Ghosts of Horatio Alger

(Gentleman Jack is a good friend who has been having a rough go of his job search and general direction in life. These are his, at times, brilliant, eccentric and esoteric musings. These are The Loxley Files. Hopefully you’ll learn something – or at least have a good laugh.)

So I’m finally writing something. Well, sort of. I had an idea for a book shortly before Christmas, on the plane back from Panama. I jotted down some ideas, mentioned it to some friends, and then let it sit for a while.

To be fair, I did have a lot going on. First Christmas. Then there was New Years. Then I just didn’t do anything for a while. Then I almost got sent to support relief stuff for Haiti (still might – no word just yet). Then I was out of town for a few days; which included, among other things, skiing and possibly a mild concussion, though definitely a nasty scrape above my right eye. They weren’t sure about the concussion – probably because by the time the doctor actually saw me it was 4 hours later; but I digress (what do you want? I recently suffered a head injury).

After sitting around and doing nothing very productive on the computer for a while today, I decided I’d get to work on the book. I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s something of a Billy Mumphrey story.

Anyway, now that we’re down here in paragraph four, I think I’ll get to what this post is all about. As a “writer” (I use quotes there because no one pays me, and as I’ve already mentioned I don’t really write that often) I read a lot to gain ideas and information that could be useful in my own writing. But of course, it is easy to fall into the trap where you’ve just got to read this one thing first, then, as soon as you’re done, you’ll totally get down to work on that thing you were going to write. It’s basically just standard procrastination with the twist that you can trick yourself by saying it is theoretically productive.(ed note: I live my life like this! -zs)

Luckily, I have found the perfect formula for overcoming this type of procrastination: read boring books. Recently I finished Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. I think it can be best summed up by the following quote on wikipedia:

In 1974, the three-member Pulitzer Prize jury on fiction supportedGravity’s Rainbowfor the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. However, the other eleven members of the board overturned this decision, branding the book “unreadable, turgid, overwritten and obscene.”

I’m not ready to say I hated it (though I may be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome after spending 776 pages with it). But I will say I think a lot of the people who like it are suffering from an “emperor’s new clothes” phenomenon. Maybe I’m just a little slow, or wasn’t paying enough attention, but I have no idea what that book was about. Most of the time it seemed to trip and fall way over the surreal and digressive line into little more than disconnected nonsense.

So anyway, I slogged through that. Then, I knocked out Tracy Morgan’s I Am the New Blackin an afternoon (you really should click that link). It was funny, but what is most striking is his honesty and openness about his life. But as I said that only took an afternoon.

Now I’m on to a book called Oil and the World Order by Svante Karlsson. I borrowed it from a friend several years ago. He got it for a class in college. He made a point of how much he wanted it back because it was going for over $100 used on Amazon. Natually, I’ve kept it ever since. I checked once and found a used copy going for only a couple dollars. At this point I’m pretty confident the price is dictated more by supply than quality. It’s not bad, it’s just really boring. If you’ve read The Prize, which is vastly superior in prose and depth, this book won’t do much for you. Also, I don’t know if it is the author himself, or if perhaps the book was written in another language and translated; but whoever is responsible for the English has a fairly shaky handle on American idioms. For example he constantly refers to the American government (though not specifically to the President or his staff) as “the administration.” That’s just annoying.

On the upside, this book is just under 300 pages, as opposed to Pynchon’s 776. But still, at the moment, the choice between reading and writing is pretty easy.

So now that I’ve said I’m working on a book, hopefully I’ll be shamed into activity. I don’t know what kind of readership I’m getting, but at the very least everyone down at Ghosts of Horatio Alger will be egging me on (ed note: yeah, it’s just me. So, not a lot of help there. -zs). So that’s the end of the post; and no, I am not going to address the fact that writing blog posts instead of a book is an equally unproductive form of procrastination.