It’s always the same, I do it the same way, stretching like a sprinter, cracking my knuckles, warming up to write a new story, nine pages of lies, the more irregular the better.
I go to PDF Drive and download a shitload of books by authors I like— Thompson, Parker, Cheevers, Robbins, Bukowski, Hemingway, Carver, Baldwin, anybody familiar, reading bits and pieces, until I’m ready to go.
I like to listen to music when I write, so I'm listening to Art Pepper's album, Smack UP, which he recorded while high on junk.
People on Twitter, mostly those in the writing community, tweet questions, which seems like an attention-getting gimmick to me, but I’d like to ask—
Do you listen to music when you write?
Stephen King seems down to earth, I don’t know him personally, but I like his interviews, anyway, he listens to Megadeath, AC/DC, and Anthrax, real loud when he writes, or he used to, likely he's grown out of heavymetal.
When it comes to writers who don’t listen to music when they write, my guess is their work is barren— I'm a Cancer so don't think for a second about questioning my sixth sense.
Hemingway listened to music from the different periods he lived through, Josephine Baker, Cole Porter, fight songs of World War I— Let’s Bust up the Hun, Over There, You Can’t Beat Us (music that makes you wanna jump outta bed and salute).
The next question I would post on Twitter is—
Do you listen to music when your fucking?
Listening to music while fucking doesn’t do a thing for me, it’s intrusive at a time when all I want to do is deep focus on my taco inside my ladie's guacamole.
And the last Twitter question is—
Do you like the way your personality comes through on the written page?
If you don't like the persona oozing through the lines of your work, box it up, baby.
A Brit I know who likes my blog has told me over beers, that I write with confidence as if writing confidently is unique for authors. Anyway, my reply is always the same,
thanks.
This guy, Peter, talks nonstop, and it’s nearly impossible to follow him because of his English accent.
His conversation jumps around the globe from Australia to England, then to Thailand, seemingly changing the enumerations of events from day to day.
If I attempt to get the numbers straight he says in a spin, grimacing,
wait, I’m getting to that now.
I have given up trying to make sense of his monologue, simply nodding my head— I will go to a different bar to drink in peace tonight.
Have you read Fredrick Exley? He was a wild man, round the bend, and out the door.
In 1968 Harper & Row published A Fan’s Notes, a fictional memoir by Exley.
The book was so unorthodox that it captivated the reading public. Exley was an unknown, a drunk, a fantasist living in an invented world struggling to adjust to the demands of society.
He once said,
I’m telling you from my heart, that I will always be the drunk, the poet, the prophet, and the criminal— in company with those whose focus is insulated from the humdrum business of life.
Exley is pointing a shaky finger at the transgressive nature of his work here.
He was the son of a telephone lineman who grew up in Watertown, New York in the forties— a dying industrial town close to the Canadian border. His old man was known in town as a star athlete and barroom fighter. As a kid, he adored and feared his father, who’d come home drunk and strapped young Fred.
Anguish dogged Exley throughout high school in a town where football was bedrock.
He once blew a playoff game getting flagged for illegal holding in the closing minutes of the fourth quarter.
After graduation, he went to the University of Southern California, a glowing campus awash in the California Sun.
Rain or shine, Fred felt like a leper on the USC campus, ignored by the priggish Greek set he hung out at local saloons in the company of an aspiring literary crowd, fellow misfits.
The future author would watch Trojan football games at bars with his pals, beguiled by Frank Gifford who was everything he wasn’t— a popular, gifted athlete with movie star good looks.
Gifford later became an enigmatic character in Fred’s book A Fan’s Notes, a character he couldn’t come to terms with, but was a driving force nevertheless.
In the fall of 1953, Fed Exely rode a bus across America from LA to Manhattan with his BA degree in hand, renting a room at the YMCA, and getting a job as a PR man for the railroad.
Night after night, Fred would carouse the bars in Greenwich Village, drinking alone, perched on a barstool, dreaming of being famous like Frank Gifford.
In due time Fred lost his job, so he moved back to Watertown where he spent his days at his widowed mother's house tidying the house up and walking the family dog.
He lived for Sundays when he’d watch the Giants and Frank Gifford play on TV. Cheering Frank on kept Fred going— in a weird way when Gifford scored a touchdown Exley scored too.
Fred trained the family dog to sit with his back to the couch, so they could watch the Giant’s games together like two pals.
Soon he was drinking alone in the house and talking to his dog.
Having gone mad, his mother has Fred admitted to Wingdale Asylum where he enjoyed playing cat and mouse with the shrinks and began to write, reading his work to patients who'd listen.
Later, on the outside, he told friends that he loved the asylum and could live out his life there.
Fred was his own teacher and editor, educating himself by reading Edmund Wilson, and Flaubert. He particularly loved Nabokov’s Lolita, reading it over and over till the pages fell out.
Out of the asylum he holed up in his mother’s attic typing away on the book that would become A Fan’s Notes.
By 1964 the book was completed and he moved back to the YMCA in Manhattan where here would shop around for publishers, rejected by Random House, Houghton Mifflin, and others.
The publishers told him a book about football wouldn’t get reviewed and they were worried about being libeled by the Giants or Gifford.
A Fan’s Notes was much more than a book about football— it was a travelogue, from bar to bar in the Big Apple by a psychotic drunk who was an obsessive Giants fan.
Finally, Fred found an agent, Lynn Nesbit, who specialized in off-beat writers. Lynn gave the manuscript to Harper & Row editor David Segal who had an eye for the avant-garde. He liked the book's searing honesty, advancing Exley three thousand dollars for it.
A Fan’s Notes was published in 1968— a victory for every nearly do well author swallowed up in the canyons of New York City, the broken hearts that never mended, and people whose voices were never heard— because the madness known as Fred Exley roared above the crowd, hear tell.
I'll never write another word about Exley and his fucking book. I’m in bed, ill, after dashing off the bit about the loser— of course, it's plagiarized some, which is lucky for you because the original is ham-handed, like a hoofer with two left feet.
Whereas my girlfriend, Pinky, is living testament to the aforesaid proclamation in that she's lying on her back motionless and uncovered next to me in bed, looking like a dimestore mannequin ready to be lifted and dressed in some kooky outfit.
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