Source Materials, Odyssey, Experience

There can only be so many plots, right? If you listen to Christopher Booker, there are seven to work with. So in rocking a plot, choose wisely. The farther back you reach, the more likely you'll get to the good stuff. Homer's Odyssey seemed to fascinate James Joyce, as well as Matt Fraction.

Homer hit the ball out of the park (sorry) in such epic fashion the title of his Odyssey now has its own meaning in modern English:

1. a long wandering or voyage usually marked by many changes of fortune.

2. an intellectual or spiritual wandering or quest.

If I stick with the second definition, I feel like that's a description of my daily life. Booker fits Homer's Odyssey into the "Voyage and Return" category, "the protagonist goes to a strange land and, after overcoming the threats it poses to him/her, returns with nothing but experience." He cites "Alice in Wonderland" as another example.

I can relate to that aspect as well--I return from most of my voyages with empty pockets and a full soul.

Fraction has the balls to take on Homer and re-make the Odyssey into something totally new. Turn Odysseus into a girl. Change the setting to sci-fi and rock out a smart, psychedelic comic that visually and viscerally spins your brain. Those that follow along at home may remember that I blame Matt Fraction for pulling me back into comics and graphic novels.

There is something both epic and daunting and maybe terrifying about building on one of the most revered works in the canon of western literature. Joyce more than pulled it off, and took his Odyssey into the mind, and inside a single day in Dublin. The possibilities are endless.

My own odyssey is only partially literary at the moment. It's a personal wandering, a personal quest to figure out myself, life, the Universe, vocation, etc. It's what you do when you are 42.

Lately I have sequestered myself into my Baileys Neck crib. Gone ghost, fled to interior life, and close surroundings. I could feel a pull to change scenery. Pull together a quick and easy overnight, a voyage and return. Shenandoah National Park is a sub-three hour trek. Mary's Rock at Thornton Gap provided about a four-mile hike (up and back) full of snow, ice, slush and views you won't find on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

A proper odyssey can't be contained in a day or four miles. But for a flatlander surrounded by water, not mountains, it can be just enough to screw my soul on a bit differently. A spiritual wandering, returning with nothing but experience. And a smiling sanctuary in the mind.

Already Read 'Em, An Experiment

This is not my bookshelf. This is not my house. This is not my to be read pile. But it could be if I let it. Bibliophiles are a dangerous lot, always pulling in new books around us. We can't wait to read the next book, before we are even finished the current book.

There is a great scene/line in the remake of the movie "Cape Fear," where Max Cady (played by Robert De Niro) is getting out of prison. When he is sent to prison, he can't read. So Nick Nolte isn't worried about Cady realizing that he let him hang, so to speak. But Cady/De Niro teaches himself to read. And he reads like crazy. And figures shit out. And along the way he develops a collection of books, which he is leaving in his prison cell as he walks to be released. So he is walking out with the guards and another guard calls out:

"Hey Cady, what about your books?"

"Already read 'em."

The ultimate utilitarian. They have served their purpose. Later, bitches. A bibliophile, Cady is not.

There is a funny thing about my bookshelves and my books. I haven't already read them all. I'm a tangential reader--I'll have books lined up to read next and some stray thought from something I am reading runs me down a mental rabbit hole, I pick up a new book and the book that was next in line gets backburnered. Rinse, repeat.

So I own some kickass books that I haven't read. And it is time to read them. Because some of them are beyond classic. And they are already here, living with me, untapped.

Here is the experiment: no new books. No new books so that I get to, and stick to, reading some of what is here. My goal is to go for a year. That would be some shit. But I will try six months, and then take the experiment's pulse. The goal is not to read all of my unread books. That would take more than a year. The goal is to spend the next six months to a year reading only books I already own. No new books.

But it hardly limits my reading. I am a slow reader. I am not saying I will get through this list, or that I won't modify it by swapping out one book for another off the shelf. But with a little thought, here is what an opening salve:

Fiction

"Ulysses," James Joyce
"The Old Man and the Sea," Ernest Hemingway (haven't read since high school)
"Far Tortuga," Peter Matthiessen
"Cathedral," Raymond Carver (short stories, have read a few of them)
"The Once and Future King," T.H. White (have read part)
"V.," Thomas Pynchon

"The Sound and the Fury," William Faulkner

Non-Fiction

"The Spell of the Sensuous," David Abram
"The Poetics of Space," Gaston Bachelard
"Travels with Herodotus," Ryszard Kapuscinski
"Forests," Robert Pogue Harrison
"The Golden Bough," Sir James George Frazier

A formidable list. I am first finishing Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian," and Tony Horwitz's "Confederates in the Attic," before embarking, but buying no new books begins today, Sept. 15, 2014. Vegas odds aren't good that I can complete this experiment; that I won't cave like a book junkie and have a book binge, but I am going to give it a shot.

The book selling industry may feel a slight pinch. And I guess there are at least a couple reasons behind this experiment. One would be not spending money I don't have to spend, when the riches are already here. It frees up more cash for craft beer :)

But I think the bigger point is that reading isn't always about reading the next thing or the new thing. If your mind is actively engaging what it is encountering, and adding its own thoughts and depth, then the right stuff finds it and even more mundane reading (which this list is not) can turn into big stuff. Sometimes it is the reader, not the book. Books are the stimulus, not the result. You are the result, what you do with or from or because of the stimulus/book.

And that isn't to reduce books, literature, or art to just being stimuli. But that is in effect what it is. A painting is experienced by a viewer, a book by a reader, who reacts to it. Who takes it in. Who studies it. Who feels it. Who relates it to their own experience. And in that respect, art, to the viewer, the reader, the audience, is to be experienced, to stimulate us. To make us think; to make us cry; to make us laugh; to make us create; to make us question; to make us wonder; to make us love.

We have to change ourselves. I have to change myself. The lesson, perhaps, is to look at what is around me, the things I already have, rather than continually looking for new and next. And I am excited for the books that are here.

And why not start with a literary mountain to climb? Next up, Ulysses. Let's talk, JJ.

Vonnegut saved fiction

I thought I'd held fiction's head underwater long enough to drown it. Then Kurt Vonnegut saved it. It's not the first time he's done it. And he doesn't work alone.

Vonnegut first saved fiction while I was in college. I was uncovering the secrets of the Universe in the poems and proverbs of William Blake, the dialogues of Plato, the scientific mysticism of Fritjof Capra, the interconnectedness of Buddhism and the aphorisms of Nietzsche. What did I need fiction for? The highfalutin make believe of blowhards.

But "Slaughterhouse-Five" is short and I'm on break... And "Cat's Cradle," and then I remembered why fiction mattered. How, in Vonnegut's hands and voice, it doesn't take itself all that seriously, but does; is irreverent, but genuine, is made up and autobiographical; imparts philosophy without preaching.

There have been co-conspirators: trying to navigate the mind and work of James Joyce in school; discovering and devouring Tom Robbins when graduate school for philosophy didn't happen; backing into David Mitchell while writing speeches and feature articles. When I think I need to back slowly out of fiction's room, someone taps me on the shoulder.

This past week in Ocean City, I was unmotivated by a novel I was reading. I'm searching for a job, wondering where life is going, if the girls had sunscreen on them, if the beer has enough ice on it, you know, equally important existential questions. Fiction, I got no time for you. And then I start looking at titles of books on the beach house's shelves. And there is "Bluebeard," a Vonnegut I haven't read.

I picked it up and half finished it in a day. We were leaving the beach, so I picked up my own copy at a book store on the way home. In the midst of job applications, getting rid of a tree in the yard, feeding kids, Vonnegut seeps into the day. "Bluebeard" is finished. Fiction matters. Its ideas. Its voice. Its humor.

Vonnegut has saved it. Again.

Revision, the improv gut method

Improvisation and revision aren't the same thing. Maybe not. And I'm not sure which I'm doing, but I'm going to call it the latter.

Ulysses may remain a mystery a bit longer. Reading Joyce is confronting a master. I've known that since "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and "Dubliners." Ulysses is stunning. But I'm not feeling it. It's an exercise in discipline only at present, without soul. And one thing about my reading and self-directed studies, since college really, is that they are soul-driven. There is so much out there to read, if I'm not feeling it, what's the point?

So my resolution to have finished Ulysses by 40 (Apr. 8) has been tabled. Now, I'm all about the one-to-one correspondence when it comes to personal betterment. So what to replace it with? Something reading, something soul-driven, something delving into a/the masters.

The answer has been presenting itself all of 2012, but especially yesterday morning. Monday. Driving to work. Listening for the first time, in full, to Duke Ellington's "Money Jungle," where the Duke composed for and played with Charles Mingus and Max Roach. I can't recall be so moved by an entire album on first listen as I was on the road yesterday. My soul was lifted up.

And I looked at what I was reading, instead of Ulysses, and it was Nat Hentoff's "The Jazz Life," and Ted Gioia's, "The History of Jazz," and amped for Geoff Dyer's "But Beautiful," and I'm not well-read, or read at all about jazz, which by virtue of listening to and thinking about has profoundly changed my life over the last decade. I count Mingus, Miles and Monk in the same aesthetic company as Mark Twain and Robert Hass and Whitman and William Carlos Williams.

So my revised, my improvised goal for 2012, is to get read on jazz. Well read. To better know what I'm listening to. Not for the sake of analyzing really, but for the sake of context and curiosity. It feels like what I should be doing. It's what I am doing, where I'm led.

And while I'm at it, I'll add an experiential component: to attend a jazz show or festival to see a musician I really want to see. I have not attended a jazz concert, proper. A lot of jazz inspired, a lot of improvisation, but to find an Ambrose Akinmusire, a Robert Glasper, a Jason Moran, etc. show.

So that's my revision. Revision by gut method. Also known as improvisation.

Twelve for 2012

Hello 2012. I can see you. Walking up to the door with the insulated pizza box. Or is that a candygram?

2011 is on its way out. But I don't care to look back on a year that had me hobbled with a messed up ankle for almost half of it. I want to look forward.

What do I want from 2012? What do I hope to accomplish? This is all subject to change. But here are some thoughts. I put these out there with/as intent...

- Complete/compete in an event I've never done before. Maybe this is a new trail race, or distance I haven't run before. Or maybe it is a stand-up paddleboard or kayak race. Throwing something new into the physical challenges.

- Read James Joyce's "Ulysses" before I turn 40 (on April 8). This has been one of those reads that feels like it has been missing, as a college English major, where we read "Dubliners" and "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." It has been sitting on my bookshelf, beckoning. I've thought about it. It is time to listen.

- Read books that are currently on my bookshelf vs. buying more. I have amassed a prized collection of books I'd like to read (and some I actually have). But too many of them fall to rainy day status as I get pulled in by something new. This is a year I want to cultivate what is here vs. acquire what is not.

- Get out on the water/go fishing more. I don't hunt. I don't play golf. I dig fishing, but don't do it nearly enough. I'm not talking about going offshore fishing. I mean to get out fishing on the Bay, in the rivers. Local.

- Go to more Nationals games, take the girls to their first Major League Baseball game. I've got my Memorial Park/Camden Yards memories with my dad. That's part of what pulled me to the Nationals when I started working next door. Now our household, my Pittsburgh wife included, are Nationals fans. This will be a fun year to indoctrinate the girls beyond evening Comcast TV.

- Finish 2012 in better shape than I start it, both physically and financially. This is a big one. This year was too sedentary for me in terms of physical activity. And it was another year of wanting to accomplish more, sock more away in terms of finances. Though these two things aren't related, I want to go at them both with abandon. Restrained abandon :)

- Spend less money on stuff, shit I don't need, either save it, or spend it on experiences. Forgo stuff for life.

- Take better care of my temper. It generally stays indoors, doesn't venture out. But the girls see it in the mornings, or around homework time. It doesn't seem like me. And I need to be mindful of it. Perhaps starting the majority of the days with meditation or yoga--Sun Salutations first thing most mornings...

- Plan and take more trips. Of the day variety, of the overnight variety, of the weekend variety. Let's go places we haven't been. Let's take the girls sometimes and just grown-ups and/or friends.

- Walk the dogs more. They dig it. I dig it. We don't do it enough. We should.

- Complete a project I haven't done before. Not sure if this is going to be an around the house or yard project, a creative writing/research project. It is a way of expanding horizons and comfort zones.

- Take care of my house (Protect this house!). In this case literally. The house, the yard, the garage. I'm not one that comes home and tinkers. I'm not going to be, not going to try to be. But I do derive some peace of mind from working in the yard, or when I friend and I re-floored the downstairs. There is some stuff that needs doing. Let's gitterdun.

Well, there is 12 to do's for 2012. That seems like a good number. The key is in the follow-through. That's how the doors get open. And this isn't so much a to do list as it is a mode or way of being for 2012. Direct the intent.