Coming Back for More

I have not been in the habit of re-reading books -- outside of books assigned for college courses, the only books I have re-read have been written by Kurt Vonnegut. I read Breakfast of Champions twice in high school, and I just recently finished A Man Without a Country for the second time. Much to my surprise, I found that I enjoyed it even more this time around than I did on the first read-through. This has convinced me that I need to give more than a few of my books a second reading.

If you are a bibliophile enraged at my ignorance, I must ask you to kindly put down that revolver before you do something you will regret later. Hindsight has made it quite clear to me that my erstwhile reading habits sprang from precisely the wrong attitude. Literature is art, and a work of art is not a merit badge to be earned and promptly forgotten. This is a long-standing  objection I have had to the "1001 Maguffins you must Kerfuffle before you Die" series of books -- to experience something merely for the sake of experiencing it cheapens its value, and dimishes whatever reward you might hope to get out of it. It was only recently that I realized that I was falling prey to the same attitude.

You may be wondering why I haven't read the majority of my  books more than once, especially considering that I have watched the same movies multiple times, have listened to the same albums over and over again and have played through many games more times than I care to remember. To be perfectly honest, I have no real answer -- it just never felt necessary to read a book over again. That reading a book -- especially a sizeable novel -- necessitates a considerable investment in time might have been part of the problem, but that really isn't an excuse. The time it takes to experience a work of art really hasn't much bearing on what I get out of it. This is especially true given that I have kept the majority of the books I have enjoyed.

Perhaps it's time to revisit the old favorites after all.

In Which I Attempt Fiction

This is the beginning of that book I mentioned in an earlier post.

The kitchen sink, as it ever seemed to be, was full of dirty dishes. Some were stained with pasta sauce so old that had begun to petrify into a brownish crust that, for whatever reason, reminded me of Yellowstone. The plates, at least, were mostly dry. It was in the water filled bowls that the true horrors of bachelorhood revealed themselves. What was once a bowl of banana bread-flavored oatmeal was now a primordial swamp out of which, at any given moment, I expected an heretofore unknown species of nematode to come crawling. Ours was less a kitchen sink and more a tiny cosmos; I less an underemployed Bachelor of the Arts and more a wrathful god, with the power to give life to a billion microbes with my munificent leftovers or to snuff it out in a moment with the cataclysmic power of soap and sponge.

On Being an Aspiring Writer

Like so many other bloggers, I suspect, I aspire to be a "true" writer. I feel as though I have a tentative plan for my first attempt at a proper book outlined in my head, but I just can't seem to get it down on paper (and I do hope to produce a proper manuscript, not a simple word document). The problem, as it has always seemed to be, is that I just don't know where to begin. And even if I should manage to get started, I will still be plagued by myriad nagging doubts, primary among these the question of why anyone would ever want to read what I've written in the first place.

There are rather a lot of ideas swirling about the primordial soup of my mind, from grandiose scenarios to brief scenes to assorted paragraphs, scentences and fragments. Thousands of middles, a few ends, but--as ever--no beginnings; no means of getting to the middles and ends, let alone making them meaningful and interesting to an audience. So many themes, but no way of placing them in context nor of making them meaningful to anyone other than myself.

Yet in spite of all my doubts, I nevertheless feel as though I have to write. I have to secure some sort of legacy; I have to secure my share of immortality, no matter how minuscule it might be. It is highly doubtful that I will find a place in the literary pantheon, but if I can touch the lives of even a few people--that is, if just a few people are moved by and find pleasure in what I might create--it will all have been worth the effort.

Heroes and Such

Although it will no doubt cause a great deal of bewilderment among my peers, I'll say this anyway: I have only ever seen one James Bond film and I really have no desire to see any of the others. The problem is that James Bond (along with the dozens of other characters of the same ilk) is essentially a wish-fulfillment figure for the garden variety heterosexual male: he drives absurdly nice cars, employs a limitless arsenal of weapons and gadgets, is surrounded by an endless parade of beautiful women and is almost never defeated. The same can be said, by and large, of most other action heroes.

Such superhuman wish-fulfillment figures are rampant in the media. The past several years have seen one overblown superhero movie after the next, and Heroes is among the most popular shows on television. This is partly, I suspect, because comic book nerds are now adults to whom products can be more effectively (and therefore more profitably) marketed, but that still leaves unanswered the question as to why hero characters are so popular to begin with. As I understand it, hero characters are popular because they often represent ethical or moral convictions that are held by most people and can overcome whatever obstacles they might face--even death, in some cases, is a temporary setback.

Yet the insurmountability of the hero that makes me so averse to them. In other words, the problem is that he is simply too perfect. James Bond and his sort are not characters with whom I can sympathize or empathize in any meaningful way--I cannot identify with the action hero, largely because the action hero is neither the kind of person that I am, that I aspire to be nor that I realistically can aspire to be. More profoundly, my inability to relate to the human society of which I am inextricably a member naturally begets an inability to relate to the icons of that society.