Well, it looks like my New Year’s resolution of posting every day is already shot. That’s what I get for having a modicum of ambition.
Amy wrote about our quiet New Year’s Eve celebration over on her site: she cooked a nice meal, we watched Annie Hall & some South Park episodes, and we barely made it to midnight.
We “watched the ball drop” (huh-huh-huh) on Dick Clark’s show, if only to remind ourselves of our mortality during the celebration. Yesterday, Howard Stern read the overnight TV ratings for the New Year’s Eve shows. It turns out that a stroke-impaired Dick Clark still drew twice the audience that Carson Daly drew. Make your own joke.
I didn’t really think up any good resolutions for this year, outside of the aforementioned “post interesting stuff every day” one. It’d be nice if I could keep up with my correspondences with my far-flung friends; I tend to let those slide when work gets too pressing, and it bothers me, because I pride myself on being a good friend.
I would resolve to keep up with the self-taught yoga I started practicing this fall, but that’s just a continuation of something I’m already doing. Howzabout: “I resolve to post a picture of me holding the standing bow-and-arrow pose”? Maybe not this extreme a hold, but hey.
I don’t think there’s any reading resolutions I can make. I’ve read an awful lot of books in recent years, and I’m happy with my ability to stick with significant works like Proust and that Robert Moses biography
. If anything, I might actually slacken my reading this year, or at least finish fewer books, because I’m hoping to get started writing a work of fiction this year, and that’s going to necessitate more research-reading and less novel-reading.
Which, of course, opens a whole can of worms for me. I’ve been hemming and hawing about writing fiction for a decade-plus. Mainly it’s because I’m afraid I’d actually suck at it, although I’ve come up with lots of other excuses to keep from trying. I’ve received plenty of encouragement from laymen and established writers alike, but I’ve tormented myself pretty neurotically. I mean, “flat-out crippled myself,” actually.
So here’s my resolution: stop doing that, and start writing a novel. Or collection of interconnected short stories. Whatever.
In closing, here’s a piece from A German Requiem
, one of Philip Kerr’s detective novels:
I thanked him and left him to his Engineer of Urban Conduits and Conservancy. That was presumably what you called yourself if you were one of the city’s plumbers. What sort of title, I wondered, did the private investigators give themselves? Balanced on the outside of the tram car back to town, I kept my mind off my precarious position by constructing a number of elegant titles for my rather vulgar profession: Practitioner of Solitary Masculine Lifestyle; Non-metaphysical Inquiry Agent; Interrogative Intermediary to the Perplexed and Anxious; Confidential Solicitor for the Displaced and Misplaced; Bespoke Grail-Finder; Seeker After Truth. I liked the last one best of all. But, at least as far my client in the particular case before me was concerned, there was nothing which seemed properly to reflect the sense of working for a lost cause that might have deterred even the most dogmatic Flat Earther.
Alright, maybe that’s too depressing a note upon which to start the year. Since my iTunes just shuffled up a “duet” of sorts with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Lori Carson, I’m going to share something from that. It’s about seven minutes of the Khan’s qawwali chanting, followed by a few moments of Lori’s breathy reading of some lyrics by Rumi:
The door is open
Let the beauty we love be what we do
Don’t go back to sleep
Don’t go back to sleep
