Gainful
employment! For the past few weeks, I’ve
been working for Copperfields Booksellers, Healdsburg. It’s a beautiful, personable little store
with lots of indie lit and quirky nonfiction—a jaunty hub of words in the heart
of the wine country.
My tenure as a book clerk (would it be
awful to call myself a “bookista”?) has, of course, impacted my writing
schedule. To try and make up for the
time spent away from my prosy career, I had a great notion:
Night writing.
I originally got the idea when I was
interviewing for another job and the manager asked, “So can you do early
shifts? You’re not one of those night writers, are you?” My response, at the time, was, “No way! I don’t understand how those dudes can do
it—I can hardly think once the sun goes down!”
But writing isn’t quite the same as
thinking, is it? Descriptive writing is
a way to clarify and commemorate thought, but it often (paradoxically, perhaps)
comes from a level of the mind deeper than words. Writing can be a way of touching the subconscious,
in all its lovely randomness: a way of taking the subconscious out to
lunch.
And as the days passed, the image of
myself, hunched over a typewriter alá Hemingway in the middle of the witching
hour, began to percolate through my mind.
&
(Wait—was it Hemingway who only
wrote at night? Or did he just write
when he wasn’t sober?)
&
I’ve been taking up my pen in the
darkness (in the eerie, remote quiet after everyone else in my household has
gone to bed) for exactly a week now, and I’ve made an important discovery about
myself:
I’m kind of, sort of, nonchalantly poetic at night.
Want an example? Here’s a passage taken directly from my
journal. Ahem.
“Night: the time
when people drive fast cars across the Amerikan highways, headlights
illuminating that chipped but eternal yellow in the center of the road. And in my mind, I’m spending the night in a
haunted house.
It’s a mannerly haunted house—the doors creak and the
chandeliers rattle to a certain kind of rhythm, if you know what I mean.
I’m always twenty-two and driving to Canada, if you know
what I mean.”
That
(I mean that) is about as close as Microsoft Word can get to an approximation of
my handwriting. If you know what I mean.
&
(Who? Who was it that only wrote at night? Barthelme?
Woody Allen? The Marquis de
Sade? Simone de Beauvoir? In whose shadow ((cast by moonlight and neon))
am I now tentatively stepping?)
&
In a
certain respect, I’m a better writer at night: less inhibited, more inclined to
chase wild geese. An example would be
when, thinking about my blog post, I penned, “A
continental post, a sidewalk post, a savior-faire post” (though I don’t know what that means), “a brightly colored post, a croissant-and-scrambled eggs
post…”
My
progression of ideas at night isn’t quite as logical as usual—but I get to
travel through unexpected doors. I undergo
a sleepless renaissance of thoughts. Oh,
and when I first thought of that
phrase (the “sleepless renaissance” bit), it was followed, in my notebook, by
the line, “Picture it in black and
white.”
With
that one, even I don’t know what I
mean.
&
There’s
a quote that I’ve seen on tote bags, to the extent of, “When I have money, I
buy books. After that, I buy food.” I think about that quote a lot, maybe because
I’ve always considered books to be the epitome of wealth.
Wealth=joy. Joy=lots and lots of shelving. That’s why I love my new job.
I’ve
got to learn to balance my life better, though.
And I’m suspicious of my night writing, because I can’t imagine that
somebody who likes to sleep as much as I do is really cut out for it.
In
fact, I’m going to go sleep right now—and there’s no words that can keep my
attention long enough to stop me.
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