I posted new old songs on this site today, ones to join "How To Be Alone", and it made me want to write something. Barring playing the guitar (beyond absentmindedly strumming "Get Back In Line" by the Kinks, I never play anything on the guitar) I thought it had to finally be time for another blog.
This guy from high school that I was best friends with really early on, but not the 2nd half - the best friend at the time with whom I played my first rawk. He on drums and me on electric guitar, we did the most elemental mountain man riff, really retarded, but it was heavy and loud and it was good.
Anyway, very strange to see him on myspace, what he looks like now - oh and he also lives in this same New England town where my parents live - a bit odd. Anyway, he wrote this thing upon discovering me up there through another friend I had in my network and vaguely remembered, who maybe found me because I was on that reality TV show Fabulous Glare At the Regular Feller! a few years ago.
Anyway, this old best friend as he was today, he loved my new song and was very much reminiscing about what a nice guy I had been, and how he let me down or something like that. Something I didn't recall at all. I remembered ceasing rather suddenly yet gradually to be best friends with him anymore, nor our crazy petite charismatic but really very crazy other best friend - and finally, at the very end of high school, my best friend was Moses, at the very top of the high school social feedbag.
In another myspace exchange with the guy today, he mentioned to me something the original person who found me on myspace because of the reality show I was on and tipped this dude - let's call him Omar - off to me, had already told me - was that they went together the other night, with a girl whose name didn't ring a bell - to see this other girl whose name also didn't ring a bell (!) book signing for her 4th novel, which took place in our old home town, and referenced a million high school memories and all these kids that hung out around the school, and all these specific little things and quirks all of which were real. I thought that sounded kind of cool - the only sort of writing I've ever been capable of since I've been out of high school has also been based on very much real stuff.
So Omar rants kind of funnily and surprisingly about this girl, this author (who I google image searched and found her web site - she's super cute!) (but alas happily married with a baby in Maine somewhere sigh) and how she referenced things he remembers, things about our immediate social circle and specific memories that he recognized himself in, and recognized our really badly crazy but funny little friend in, and all sorts of stuff that Omar ranted she didn't write really, just retold. We gave her fodder that she simply memoired and called it a novel. I guess that was Omar's point.
Anyway, I seem to have no point, for that was pretty much the story. I wrote back to him that most good fiction is just the retelling of real stuff, and very few masters and craftspeople like Nabokov, Amis and Delillo write stuff out of thin air, make up stories not based on any real memories they have or things they experienced directly. But that's not true - you can tell Salinger writes pretty personally and the stuff seems like stuff he's really seen - Capote too, hugely, and they're great master writers too. I seem to be obssessing with this question - whether great prose can't just be the lyrical rehashing of things that really happened.
This guy from high school that I was best friends with really early on, but not the 2nd half - the best friend at the time with whom I played my first rawk. He on drums and me on electric guitar, we did the most elemental mountain man riff, really retarded, but it was heavy and loud and it was good.
Anyway, very strange to see him on myspace, what he looks like now - oh and he also lives in this same New England town where my parents live - a bit odd. Anyway, he wrote this thing upon discovering me up there through another friend I had in my network and vaguely remembered, who maybe found me because I was on that reality TV show Fabulous Glare At the Regular Feller! a few years ago.
Anyway, this old best friend as he was today, he loved my new song and was very much reminiscing about what a nice guy I had been, and how he let me down or something like that. Something I didn't recall at all. I remembered ceasing rather suddenly yet gradually to be best friends with him anymore, nor our crazy petite charismatic but really very crazy other best friend - and finally, at the very end of high school, my best friend was Moses, at the very top of the high school social feedbag.
In another myspace exchange with the guy today, he mentioned to me something the original person who found me on myspace because of the reality show I was on and tipped this dude - let's call him Omar - off to me, had already told me - was that they went together the other night, with a girl whose name didn't ring a bell - to see this other girl whose name also didn't ring a bell (!) book signing for her 4th novel, which took place in our old home town, and referenced a million high school memories and all these kids that hung out around the school, and all these specific little things and quirks all of which were real. I thought that sounded kind of cool - the only sort of writing I've ever been capable of since I've been out of high school has also been based on very much real stuff.
So Omar rants kind of funnily and surprisingly about this girl, this author (who I google image searched and found her web site - she's super cute!) (but alas happily married with a baby in Maine somewhere sigh) and how she referenced things he remembers, things about our immediate social circle and specific memories that he recognized himself in, and recognized our really badly crazy but funny little friend in, and all sorts of stuff that Omar ranted she didn't write really, just retold. We gave her fodder that she simply memoired and called it a novel. I guess that was Omar's point.
Anyway, I seem to have no point, for that was pretty much the story. I wrote back to him that most good fiction is just the retelling of real stuff, and very few masters and craftspeople like Nabokov, Amis and Delillo write stuff out of thin air, make up stories not based on any real memories they have or things they experienced directly. But that's not true - you can tell Salinger writes pretty personally and the stuff seems like stuff he's really seen - Capote too, hugely, and they're great master writers too. I seem to be obssessing with this question - whether great prose can't just be the lyrical rehashing of things that really happened.
posted by Same Suit Sam | 10:34 PM
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