Listening to Pavorotti sing “Oh Holy Night.” It’s a slab of vinyl that Del brought home from a flea market or garage sale. It looks good enough, but you can’t really visually grade these things without a jeweler’s loupe. She put it on a modern turntable. No sound. My fault. I was re-wiring the sound system this week, doing the new equipment installation yoga, often in the very challenging cable pulling asana. So I had a bit of work to do before we discovered that the record was stuck at the start of a track. After figuring out the vinyl was so messed up that it actually won’t play on a modern turntable, I fired up that old Philco console (which I have lovingly worked at restoring but acknowledge that it still has issues), and spun the disc on that. Back in the day, tonearms were much heavier. That thing plows through any snowstorm of grit. Once the tubes get good and warmed up and all of those new resistors and capacitors hit their final warmed up value, that thing sounds really, really good. It’s like an old jukebox, that amp. Two 6L6s with 12AX7s doing the phase splitting and pre-amping. Classic. ( I miked it up over the summer and used it when making Kathleen Kelley’s piece. You can see the dance and hear this phonograph here. But it’s a ways in before it plays a note of music, and the Edison’s involved also.) I seriously digress.

We’re multitasking maniacs. Del’s on Facebook and scrambling eggs. I’m listening to Christmas music while actually reading that novel I wrote. I have my reasons for going back to it now. I can read it now with enough distance to be somewhat (ok, seriously) critical. There are some really good parts. I like Eve of Brattleboro very much. She’s a spunky girl and tells it like it is. The acid trip description is not as bad as I thought; it almost really works. The counterpoint discussion has got to go – or at least, be pruned back. I’m not sure if the musical analyses can be made to work. You hit that stuff and it’s like reading a shop manual. The composer of the unsingable madrigal has now written an unreadable book about composing that same ditty. To top it off, he tries to write a book about writing a book. The ending is an unholy mess that needs a complete re-write. The idea of the journaled ending absolutely falls on its face. It might be that it’s not the idea so much as the execution of it. Rewrite! Resubmit! This might be worthwhile, but I really do have to have the time for that. I learned this: even when your tale is plotted by past life memories (and documents) – or maybe, especially when – it is all the more important to build tension into the structure. Why else would anyone read beyond a certain point? I myself hit windy, sand blasted, arid, hard-going stretches when I can’t even be bothered with straightening out my own grammar. I see now that it would be better to let a thing like this simmer, be worked at objectively, be cleaned up and bashed into a workable shape and compelling functional form before sharing it with another living soul. Too late for that. I wrote it on a blog.

I’m a fair critic of things I read. I can tell when a plot is yanking my chain. I can tell when a structure has gone off the rails. I will walk out of a theater, skip past a song on a record, yell at the screen when whatever swill we’ve tuned in to (or surfed over to) fails to deliver the goods. I’ll also weep at Brahms, shout along with Beethoven, and get down on my hands and knees before the altar of Bach. Well, maybe not. I’ll pull over and get off the road if I’m overcome by something on the radio. (Mostly, I avoid listening to music while driving.) The critical faculty is not lacking in me. To take that same razor blade and cut my own flesh with it: that is the requirement of getting a ton of whacked writing into some kind of shape that anyone, me included, would want to read. That’s where we are right now, Ken Beck, old buddy, old pal. We’re at the bottom of shit mountain. Care to start climbing?