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
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
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
Hey, there is no way you can suck at writing fiction as much as I suck at singing…Which is why, despite the crippling fear of humiliation and overwhelming sense that I’m a lost cause, I turn up for my singing lesson every week. I come up with lots of reasons why I shouldn’t bother, and it can be quite emotionally draining, but I keep doing it.
Hell, once in a while I even enjoy myself.
Maybe one day I’ll be good at it. I won’t know unless I try.
I figure there’s no point sticking to stuff that keeps us in our comfort zones. There are lots of things I’ve worked at over the years, but I realised they are things I kinda knew I was already good at. That’s why I never felt a real sense of accomplishment. It’s only when you really run the risk of falling flat on your face that you get the buzz of achievement. So, get creating boy!
GO FOR IT with the fiction writing and stop putting pressure on yourself!!! Just write what you want and when you feel like it, take your time and you’ll be amazed at what you can come out with (…I’ve yet to see evidence of you not having much to say!).
I know you’ll be really good and it will give you something new to focus your attention on. Anyway look at all the crap out there!!! You can’t produce anything as bad as most off the stuff that gets passed off as ‘the book of the year’ by so-called critics and experts.
Now we’re all going to bug you to check that you’re acting on your new year’s resolution – ha ha!