Three Nights in Rednotebook
2:38 am
I've been thinking of going to Bartleby's Used Bookstore for days now
I have a list of biographies I want to live through for a bit
Last week I found a card for a psychiatrist inside a biography of Virginia Woolf
There was a date and time written on the back
And the margins of the book were filled with notes in the same pen
They were good notes, really good notes
4:15 am
I can’t stand quiet moments. I like to turn on voices that are easy to ignore. I like entering rhythms I recognize.
6:00 am
Poets once knew their birds; I know the dietary restrictions of my favorite pornstar.
4:01 am
hyper replay
crash
gotta punch through
distor-
ted sound
morning after morning
possible
plane — fall
escaping
arrhythmic wave
reaching
moon temple
2:50 am
Last week, I went to the home of a writer just outside Los Angeles for an interview. I noticed the laptop on her kitchen table was open to Scheherazade42’s online shopping cart. We talked for a while about what books we wanted to buy. We both agreed that the most ignored aspect of good taste is knowing what you’ll like before you’ve even read it, when all you really have is a name and a list of writers who cite this name as an influence. Or when you have even less, just a name and a title, maybe only a cover, or a spine. We talked of how you could rank great books by their first pages, their first lines, and how it wouldn’t make a difference.
She discouraged me from pursuing an MFA in writing. I had never considered an MFA in anything.
I forgot to ask about her process, the time of day she wrote, and what she thought about twitter.
After an hour, she asked, So how’s the struggle?
I thought for a while.
I thought for maybe too long.
But she took a sip from her coffee, encouraging me to think carefully about what I wanted to say.
I don't know what I'm doing, I said.
I think, she said, every writer wants to be a homicide detective or a villain. They want to study the chaos or manifest it.
I don’t know who I am. I don’t know if I am a writer.
There are some writers who only want to be writers in conversation.
I want to be a writer so I can live as a reader.
Do you wake up wanting to write?
I wake up wanting to read and to think of what I’ve read.
Do you write that down?
Rarely.
What you need to realize is that we are...look around you...we are wartime writers.