pulled forward by the front of your pants, irresistible, how the cigarette smoke spoke to you in sines and cosines, explaining determinism on the couch of your friend's mom's apartment and this is the most comfortable couch I ever...

Like the Dickens

Besides the usual shit-ton of memoir (Foreskin's Lament, which is a really funny and horrifyingly accurate portrait of the type of mental torture I've been putting myself through for the past few years, and by "few" I mean "decades' worth"; also Portrait of the Addict As A Young Man, totally salacious but with beautiful writing), I've been reading a lot of Dickens lately, sort of going back and forth between the two genres. I'm into the less popular novels now, the Martin Chuzzlewits and the Dombey and Sons -- the thicker the better, I find. I like to see a longitudinal study of several intertwined lives over ten or twenty years; I like watching the kids, with their terrible parents or their wonderful uncles, find their way to adult personalities, systems of morality. It's like watching six seasons of a really good cable drama, one episode after the next. 

That's what I want to do in fiction; show characters evolving episodically over a long period of time. Let you experience everything the character does and thinks and feels as a kid, and watch how those experiences shape that person, understand every one of their thoughts and actions from the inside. But it's not children's literature, or maybe it is. I was at a picnic with a four year old not too long ago, and I showed her my copy of Our Mutual Friend, showing off how many pages it is. "Yeah," she agreed, "but it's got pictures."

Charles Dickens helped found Urania Cottage, a home for what they used to call fallen women. Then he put characters based on some of them in his books. Does that make him an exploiter? Am I?

The Ramble

I've been reading Stephen Elliott's The Daily Rumpus newsletter for the past few weeks, and I love it, it's so intimate, so aptly random; very dreamlike, which these days is lifelike to me. My own dreams have been even more vivid than usual (medication); the other night I had a dream about buying some Entemann's from a deli with Stephen and another author, who scoffed at me for having recently paid someone to paint my apartment. I painted my own apartment more times than I can count, I think now, hours later and awake, and I want to go back and tell the author in the dream about all the places I painted. Me and Sebastian even faux finished the wall in the bedroom in my first place in Brooklyn, it took seven different layers -- primers, alkyds, oils, glazes, some of them applied with sea sponges, all of which took hours to dry between coats. 

Speaking of faux finishes, "Sebastian," not his real name. But he's a real person, really exists. Really sends me emails: things going so well, corporate cars and trips; things actually going not so well, daughter in foster care, money tight. His dense, snaky blocks of text are dreamlike, wishlike, non-narrative, as they say, or as they also say, I'm not sure I see the arc here. It's kind of the same thing over and over, don't you think? Do you think you could add a little more personal growth?

Or, Can you make your mother a more likable character?

That's the challenge, isn't it. I thought you guys didn't want people to lie anymore. I don't want to lie anymore. I don't want to have to protect identities, especially my own. There is so much that I can't say. My throat is aching with it.

I just want to write in circles, if that's okay. I don't want it to have to be official. Like, I read Koren Zailckas' new book, Fury, and I was rapt when I was reading it and found it really salient, but I don't feel like writing a whole review-y thing about it. It was helpful to me, that's my review, as was the advance (because I am adfancy) copy of Stacy Pershall's Loud in the House of Myself, which I'll write about when it comes out in January, but for now I just want to say that I've thought about some of the things I've learned from it every day since I read it. I don't feel like going into what those things are.

Other: Bill and I went to San Antonio, just got back last night, feel like I'm still there, like it's right on the other side of town. Everything is right here.

Bill here, giving you the latest...

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Janice's impending doom... er, return, is still scheduled for the 19th of this month, but I'm here to deliver the next two episodes of THE BILGE SHOW for your viewing pleasure. We like reaching a nice round number. It makes us feel like all that money spent on college educations was somehow worth all the fraud and embezzlement it took to earn.

Enjoy!

--Bill Scurry

Bill Posting as Janice temporarily...

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--Bill Scurry

Bilge Forever!

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Disembodied voices command you to watch!

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OH GOD NOT THE BILGE SHOW *AGAIN*

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Bilge-Aversary!

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