Rumours of my demise, etc. In fact, April has been Novel Writing Month in Debville. It has progressed well, but slowly, & left me in a state in between hopelessness & optimism. What is this state called? Perhaps 'normality'.

I am back.

In news, this: a joint venture by Mission Australia and realestate.com.au to raise money for the homeless. Click on the link below to donate a dollar to Housing for the Homeless.

www.housesforthehomelesscom.au

As usual, I am torn. In the words of Lee Stringer, it's presumptuous to assume the homeless need homes. Perhaps what they need is more complicated than that. Perhaps more simple.

Do we, of the middle-class, internet-surfing world, really think we have all the answers, for everyone?

This is one of the few answers I have for the right now. Click the link, give a dollar. Why not?

This is how Lee Stringer began to write. He lay in a crawl space underneath Grand Central Terminal, groping about for anything long and thin. At last his hand fell upon a wooden, dowel-like instrument. He thrust it into his crack pipe, and before long had freed up the last smokable resin. He lit up, and ''success, love, orgasm, omnipotence, immortality,'' as he describes the effect of the drug, were once again his. One parched, drugless day he was reduced to staring at the long, wooden thing, and noticed it was a pencil.
-- Kurt Vonnegut

Here's something I picked up in a brilliant bookstore in San Francisco last time I was there. City Lights Books, I think. I'd forgotten the name, but I looked it up & this sure looks right, the map looks right, too. Such wonderful, esoteric stuff designed to tempt even the most jaded book shopper.

The book took me a year and a half to pick up, and an hour to read.

"When I teach -- and I've taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop for a couple of years, at City College, Harvard -- I'm not looking for people who want to be writers. I'm looking for people who are passionate, who care terribly about something. There are people with a hell of a lot on their minds, Lee being a case in point, and if you have a hell of a lot on your mind, the language will arrive, the right words will arrive, the paragraphing will be right."
-- Kurt Vonnegut

(Why did it take so long? I put it on the wrong shelf. I put it on the shelf in my room, where I expected to see it first. I was spending a lot of time in my room that year. But I came home and found out my housemate was moving out, life changed, and I expanded. Now the books in the 'to read' pile sit on the shelf opposite the lounge, in the largest room of the house.)

"In a way .. it's a struggle to be human. I mean, if you really look at it, we wake up every morning to an alien environment. Certainly not the environment man was created in. It's a busy, throbbing, hustling, buzzing, spinning, crazy, alien environment. And the struggle for me, within that, is to try and be human, to try and do human things, to try and remember what we were born with. So to me it is very much a struggle just to be human, not so much a human struggle to do something else, but a struggle just to feel ... human."
-- Lee Stringer

I am, I confess, an idealist (we make the best kinds of cynics). I'd like to pretend good writers are good people and bad writers, well, they'll get theirs, eh? Yeah, right. Now and then it's gratifying to hear someone else -- unapologetically -- espouse the same thing.

"And I have said about the practice of the arts that practicing any art -- be it painting, music, dance, literature, or whatever -- is not a way to make money or become famous. It's a way to make your soul grow. So you should do it anyway."
-- Kurt Vonnegut

Also, I love that this *is* a book, that this book exists, that someone thought to record that conversation between Vonnegut and Stringer and then turn it into a book. Not streaming media, not lost-and-forgotten. A genuine, gods own book.

Vonnegut's tired but intense idealism sparks expansive riffing from Stringer, a new writer still amazed by the art's potential, and the rapport between the two is as engaging as the topics they ramble through, expound upon and pick apart.

A caffeine jolt for the soul. Don't you wish you could've had Vonnegut on speed-dial when he was alive? Don't you wish you could have that right now?

Vonnegut & Stringer quotes are from LIKE SHAKING HANDS WITH GOD: A Conversation About Writing.

Vonnegut always fills me with the desire -- in his fiction, in his talk -- to say goddamn, goddamn, goddamn. Over and over. I love that about him.

One of my students said, "Mr. Cheney, you seem really upset about this." I said I was, but not in a mournful way, not in the way you are for a life cut short, but rather in a more selfish way -- the way that comes from knowing you now live in a world that this person, whose consciousness was so important to your own, does not live in. I'm glad to have lived in a world that Vonnegut shared for a time, but sad to soldier on without him.
-- Matt Cheney, The Mumpsimus

To Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness.
-- Dinitia Smith, Voice of America's counterculture falls silent

All of the arts, with the exception of architecture, are practical jokes, making people respond emotionally and at no risk to themselves, because things aren't really happening. A good example would be "The Last Supper" by Leonardo da Vinci.

What I do, which is becoming more and more impractical I think, is make people respond to idiosyncratic arrangements of 26 phonetic symbols and ten Arabic numbers in horizontal lines on a page. And there was a time when this was a form of home entertainment, and so it was worthwhile for people to learn how to read. But reading it is actually quite difficult--I mean it is as hard as learning to read music, and it's a remarkable skill. And if you take ink on paper and make people respond to it, they themselves are going to have to be performers. It's like arriving at a concert hall and being handed a violin, and you're expected to play. That's what we expect readers to do, perform themselves, because they're half of the performance.

But ink on paper is no way to tell a story anymore. Film and movies are the best way to tell a story today. That works, so you don't have to be a performer yourself anymore. Because of our terrible high schools, we have a huge illiterate population, but they can sure as hell watch a movie.

I would guess that people who are literate somehow get their minds improved, or they get more personally involved in a story when they read it because their own brains are involved. Watching TV or a movie, your brain need not be involved, and you can just kill time.
-- Excerpted from an interview with Lacey Rose on Oct. 17, 2005.

I didn't agree with Vonnegut all the time -- hell, I didn't even *understand* him all the time. But I always admired his passion. And his compassion. Particularly his compassion.

He never failed to make me think. And he was one of those rare authors who can turn a sentence just so -- just *so* -- that I'd forgive him again & again for the things I didn't get.