Getting my footing...

BOOKS READ: THE SOUND AND THE FURY, DARKNESS AT NOON, THE GRAPES OF WRATH
MOVIES WATCHED: SINGING IN THE RAIN, GONE WITH THE WIND

"The last clear function of man-muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need-this is man" -The Grapes of Wrath

"One can deny one's childhood, but not erase it."-Darkness at Noon

"The fact is: I no longer believe in my infallibility. That is why I am lost."- Darkness at Noon.

Not the strongest start, set out to write once a week and here we are about a month later. Screw it...moves, flu, sick children, long hours at work...once a month to write is actually not bad. I still have no idea what I actually will write about in a blog. I think maybe just the act of writing is important at this point. Words, words, words, words on the screen. Why is it so hard to put these down?

It is a surprise how hard fiction, good fiction, can become to read if you get out of practice. It took me a little time to get my stride back. My favorite part so far of starting this is the unfamiliar ground it puts me in. Turning 30 has made me a little concerned about my tastes and preferences become fixed and solid. Fossilized. I don't want to like what I like and everything else be damned. i want to make sure I remember that the new builds on the old and complements it even while it tears it down and moves past it. I haven't read any of these books before, many I've never even heard of before and I can feel their magic working on me already. Surrounding and filling my mind, forcing it to take new paths. It's wonderful to see so much pain, misery, obsession, and visceral hatred written into a work and to somehow come out of it hopeful and rejuvenated. Except for the Faulkner. That really was a downer. Southern obsession and meditation on hell as a final resting place. If you come from certain parts of the south and certain parts of the Christian faith, more than your need to eat and sleep is your need to fear hell. It's there in the middle of the night or when you think about getting older and guessing the years you have left. The years until you go to sleep and wake up in that burning lake. This is not frivolity on my part, this is a factual description of a mental state.

Well, there is some hardcore rambling. Something was put down. The years these authors spend on these books. The mental dedication, the editing and rewriting and rewriting and obsessive belief in the worth of what they are doing or at least the obsessive need to do it. To spend a decade on a book or making a movie...what comfort that must be.