Gillian Welch

It took me some years before I started to learn to like, and even love, country music. Sometimes a Johnny Cash song would break through my New Wave, but in general I just didn’t “get it”.



My problem was this: I wasn’t listening to any of the old stuff. Then, towards the end of college, someone slipped me a live CD of Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys. Wow. That Texas Swing was some truly ass-kicking music, and started to figure out that the best stuff was the old stuff.



So I started putting an ear out. While I’m not a country afficianado, I know there’s plenty of good music I just need to come across to love.



Which is why I was pleased to see, on BBC, a 4-part series called “Lost Highway: The History of Country Music.” Very nicely produced, and in-depth. The last episode I saw, “Sweethearts of the Rodeo”, focused on women in country, from Jean Shepard and Patsy Cline, through Loretta Lynn (whose last record, by the way, produced by Jack White, is utterly stunning) and Dolly Parton, and up to Shania Twain and kd lang.



But the real find there, for me, was Gillian Welch.



Says BBC:

With guitarist David Rawlings, Welch has re-drawn the approach to traditional music, writing and performing songs that are at once sparse, haunting and seemingly part of the vein that goes back to the Appalachians.


I suppose that’s all true, but the fact is, it’s just amazing, melancholy music. Check out, for instance, the song “Time (The Revelator)”. It’s simple and slow, but with a hook that stays with you for days: The days are getting straighter; Time’s the revelator.



A couple years ago, even the New Yorker was taken by her. That’s all fine and good, but in the documentary I watched Loretta Lynn stumped for words to describe the respect she has for Gillian Welch’s music. That was enough for me, and it should be enough for you.





"First Get 007. Then the World!"

Well, as I mentioned last week, I dug my claws into some Ian Fleming James Bond, in large part because I’m interested in writing espionage fiction, and thought it wouldn’t hurt to get real with the most famous archetype.



As I mentioned then, I was finding Diamonds Are Forever to be better than I expected, and was finding it a good ride. The writing was stripped down (except when it came to a meal), it moved along at a nice click, and I liked that Bond wasn’t the all-knowing god he tends to be in the films.



But then, well, it started to drag a little bit. Maybe it was my knowledge of the film, which I enjoy, but it started to feel like a regular ol’ boys’ adventure story. Not a lot more. (Despite the rather cool detail that poor Felix Leiter is now working for Pinkerton because the CIA sent him to a desk after he had to have his hand replaced with a hook!)



So I decided to do a little research.



I read on some site that Diamonds was considered the weakest of his earliest Bond books, while From Russia With Love (which happens to be my favorite Bond movie) is the strongest of the earlier ones. So, ready to be wowed, I quickly finished reading Diamonds and turned to Russia.







my next book











sixties’ spy





Slow down, ya move to fast...

A little while ago, I talked a little about my writing habits, specifically my tendency to write a few pages, then go back and edit, then move on to the next chunk of pages. One of the annoying things about writing, particularly for newcomers who (like I did when I got going) would like to get a few stable guidelines, is that as soon as you mention this kind of guideline, it tends to change the next day. That’s what’s happened to me.



About a week and a half ago, my output on this novel suddenly trippled. Whereas some people are talented enough to crank out 15 pages a day, I’m generally very contented with 5. And so it’s never a chore to go back and edit them the next day before diving into new stuff. But suddenly I got a clear vision of where my story was heading, and the pages just seemed to drop out of me. 15, then 17, then 19, then 19 again, and on one miraculous day nearly 30. I felt like a porn star.



But then, like any successful porn star, I started to worry.



Why?



Because by the end of the week, I had nearly 100 pages of only lightly edited stuff. I liked looking at the stack, of course, and showing it off to my girlfriend, but then she said, “And is it good?”I shrugged. I didn’t really know. In fact, I doubted it. But I wasn’t going to worry about it too much. I couldn’t waste time when my fingers were hammering out so damned much progress.Finally, on Friday, I reached page 250 (out of a guesstimated 300 pp manuscript) and decided it was time to catch my breath. I was closing in on the final act, and needed to make sure I was at least going in the right direction.



Overall, I was. The story’s generally good. A little overmuch in places, but once I’ve set the finished manuscript aside for a couple weeks, I’ll be far enough away from the pages to edit those correctly. But in the last, say, 50 pages, I saw that I’d started to lose track of where the story was heading. There were some nice scenes, and it was generally believable, but it started to feel plodding.



So I’ve had to rethink those last 50pp and cut most of them in order to put things back on track. Today, I came up with a new understanding of all the denouments, and wrote a lousy 9 pages in that direction.



Lousy? Well, no. But it sure would’ve been nice to see 15.



I think my point here is just to say that when it’s going well, when the pages are flowing, go ahead and let it flow. Don’t hinder yourself. But when it’s gushing continually for over a week, and you’ve got 100+ pages to gaze at, it’s probably time to take a day off and see what’s really in there. You’ll surprise yourself in good ways and bad, but most importantly, you’ll make sure you’re still on track, and not waste another week leading the story down a blind alley.



Of course, like any rule, this one may go out the window tomorrow. And I’m sure that this guy would call it a load of bunk.



On the Web: Future Me

If only I would remember next year what I know now…



How many times have we said this to ourselves?



Well, now there’s a new way to make sure you don’t forget a thing. It’s called Future Me, an extremely simple site where you can write an email to yourself (or someone else) to be delivered on the date you specify, weeks, months, or years in the future. You can choose to make them public, or private, and you can browse public entries. And there are some tough ones, like:

Dear FutureMe,



Are you still alive? Do you remember that this time last year, you were actually in tears as you were typing this? Do you remember that this time last year, your two-and-a-half year old relationship was practically in shambles and you were mad at how things had changed so much?



I hope you’re still in college and that somehow you got over all the problems you encountered when you started last year. I sincerely hope you sticked around for the entire first year.



Take care of yourself and I hope you’re now leading a somewhat happier life. If you at least manage to achieve that, you will be doing something your past-self was totally clueless and helpless of doing.






So, this will make 18 months since the filing. Are you finally divorced? I sure as hell hope so Charlie, cause you got to get on with your life, and little m isn’t going to wait forever.If the decree isn’t final yet, you should seriously consider just running away to Jamaica or some other warm country that doesn’t have extredition to the US.


Check it out, and write yourself one. I will, just as soon as I remember what it was I was supposed to remind myself about last year.


Asymmetrical Spin



After another uncharacteristically good writing day, I took a peek at Dark Planet, which led me to Fafblog, which then pointed me to the BBC, from which I excerpt the following:



The suicides of three detainees at the US base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, amount to acts of war, the US military says. […]Rear Adm [Harry] Harris said he did not believe the men had killed themselves out of despair.



“They are smart. They are creative, they are committed,” he said.



“They have no regard for life, either ours or their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”


real life is much stranger















Check out the entire article

Second Drafting

I’ve been out of touch here in the last few weeks because my obsession with getting through this next book has taken over completely. Apologies for that. Not only have I been absent here, but I’ve been absent in Budapest as well, all my time engaged with this laptop in the living room, or, on good days, in the garden.



So I thought I’d pop in with a quick object lesson on second drafts.



I don’t actually work in full-sized drafts. I write X-number of pages, read over them with complete disappointment, then work on them until I can bear the sight of them again. So my drafts are fragmentary until the whole thing is done.

American Movie Critics

IMAGE: Pauline Kael, from Associated Press



There’s a terribly appealing review over at the New York Times today on Phillip Lopate’s new anthology, American Movie Critics. It’s less a review than a chance for Clive James to riff on the difference between critics who involve theory in their critiques, and those who go by perception.

SINCE all of us are deeply learned experts on the movies even when we don’t know much about anything else, people wishing to make their mark as movie critics must either be able to express opinions like ours better than we can, or else they must be in charge of a big idea, preferably one that can be dignified by being called a theory. In “American Movie Critics,” […] most of the practitioners fall neatly into one category or the other.



It quickly becomes obvious that those without theories write better. You already knew that your friend who’s so funny about the “Star Wars” tradition of frightful hairstyles for women (in the corrected sequence of sequel and prequel, Natalie Portman must have passed the bad-hair gene down to Carrie Fisher) is much less boring than your other friend who can tell you how science fiction movies mirror the dynamics of American imperialism. This book proves that history is with you: perceptions aren’t just more entertaining than formal schemes of explanation, they’re also more explanatory.














check it out

In da Metaxu Club

Our more perceptive readers will have noticed not only that we’re posting with surprising (even for us) infrequency lately*, but also that there’s a new link at the bottom of the Ways of Escape: the Metaxu Cafe litblog network. I actually hadn’t seen it until recently, and was very impressed by Bud Parr (aka Chekhov’s Mistress)’s incredible vision and design, and savvy layout. So, like any jealous man, I joined. You can now view Nomad posts from the comfort of your Metaxu armchair. But please, do come back and visit now and then. You can listen to our new hi-fi.



*Once we have our various other projects better in hand, we’ll all be back to our usual frequency.

(Originally posted at the Contemporary Nomad)