Kat and I made a challenge to one another to crank out at least a thousand words a day, every day, for the month of June. I’ve been pretty good at it so far, but today I woke up and couldn’t imagine typing a single coherent sentence. I stormed off out of the flat in mid-afternoon because eventually it starts to feel like the trash compactor scene in star wars, since it’s approximately the same size, and have not sat down in front of the computer for a sustained period of time since, except to answer a couple of emails regarding some freelancing. Now it is just past midnight, which is fine for the challenge since days start when we wake up and end when we go to sleep, but I have a ways to go still.
The sun will be up in three hours. That’s fucked up, isn’t it? I know I just wrote about that, but still. I can’t quite get over nineteen hours of daylight. Every day I stay out later than I expected because I’m used to basing most of my daily schedule on things like the movement of the sun, barring the usual circumstances of external influence that affect people with real jobs and stuff. During the winter, when the sun rose at seven-thirty and sank just before four, I ate dinner early. Today we didn’t start cooking until almost ten o’clock. This strange little island is confusing the hell out of my body.
Eleven weeks. That’s how much longer we have here. There’s this scene in kicking and screaming- the 90’s indie film with Parker Posey, not the 2000’s one with Will Ferrell- where one of the characters is talking about how he’s nostalgic for things that happened five minutes ago, how he’s reminiscing for the very thing that he’s doing while he’s doing it. That’s kind of how I feel about London. I know that I’ll miss it when I’m gone, that there’ll be parts of it that I wake up craving, aspects of life that I’ve come to take for granted that won’t be there anymore. Things that will be so obvious to me when they’re gone that I can’t even think of now because right now they’re things I’m used to and they no longer seem novel. Will I still make a cup of tea every morning? That’s a new one on me; I started drinking tea a few years ago, but it was a rare treat. It’s only been the past few weeks, really, that it’s become ritual, and I have taken it on because I am a Gentleman of Leisure and sipping tea in the morning seems appropriate.
Gotta keep the word count going… books, I could talk about books. I finished two this week, because what is a person supposed to do while sipping tea in a tiny, empty flat in the morning besides read? I finished blue pills, which is a Swiss graphic novel by Frederik Peeters. Kat gave it to me for my birthday. It’s an extremely European (in style) autobiographical piece, a memoir about the author’s relationship with an HIV positive woman and her HIV positive son. Sometimes it’s really insightful, and introduces you to what their world is like- as in the scene when the condom breaks- and sometimes I get the feeling that he wanted to just validate the difficulty of his situation to himself. I liked it, and he’s a terrific illustrator and visual storyteller, but some aspects of the book were unfulfilling.
The other book was soon i will be invincible by Austin Grossman, which is a literary fiction novel about superheroes. It’s infinitely clever and manages to strike the exact right tone throughout- it never gets bogged down in the minutiae of its world or its characters, but it treats the respectfully, if not entirely seriously. There are no throwaway gags, and for someone whose read as many postmodern takes on the superhero concepts as I have, for it to come off as fresh throughout is a really impressive accomplishment. It’s got elements of powers and rising stars and definitely astro city in it, but it’s a novel, not a graphic novel, and Grossman is smart enough to use the medium to do things that a comicbook can not. Which is interesting, because it’s been a while since I thought about the limitations of comics as compared to prose; there’s sometimes a general feeling among people who take comics very seriously that the medium is almost limitless- you can do internal monologues and narration as in prose, if desired, but you also get the benefit of images and visual storytelling. What Grossman picks up on deftly is that you can accomplish a lot with the absence of visual storytelling, and use that as a device unto itself. It’s an obvious thing, once you think about it, but you may never think about it unless you’re reading a superbly-handled story in a genre that prose rarely tackles (and never well). Top marks for soon i will be invincible. Sign me up for whatever Grossman does next.
A hundred and thirty words to go. Really just time for brain vomit now, scraping the sides of the bowl for enough leftover dough to make a mediocre cookie. Jesus, what a disgusting mixed metaphor. A vomit cookie? Enjoy that with a cup of tea in the morning, and I will see you with another thousand tomorrow. Wish me luck.
