He’s always social distancing and we are too. But we check on each other daily.
I’m dealing with ‘writer’s block.’ I hate that term and I think it’s over-used, but that’s what I have in my toolbox of words to term this thing. I have this story to finish and it’s a pretty good story. I haven’t been able to get it done lately. Not only does it feel like I am down in a hole trying to claw my way up and out, it feels like I am weak as a writer. I’m accustomed to feeling strong. I am one of the world’s leading experts at procrastination, and I am clever and conniving at rationalizing procrastination, but I normally feel like: ‘I could get this done if I wanted to, or really needed to. I could dig down and grind it out.’
Now, not so much. So the one thing I can think of to do is just to take very small steps. Do something very simple. Then do the next thing that’s very simple. I know that the strength will eventually come back to finish this story. Here’s my list of steps:
I’m going to look back on this and laugh about it. No doubt about it.
In Mississippi a lady that I worked with gave me an amaryllis which I put in the flower bed in front of my house there and within five years there were about 30 of them.
Here in Montana, the plant is more persnickety. My wife grows about twenty or thirty of them indoors, in the atrium/ full length windows part of our house and it seems like you get about a 10 percent attrition rate through the winter. But when they bloom, they always strike me as a cheerful-looking plant. Here are two starting to bloom on the dining room table. I think I gave her both as gifts – I know I gave her the one that has the colors of an apple blossom.
In the background is the lighted nook we built a few years ago for the dining room area of our house. I think I did most of the work of building the “box” and Colleen did most of the finish work – our usual style of working together. Here’s the “box” going into the “hole in the wall.” (This old house has plaster walls and ceilings).
This week, with the cheerfulness of the amaryllis to inspire me, I plan to get lots of writing done.
This quotation from Australian singer/songwriter Paul Kelly means a lot to me:
I tried to do it as a typecast – still working the kinks out of that.
Paul Kelly seems to intersect with my life a lot. The 1987 album “Under the Sun” on tape cassette lived in the cassette player of my Ford “Lazer” for the time that I lived in Australia during 1991 and 1992. I played that music for years afterward, too. In 2006, an Australian Film group made the film “Jindabyne” based on Raymond Carver’s short story “So Much Water So Close to Home.” Paul Kelly had recorded a song based on this story titled “Everything’s Turning to White” and Kelly also did the musical score for the film.
Lake Jindabyne and the town of Jindabyne was an old stomping ground of mine in Oz. I went there a couple of times with the squadron I was in – 817 Squadron – as we did search and rescue training there. We were training for the contingency that an airliner might crash in the Snowy Mountains and there would be an all-out rescue effort. They were multi-day SAR exercises that involved coordination between helicopters, snowmobiles, first responders on skis and on horseback, and virtually the entire town of Jindabyne. But I also went there on my own at least 8 times to fly fish for trout. There was an area where the Thredbo River flowed into Jindabyne that was like holy place for me. I would take off in my Ford Lazer at midnight, drive 5 hours and be there when the sun came up at the mouth of the Thredbo. I even built a carrier for my wooden boat, mounted it on top of the little car, took it up there, and motored around the lake with it. Everyone I met said the boat was too big and heavy to be mounted on top of the car like that, but I did it anyway, and I have photos somewhere.
So my wife and I watched this movie “Jindabyne” based on the Raymond Carver story, with Paul Kelly knuckle-deep into the production effort, and though the music was fine, all I can say is the film was a bit of a slog. It was drama on top of drama, surrounded by over-the-top drama. I remember telling Colleen, “I’ll bet the townspeople of Jindabyne watched that and then said in that laconic Australian way, ‘Well that was a bit a dark, wasn’t it?’” I mean, it’s a dark story, sure,…but the film needed a little more comic relief, or something. It seems to never go two minutes without someone screaming at someone. But I enjoyed some of the scenery in the film , which seemed to be shot around Jindabyne. I did not see the mouth of the Thredbo River flowing into the lake, though – I could have pointed out the spots where you could catch trout.
I have a short story started titled “Tullamarine” which is based on the situation in this Paul Kelly song:
It doesn’t copy anything from the song, of course, but it uses the basic situation of the song as the starting point for the very highly stylized, fictional, and invented story. I think of it as a “dark lady of the sonnets” story, where a guy runs into an old lover at the Melbourne airport, and then a series of events occur which release a lot of ghosts and plot twists from the past. The dark finger of old love from the past is beckoning. “Tullamarine,” an impossibly poetic word for me, is the nickname for the international airport at Melbourne. But back to the Kelly song – the line “I woke up at the table and the house was burning bright,” – is a great line! – and it takes me straight to a Raymond Carver sort of world.
Paul Kelly’s memoir titled “How to Make Gravy” is unique. He takes 100 or so of his best songs, alphabetized by title, and then writes a little vignette about the writing of each one. It skips back and forth through different periods of his life and is an overall great read. I think it was published in 2010. There are recorded performances of the 100 or so songs – 8 CDs! – which go with it.
I am finishing up a story titled “Martin and Miyako.” When I finish, I will move on to “Tullamarine” – which I am occasionally making notes for. Writing is difficult in this weird pandemic time, so far, but I am working on writing every day.
Listening to:
From 2017, and
From 1959, I think.
Both great albums. There’s this one moment in the second song of that Howlin’ Wolf album – first you have perfect piano, then perfect electric guitar, then perfect harmonica, then all of a sudden you have what sounds like trashcans being pounded on a wooden floor – but perfect, absolutely syncopated rhythm with the rest of the song – it is one of those moments in blues music that just totally owns me. It is like BB King and Tracy Chapman dueting on “The Thrill is Gone,” or the beginning of Rev. Gary Davis’ “Death Don’t Have no Mercy” – totally owns me. I surrender.
