Returns and Rushdie

I'm back from a perfectly lovely weekend in DC! It was hotter than the devil's asscrack and more fun than a ride at the fair. It's also the reason for my blogular absence these past few days, and for that I apologise to you, my dear blog. But it's okay, I have come back to you, back into your welcoming arms to hold you close and nuzzle your neck and whisper in your ear that it'll all be all right.

It'll all be all right.


And here I sit in a Brooklyn back yard, slowly broiling in the 73-degree nighttime heat (that's 23 degrees in Real Measurements), sipping a beer - I'll be exact, a Samuel Adams Summer Ale - and breathing in the scents of a suburban evening while Miles Davis rolls through a rendition of Bye Bye Blackbird; and life is pretty sweet.

Whenever I read a really good book - by a really good author with a really good voice - I usually find myself trying to mimic his or her style. Not parroting in any way... more like trying it on to see what fits. While taking a screenwriting class in Junior year I was concurrently working my way through the early seasons of The West Wing, and I found myself trying desperately to capture - however poorly, through however warped a lens! - some of that beautiful run-on style of Aaron Sorkin's, the way his conversations ebb and flow in a way that seems so beautifully crafted and yet so natural. It's certainly something to aspire to.

I mention this because I've literally just finished reading Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. It's utterly fantastic, like reading long-form poetry, and I highly recommend it. And the style, with its sense of narrative propriety that opens the door to all sorts of questions of reliability and truth and interpretation and objectivity, fits itself well to a blog. I'm trying to capture some sort of sense of that book's exactitude - the fastiduous attention to detail in a desperate attempt to nail down some larger truth that defies conventional explanation. It's really magnificent... reminded me of Murakami, the way Rushdie will not only explain a thing but also weave a gleaming narrative around it, cocooning the unknowable truth in fact and fiction until you can see the shape of it if not the substance.

And also the way he leaves you hanging - blunt explanations one minute, tantalising hints and glimpses and sensations the next. So in the spirit of fictional truth and factual stories, of substance and essence, and - above all - of long-winded brevity, I'll leave here some thoughts on what I want to make my next short story (short, but longer than most I've written lately!), jotted down on my phone during a long bus ride through twilit Delaware fields.

It will be about fish out of water and flannel jackets. It will be about pasts and presents and futures and fireflies. It will be about longing and hoping and the sweetness of disappointment. There will be running and hiding and seeking. There will be footnotes and police chases, and a certain detached, Morpokian, chicken-bashing style of humour. But most of all, it will be about how damnably, horribly easy it is to fall hopelessly in love on a stifling summer's night in America.

It might even be about letting go - about acceptance and peace. But I'm not sure about that quite yet... they say you should write what you know.

I'm not who I was last summer / Not who I was in the spring