Om

I feel like I’m on drugs. Is it sugar? I had a big brownie from a vending machine about an hour and a half ago. I’ve been drinking lots of water. Something feels… off. I feel slightly weird, slightly manic.

I’d been out of the blogging mood for several days. I hadn’t felt like blogging and I hadn’t even thought about reading anyone’s blogs. And then this afternoon I try to catch up on my usuals, and everyone’s gone bonkers. Choire and Philo have turned into Sally Struthers. Jonno is writing impressionistically about New York. Sparky’s using bullet points. And not only has the Blogstalker returned, but he’s writing about John Blair cards in a semi-fictional way. Something feels slightly insane. The universe feels unreliable. If everything in the universe suddenly grew a thousand times as large, including ourselves, would anybody notice? But I feel like I’m measuring the universe with an unreliable ruler. How do I know an inch is really an inch? I don’t feel upset or worried. Things just sort of feel trippy, like they don’t add up. It’s not a bad thing. I just feel like I’m on drugs. I feel slightly manic. Slightly overstimulated mentally. Maybe I need to have sex. But sex doesn’t seem as exciting as the mental stimulation.

I want to read and read and read. Not necessarily all at once. But thanks to utmaninva‘s comment to my previous entry I want to read The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas. And on Bill‘s suggestion I checked out the website for Oxford World’s Classics and I want to read, oh, everything. Well, seriously. But right now I guess I have a few books on my reading list. St. Augustine’s Confessions and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and stuff by Plato and stuff by basically everyone else who’s ever written anything that has withstood the passage of time.

There are too many good things in the world. Do you know that I just got caught up on Choire’s last few entries and for some reason they completely blew my mind? The writing crackled with energy. It was so fucking refreshing and new. I wanted to throw out my keyboard and never write anything ever again. At the same time I wanted to write and write and write and keep trying.

Blogs trouble me. They trouble me because there is so much amazingly good writing out there that so few people know about. And not just blogs. There are independent bands. There are incredibly wonderful Broadway songs from long-lost musicals that flopped. Nobody’s ever heard of them. Are they still good? If a tree falls in the forest?

Who decides what is good? There is a surplus of goodness out there. Well, not a surplus, because that would imply that some of it is dispensable. But none of it is. It’s just that there’s too much. How can I decide what to read, what music to listen to, what movies to see, when all of it is so good? And how do I decide what is good and what is not? I want to read the classics. But there’s still amazingly good stuff out there. Fuck — last night at a pizzeria the TV was tuned to VH-1 and I saw a Sears commercial that was really witty. A Sears commercial! And yet there are all these classic works out there. My brain wants to explode. Oh my god there’s too much.

I feel like I’m drugged. I feel like right now I’m addicted to good things. I want to absorb the universe. I want to absorb everything that ever was, everything that is right now, everything that will ever be.

I believe that if I absorb all this goodness it will rub off on me and make me able to write The Perfect Novel. I want to assimilate Everything That Has Ever Been and write the Novel to End All Novels. I want to write the ur-novel. The uber-novel. I want to write the novel that will make all subsequent attempts futile and make the universe pack up and go home. Okay, fellas, the human experiment has been completed, human destiny has been achieved, we can go home now. Close the books on this universe. Time for God to make the next one.

What if God wrote a novel?

He has. We’re living it.

So it’s already been done.

Dammit.

I’m getting a headache.

Insatiable

I want to read every great book that has ever been written. I get like this sometimes. My brain gets so stimulated. I want to experience everything in the world that is good, that has been created and has been judged to be exceptional. The tragedy is that there’s not enough time. There are terrific books I will never get a chance to read. Musical compositions I will never get to hear. Cities I will never get to see. There are tons of wonderful people I will never meet. It’s not my fault. It’s just the way things are. Life is filled with an infinite number of beautiful things. There’s only so much time.

Yesterday I went to the Strand, determined (after some Amazon.com research) to buy John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor. I was in the mood for something postmodern. The book was written in 1960 but Barth wrote it in the style of an eighteenth-century novel. I bought it. Then I left the Strand and went to Barnes & Noble in Chelsea, and I wound up buying yet another book — The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami. My friend Nick is reading it and he thought it would be cool if we both read it at the same time, because then we can discuss it afterward. It was sitting there, prominently displayed on a special shelf. It looked interesting. So I bought it.

And so instead of The Sot-Weed Factor, which is now sitting on my bookshelf horizontally (I’ve been told it’s unhealthy for a book to lie horizontally, although maybe that only applies to hardcovers), I’m reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. It’s terrific. It turns out it’s exactly the type of book I was looking to read.

I want to read everything. At the end of Rita Mae Brown’s book on writing, Starting From Scratch, she sets out a recommended reading list of literature — books that anyone who wants to be a serious writer should read. There must be at least 300 books on the list. How anyone is supposed to read everything on her recommended list is beyond me. I have this almost unquenchable desire to read everything on the list, even though I know that I’ll never be able to do it.

I want to learn Latin.

I want to read every great book because I think and hope it will make me a better-informed writer. It will clue me in to the use of language, to structure, to plot, to character development. I want to be an expert. There’s also an element of pleasure, yes — it feels great to read a great work — but there’s a Puritannical (or at least very American) self-improvement streak there, too. Great literature will make me a better person. In addition to a better writer.

Hmm… suppose I read a book a month. Over the next 50 years I can read 600 books. That’s a hell of a lot of books.

But there’s also people to meet. Sex to have. Really good movies to see. Places to visit. Cuisine to eat.

I’m envious of people who were English majors in college and read lots of the classics by the time they were 22. I’m 27 and I’m young. But in some ways, 27 isn’t so young. There are people five or six or seven years younger than me who have read way more great literature than I have, and so they are much better informed about these things than I am.

I want to find a good primer on Western philosophy. I want to work my way through the great philosophers. Find out why Plato’s so great. Saint Augustine. Figure out what Wittgenstein’s all about. I want to read everything. Now. Paradise Lost. Dante’s Inferno. Everything by Charles Dickens. Gravity’s Rainbow. Now. Because I don’t trust my attention span. If I don’t do it now, I will lose interest.

Relief and Joy

The five-day heat wave is supposed to break today.

And this morning I learned that I’ve been offered the job I’d been waiting to hear about. Someone pulled some strings.

I will remain employed.

I can’t tell you how happy I am. And relieved.

I’m going to enjoy this weekend.

Anyway, it’s really been an exhausting week, blog-wise, so I’m going to cut it short today, except for a link:

Doonesbury is online. Not just today’s strip. Not just yesterday’s. No, you can search the entire 30-year archive of Doonesbury comic strips. Wow.

One more thing: Ernie, I’m sorry to hear about your layoff. But you know — with guys like this on your side, and with all your great abilities, I’m sure things will turn out just fine for you. Hang in there, and best of luck.