Jonas David's Blog, page 9

Read faster, write faster

I feel sometimes that Time is shrinking ahead of me. This year has gone by extremely quickly, due in part, I’m sure, to how similar all the days have been, indoors, living online and in my head.

Given the number of books I’ll never read, it’s pretty likely that one of them would have been my favorite book, had I read it.

I feel the need to read faster, but, doing so means I enjoy and absorb what I’m reading less. So then, should I be more careful in my book selections? But, reading indiscriminately is how I have found so many gems I’d never have suspected…

In the same way, I find myself writing so much less because I am so focused on completing certain things before I allow myself to do anything else.

Would it be better to write indiscriminately, whatever comes to mind?

That kind of writing might turn out something like this post.

fog and smoke

There has been heavy fog the past few mornings here.

I always liked fog, but now when I see it I worry the smoke from the wildfires has returned. I start to imagine the taste of burning in my mouth and an itch in my throat, even after looking at air quality and weather websites to confirm that it is in reality just fog.

I wonder if fog is ruined forever.

spiders

There are four (4) orb-weaver spiders in the tree outside my kitchen window. I watched them this morning. Two of them were repairing their webs, less than two feet from each other and completely unaware of their neighbors. I wonder if there will be enough insects in the area to feed all of them. I wonder how these spiders get so big in the first place. I’ve never seen a baby orb-weaver. Could a baby orb-weaver even build a web? How do they eat enough to get big enough to build one?

I learned today that many orb-weaver species will eat their web and rebuild it each day. This is why it is so rare to see any corpses in the threads.

Watching those little gals crawl around their nearly invisible traps, swaying in the lightest breeze, they seemed so fragile to me. Any moment something could come crashing through and destroy all their hard work. A bird could pluck them up, a hard rain could wash them away. But they just keep on living and doing their thing. What else can they, or any of us do.

UPDATE: I checked on the spiders this afternoon because there were some landscapers cleaning up with leaf blowers and I wondered if they were still there.

They were there, and it turns out there was a fifth spider I hadn’t noticed before. Two of the spiders were having meals.

Not so fragile after all?

Scraps

I have often tried to write every day. I’ve lost count of how many times. Every year or two I start a journal to document thoughts and events. I keep it up for a few months, then forget, and all the following moments that I didn’t write down are lost forever.

Why are habits so hard for me? I don’t know. Maybe it goes hand in hand with my bad memory.

Anyway, this is me, yet again, trying to pick up the habit again. So be prepared for daily ramblings, which will be for the most part stream of consciousness and unedited, otherwise I probably will start to worry about the quality and never post them.

What spurred this is today when I picked up one of my many failed journals and started looking at them, and some memories came back, preserved on the page. My mind needs these kinds of things or I just live in a fog of uncertainty.

If I can’t think of anything to write I’ll transcribe one of the pages of these dead journals. Why not.

Words will appear!

Strange Hotel, by Eimear McBride

I don’t know if I have ever identified so strongly with a character with who I share so little lived experiences.

This was a powerful, sad, startling, sometimes funny, most times existentially upsetting, and overall extremely readable book.

The story follows a woman through several brief moments during different periods in her life, each moment taking place in a hotel room.

Each moment is almost entirely internal, focusing on a rush of thoughts and emotions all relating to whatever she is (or isn’t) reminded of in the hotel room. Each moment circles around one event in her life that she won’t allow herself to think about.

The best kind of books, in my opinion, are ones that focus on the internal world rather than ‘things happening.’ You could say that ‘nothing happened’ in this book, but so much was said, and shown, and so much revealed through the internal workings of the character.

One of my favorite reads of the year so far, and one of very few new books I’ve read, ever. Recommended!

Mi primer libro en español

I have been (very) slowly teaching myself Spanish over the past few years, mostly by using Duolingo for just 20 minutes or so each day. But recently I felt comfortable enough to seek out more content to read. Because how better to learn a language than by just jumping right in?

This week I reached the momentous milestone of finishing my first book in Spanish. It was very slow going, and I looked up words constantly, but by the end of it, it felt quite similar to actual reading.

The book I read was Short Stories for Beginners by Olly Richards. It contained 8 unique short stories that were actually entertaining to read, as opposed to some other ‘beginner’ books I looked at which were composed of boring, repetitive exercises, Richards’ stories were fun and interesting to read, while also being written very simply with the learning beginner in mind.

Brains are impressive, and it was startling to find how much I could understand without knowing what specific words meant or how to form sentences on my own. While I still can barely speak it at all, I find that reading is so much easier because you can pick up everything from context. And reading is what I’m really interested in, anyway.

Perhaps next year I’ll be able to read an actual novel written for native speakers!

Delicious salad

Despite evidence to the contrary, I am still writing.

It’s been a while, but I have a new story published at 96th of October, and you can read it here.

I was prompted by the quote “Alcohol: because no good story ever began with someone eating a salad” to write a good story that began with someone eating a salad. A strange inspiration, sure. And it led to a strange story which ended up being classified by 96th of October as ‘horror.’

Yes, a horror story about salad. I hope you enjoy!

Psycho, in all its various iterations

I recently watched the A&E series Bates Motel, and was impressed by the acting of Vera Farmiga (Norma Bates) as well as Freddie Highmore (Norman Bates). The show did a good job of telling their story, which was intriguing and engaging. However, as with many of these TV dramas, they had to add in 78 other plot-lines and constant nonsense which unfortunately often distracted from the main point of the show: Norman’s neurosis and weird relationship with his mother.

But when the show was about Norman and Norma, it was high quality TV. So good, in fact, that I decided to read the novel by Robert Bloch… and then watch the Alfred Hitchcock movie.

The novel and the movie are very similar in spirit, and in the plot. They are very short, thrilling and too the point. The novel is less than 200 pages long, and not one of them is wasted. Hitchcock was so struck by the novel that after reading it he went and bought out all the bookstores in the area so that no one would know the plot when his movie came out–which he was determined to film the moment he read the book.

The TV show, though, suffers from the fact that most TV series aren’t made to tell a story, but are instead made to keep you watching for as long as possible. If all the other crap in the FIVE seasons of this show (much of it so ridiculous that it makes the idea of Norman’s insanity seem kind of normal) was pared away and the show had instead just told the story of Norman and Norma, it could have been a really great show. However, in that case it would have only lasted 1 or 2 seasons, and we can’t have that, can we.

Even though somewhat bloated, it was one of the better quality shows on TV, and was very well done. Though if you’re a fan of the original, you might be a bit baffled at the scope of it.

The Sundial, by Shirley Jackson

As with all the Jackson books I’ve read so far, this one features some people confined in a house, strange visions, and fear of the outside world.

Aunt Fanny, of the Halloran family, has had a vision that the world will soon end. That is, it will end for anyone who is not safely inside the Halloran mansion. The rest of the family begin to believe her, and slowly descend into madness preparing for the end.

As with all Jackson novels, this is a very subtle, understated story, and you are never really sure if the characters are crazy or not, even at the end. The clickbait of the publishing world that is back-jacket blurbs may have you thinking this is a ‘terrifying’ or ‘chilling’ book about an apocalypse, but it isn’t. It is a weird, often humorous, sometimes creepy, book about a rich family that believes they are, literally, the most important people on Earth and are the only ones who will be saved when the world ends.

And it’s even worse than that, because the Halloran’s believe that anyone who is inside their house will be saved from the coming apocalypse, yet, they go out of their way to make sure the servants are all sent home early on the ‘final day’ and not told anything, they give a big party to ‘say goodbye’ to all the towns people, with no effort to invite anyone else into the house, and so on. They are looking forward to a new, empty world with only them.

While this is probably more a reflection of Jackson’s agoraphobia, I found it an interesting commentary on the rich and powerful, and how they tend to be just fine with any disaster as long as it doesn’t affect them.

A great read, but for me it was probably the least impactful of her books so far.

Always be dreaming

I’ve been having trouble writing, because I haven’t been thinking.

Now, since I’ve started spending more time each day just drifting, mentally, I find I’m a lot more inspired.

I think mind-wandering is important for me. It’s hard when we are all currently surrounded by chaos, evil, and death, but all that stress and anxiety makes it all the more important to just breathe for a while now and then.

I try to take some time each day to dream, to imagine, to explore alternate realities and strange possibilities. It can be hard sometimes to let yourself wander. It’s so easy to think ‘I should be doing something else’ and start listing out all the tasks you have ahead. But that is not relaxing or inspiring.

Even just fifteen minutes each day, to just let my mind breath, unguided, and see what ideas present themselves, has been a great improvement to my writing productivity.

What will you dream if you let yourself rest?