Writing Shit…

I’m currently reading a novel on the basis of a recommendation printed in the back of Hunter S. Thompson’s magnificent political screed Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail.
The book is called Ask The Dust, and it’s by John Frante. I’d never heard of him, but I have heard of Charles Bukowski, whose glowing praise is heavily quoted in the online review on Amazon so I bought it.
And boy does the story of the semi-starved would-be literary genius, crouching in a LA flophouse hotel, living on oranges and too broke to pay rent resonate. Even with a well-fed, comfortably housed and gainfully employed would-be literary genius. The stuff about Catholic guilt, and whores, and a really long, surreal bit about a huge earthquake which might have only happened in the narrator’s imagination don’t mean much – but the writing does. The sitting at a typewriter hammering out pages and pages, trying to pin down an increasingly slippery idea that vanishes like a breath, or gives up – battered to death by keystrokes.
Yesterday’s mighty struggle to pin down a flash of an idea ended in terrible stalemate. I wanted to write about how some great museum artefacts made me stop and think how insignificant most of the petty shit I worry about is. How individuals and their daily routines are erased in an instant while great works of craft or creativity sometimes manage to transcend time.
Sound simple? Even those last two sentences took me a while. You don’t even want to see yesterday’s literary mincemeat. Left to ripen for a day it's starting to stink. Paragraphs stopping abruptly for no reason, or changing tack in midstream and beginning a new thought unbidden. Blue ink and yellow highlighting the few scattered signs of life.
I sat and wrote through most of the day at work. Wrote through virtually all of the last-days-of-Nazi-Berlin drama Downfall (probably for the best. Close attention to dozens of characters graphically and despairingly putting guns to their heads and pulling the triggers isn’t ideal Monday night viewing). Basically, wrote until all strands of thought were hacked to bits, leaving me nothing to tie together into logic. After a while I went from thinking ‘I know what I want to say, but I just can’t work out how to say it,’ to having no idea what the hell I’d been trying to say at all.
Not being able to resume work on it this morning was a relief. But rereading it is depressing. There are maybe two or three good sentences or fragments in over three pages of single-space text. Frankly, I don’t know if there’s anything there worth saving. Ask The Dust’s troubled hero’s fortunes shift when he digs a letter out of the rubbish bin and posts it to his editor, who prints it as a story. Hell, maybe I should give it a go.