011: Pretend like you know me

Sitting at the computer late at night unsure of what to listen to, I inevitably choose the Coral's Nightfreak and the Sons of Becker.

It's a remarkable choice, an esoteric one. I have all five of the Coral's albums and the majority of my friends, and many strangers, have never listened to them. Those that have usually get mixed feelings (although Alyssa seemed to really dig them and Ryan once told me he went through a Coral phase after hearing Dreaming of You on Scrubs.) Nightfreak is their most maligned album, from a band that is generally well-regarded, so long as one only ever listens to the opinions of Allmusic.com.

It goes like this. Their first album (self-titled) was ridiculously inventive. I haven't listened to it the whole way through in years, but its mix of pop sensibility, raucous energy and psychedelia made it a potent breakthrough. Their second album (Magic & Medicine) was by far a more precious affair, with sweet guitars and jangly melodies. If their first album was 1968, this was about 1965 or 66. Their most recent two albums (The Invisible Invasion and Roots & Echoes) have continued on this route, purifying their neo-60s retro sound of much of its initial punkiness. The band remains a talented group of composers and performers, but their objectives appear to have shifted considerably since their first outing.

In between is this bizarre little bit of business with the attention-demanding name of Nightfreak & The Sons of Becker. Famously, it was written and recorded nearly spontaneously in the studio, and it definitely sounds like it. It's ragged and rough, and weirdly funky and dark and paranoid, even ominous. It's the only album where I think the group sounds sexy, possibly due to the heightened presence of bass. Listening to it one summer night while I went for a late coffee, I decided it was the ideal nighttime album. Most of the tracks are wafer-thin compositions with rudimentary lyrics and guitar noodling, but it's that tossed-off, minimal feeling that gives the album so much character. And at only a half hour or so, it slinks by.

I ought to get back to writing. My new computer is on its way. I owe the world another play and have been thinking constantly how to restructure it for two acts and juggle these characters without making them seem 1-dimensional. In a comedy, two-dimensional is largely okay as it's harder to laugh at someone if they're a fully-rounded human being. I've also been thinking about those short stories I keep writing in my head, and keep re-drafting without satisfaction.

The writing, I stress over. I stress, if you can believe it, over things I am not writing and not thinking about writing. Things I think I can't write. I keep getting hung up on little details and the fact that I'm not a details guy. I don't know why I fret so much over the fact that I envy other writers' product. I can't just enjoy, I need to analyze and marvel at the fact that I could never do that, whatever it happens to be. I could never write about that topic, or write from that perspective. Well, that's bull. Nothing to get too stressed about. I probably write pretty well for the perspective I have, for the style I use. I've been told as such and I worry about it constantly. Self-evaluation is important, maybe. I try not to get complacent, almost to the point of paralyzing insecurity (luckily I'm not paralyzed, I'm still writing. Sometimes.) But they say, write what you know, and I just need to learn more so that I can write it. For now, I do write what I know.

First book we read this semester in American Fiction was The Human Stain by Philip Roth. I really admire his writing style, the free indirect discourse, the voice he employs as Nathan Zuckerman. I was influenced by it before I had ever read it: it's largely the same effect I've tried for on Melancholy Catatonia, when I have written it (it was my 2005 NaNoWriMo-winning project that I later scrapped and restarted because I thought I could do better. Also I lost it in a previous harddrive mishap that helped characterize my reaction to my little scare. I still think I could do better than the unfinished redraft, in places.)

The Human Stain works on a lot of levels, about representation and race and narrative structure. Great example of an unreliable narrator. At one point at the end of Catatonia, I intend to have the main character sit down with the narrator, having read his draft for the story based on her, and say "The parts I liked best were the parts you flat-out made up." It's a bit on-the-nose, but I think true to the messy, unacademic tone I try to get in the book. But enough about things I haven't written yet.

End of the Night is top priority. I need to make it cohesive and funny. Or at least, comprehensible and enjoyable. If I give it a strong enough framework, the laughs will come, I have faith. The way Cary goes on about it, I feel like I've really gotten something right. I felt that way before I showed Cary anything, but that confirms it. This works. Now it's just got to work harder.

Having listened through Nightfreak, I cracked open the first Coral album, which really took me back, since I haven't listened to most of these songs in years. They have the capacity to take me back to the first time I listened to them the whole way through, which would be grade 10. I've gotten all the way to "Waiting for the Heartaches," a really cool song that I think I need to get back in my life, once I have iTunes again and can command the arcane forces of my iPod.

Toiday was feeling like one of those exasperating days when everything is shitty. I was getting easily frustrated and annoyed by every little convenience early on but by the end of it things had eased up. I had to write a response last night, because not only did my computer crapping out mess up my attention span, I would've forgotten that due date anyway. It was about the Breakfast Club, its depictions of high school social structures in comparison to "a show like Glee." Having 900-1200 words to play with, I invoked both Glee and Degrassi for comparison and contrast - Glee utilizes Breakfast CLub's clique structure in order to dismantle it (or perhaps strengthen its reality, in a way) while Degrassi disregards it to present an alternative situation in which high school cliques are related less to personality type than by individual situation.

And I probably just summed it up there better than I did in my paper. SWP, you win again.

So my frustration about that fuelled me for the first half of the day, and then I mellowed out by the end of it, finally conversing with people in Drama, actually getting to know people, which can be hard to do in the university classroom.

I feel like I accomplished something today. Small victories. I need to keep my Zen going, though. That's on me. It's late. Sleep sounds good,

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto