The end of the week

When working on as many projects as I do because of the work Sullivan Street Press does, it is often a temptation to divert all creative energy into the company and reserve none for myself. It is certainly easier to do that. I have no illusions that hordes of people are going to be waiting eagerly the night before we release Scags at 18 to receive their pre-paid copy of the book in a download.

I often wonder why this kind of mania exists in us and what it does to our compasses as we work away, those of us who create works of fiction. I recall many of my former students telling me they chose to become novelists because they wanted to make a lot of money.

After that idea passed between their lips, I would cock my head and bite my tongue. I knew the kinds of evidence I could have given them regarding that foolhardy plan. But that would also end their interest in taking my class so I decided the better part of my life plan was to keep my mouth shut.

I read not with envy per se but definitely some kind of curiosity about people lining up to see a movie or to buy a book. It is rather curious to me the ones that they line up to read or to see. I mean there is rarely anything that good that holds as many people enthralled today as it did years ago when I saw clips of men and women lined up to hear Maria Callas sing or when there would be long lines to see Woody Allen movies.

To buy a book didn’t ever require standing on a line. Book buying was a less boisterous activity, reserved for those who liked quiet and the more serene surroundings of a library.

Man those days are sure gone. As are many of the libraries and the bookstores we went to and stood around in breathing in the air of the paper, the glue and the indefinable aura of something as serene and provocative as a good book.

Whittling away these days at the pages that need to be written in order to get Scags at 18 finished takes me back to those times. Her world is not this one. Hers may be new to her and ever surprising, but it is of a completely different order of size. That is the word I guess that makes me think differently of that time.

We didn’t have supersized drinks or meals. We just ate a good meal or not. We certainly didn’t realize that the gas we bought for $.29 a gallon, yes you read that correctly, had any moral implication. If it just took $2.00 to fill the tank of a car, that was the norm. It felt right and manageable. A war raged on another continent that we had to spend plenty of time studying about in order to know a) how to pronounce the names and b) what it meant that a president declared a war resolution. That meant on our own we had to understand things that seemed completely irrelevant to the time we spent with our friends on a Friday night consuming drugs and/or alcohol and trying to figure out where our bodies began and ended.

In that world Kurt Vonnegut was a hero. Salinger was a hero. Even Mark Twain was a hero, along with Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre and Marx, and we liked to think of our music as being produced for us, that it spoke for us and to us even when it was making some record company lots of money.

We read a magazine called Ramparts and it filled us with lots of crazy ideas about sex as well as filling our minds with great political writing. But all in all, there just weren’t these super anythings.

Wars were being fought by kids we grew up with. The night of the lottery for the draft we sat with our male friends and waited for their numbers to come up. And when Kent State happened in June 1970, it was as if we were all connected through the ether of the air that floated all around us, some huge drug cloud carrying our thoughts and fears and our loves and hatreds. We exploded with the rage we knew all about and knew we were being led down a road we didn’t want to go down.

In some ways, writing Scags at 18 lets me live there again, in that time when there was no future but is now so very past it is as if it were encased in some magical kingdom of memory and shrine. I hope that when the next book comes out people want to read it and learn something about what it is to keep being awakened to the world in which you must live.

I am certainly learning through her voice what that feels like.