Latest Novel Update

You didn't ask

Experts say blogs that start with pictures of food get more likes so here we go, glossy and greasy. The Redneck Special.

Author - always a suspect term in my lexicon, writer is fine and if scribbler was good enough for Kafka, it’ll do for me - presently stretched out after bashing off and in today’s entry in the last chapter of my novel, le Plouc de Paris, which was ably aided by Eric Rolando Arriaga, who provided copious gobelets of mirabelle, great good humor and a hearty meal to a man starved for both and Nathanial Draper, who supplied insider film dope at exactly the moment needed, to them and the King of France I lift my glass of Vitamin C after a day that began at 5 when I woke up to write and ends now at 8 in the evening, when I lay the pencils down. Plouc de Paris… let’s skip that shall we ? You are possibly tangentially or maybe partially curious and probably couldn’t care less about another guy flogging product that doesn’t even exist in physical form that you can turn your nose up at, yet, right ? but you’ll get your chance, don’t worry. For myself I feel that it’s good but I can’t get carried away because I should do the same tomorrow morning minus the mirabelle, quelle dommage, and so must keep the crazy going on the straight and narrow, if you catch my drift. Today’s entry starts with a sentence 588 words long, which gave me a lot of pleasure to write and then later decipher (I write in pencil and sin in ink), five hundred and eighty eight which I’m quite sure isn’t a record breaker, one always has to bear in mind Gabo’s Autumn or something Lezama-Lima threw down somewhere but it’s a thrill nonetheless. Maybe someone among my readers as erudite as Alvaro de Prat could weigh in with some other examples in the long-song genius phrasal form which we could print here because you know life isn’t all reportage and tax evasion and who done what to whom fetch the broom mister please cos there’s a mess in here. Speaking of Autumn of the Patriarch brings back the story of Sean Penn and Brando going to Mexico City to meet the Colombian to convince him to give them the movie rights, which he did but nothing ever came of it. Penn told the story on a talk show but from the ‘Brando, what’s he like’ angle ? which I think he can do better than. He should, it can only help his reputation after the bum novel he foisted on us. That immediately brings up two other stories from the forking gardens of time. One, John Huston going to Mexico City to meet B. Traven a generation or more before, to secure the rights to Treasure of the Siera Madre and being told that Mr. Traven was unavailable and instead meeting a man who never gave his name but did give permission on behalf of Traven. The writer was an anarchist who had fled Germany so he likely had his reasons. The other story goes a ways back too when I was working with a certain American film director, who planned a vast Roman-American epic in which Senators of the empire would be translated to New York in the 80s and of course, having made films with the director on numerous occasions, Brando was interested in that too. At one of our meetings I cracked wise that, What does this mean, Marlon in a toga in a highrise overlooking Central Park while he quotes Pliny’s Lives, which I was then making digests of for the film director. Everything rolled along merrily and I went back to scanning the entire corpus of latin literature for him but I’m not sure things were ever the same after my little indiscretion. Sensitive souls out there in the ruby hills. That film never happened either, so that shows you one out of three ain’t bad and be happy with what you got. You’ll have Plouc de Paris soon enough if I have to print it myself. It’s okay with me. It’s just the first one in the Knowles series but I’ve slaved over it and under certain conditions it’s good to be a slave and surrender everything, even while the whole world is either laughing at you or growing exasperated, which they tend to do. It can’t be helped and it doesn’t matter anyway. I’m going out for a smoke now after I post this without thinking too much about it or worrying either, just armed with the hope that I’ll see a few stars, the real kind, and you do, too. See ya down the road a piece, mes chers lecteurs, all five or six of you…