Stunning progress on the Novel

I've decided that to justify the expense of maintaining this state of the art blog for my mother and a couple of other readers I should probably use it for something besides its primary function as extra explanatory text for the Hagenart sklog.
So I've decided to start posting self-congratulatory notes to myself whenever I find time to work on My Novel, the noble and majestic tome the conception and creation of which has consumed the better part of my life and which after numerous re-writes and deletions and inevitable memory losses contained before tonight just over 2400 words.
But I toiled over it like a machine today, stretching it out to just over 4100 words in one day (pant pant, gag, retch, spit, blink uncomprehendingly at appalled onlookers)!
About 1800 of those words, written on previous occasions under the influence of far less inspiration than tonight, will have to be deleted, but oh the survivors are looking perky and well indeed! Vibrant and healthy and fit, the words I'll have left after the necessary extinctions will be the Times New Roman version of phytoplankton, ready to teem!
On a slightly negative note: I may have to find a new writing spot. Keep getting bugged while I try to write.

Rome LIves!

The hagenart sklog for 11/11/07, which happens to be Veteran's Day, which I celebrated by reading excerpts from a book about World War II, but did not employ any veteran's themes in the sklog, which I drew while we waited outside the Borghese Museum to go in and view the Bernini sculptures which my uncle had so fervently recommended to me as being superior to anything by Michelangelo.

Well, I couldn't honestly tell who was better than who. The Michelangelo's and the Bernini's and the Donatello's were all amazingly detailed and lifelike, but by the time we went home I'd seen so many other statues that I could hardly bear to look at them. They had halls and halls of them in every museum over there, and after a while they kind of blurred together, good and bad.

I think the statues were like billboards in ancient rome, that they put them up everywhere and most of them were garbage by hacks and people going home from the market or the forum would look at them and sigh and say; "Another goddamn statue - why do they have to do that?" and shake their fists at them and try to get the senate to pass laws against them and the senators all agreed, it was a damn shame, all those statues cluttering the city, you couldn't even see the sky or the trees anymore, and they shook their heads but the head of the sculptors union was a sleaze ball businessman who shook his head and told the senators that the statues were actually helping the city by encouraging citizens to win wars or do well in business to get their own statue made, and disarmed opponents by thoughtfully sketching their heads and telling them how excellent their image would look in marble, overlooking the Via Sacra, and when all else failed asking senators if they wanted to see a small sculpture he was particularly proud of, a little two-dimensional profile of ceasar, and why yes, it was sculptured in gold, and yes, it was in fact a dinari, and yes, he did have a large chest full of such sculptures available - why, senator, are you a supporter of the arts?

I'm actually quite fond of statues, especially big ones, but Italy gave me my fill.

Italian Epilogue: Pompei Scavi

As kind of a postscript to the Italy trip, I thought maybe I'd describe my inner thoughts as I wandered the streets of ancient Pompei, give my ruminations some illumination, you might say...Isn't that some nice writing?: "give my ruminations some illumination"...Just say that out loud...I'll try and think up some other rhymes as we go along. Anyway, gazing upon the 2,000 year old wagon ruts in the cobblestone streets of Pompei Scavi (which means "The Pompei Excavations" in Italian) it occurred to me to wonder what our cities will look like 2,000 years hence, will our buildings survive? Probably not the buildings of Salt Lake, they're all very cheaply made, except for maybe the City Library, and the Temple of course, and the Giant Parking Garage under the gateway...but the all the rest would be rubble, ruins, a few bare walls, and would be greatly improved by the conversion, and people might look at them and let their imaginations run wild, so wild they might think something pretty or somewhat bearable stood there, once.

As we hurried through Pompei Scavi, fleeing the huge German tour groups with their bull-horn-voiced guides, I thought somewhat wistfully of Salt Lake's future prospects as a historical disaster site; we have no volcano, but the lake could rise, perhaps precipitously, and preserve our city in salt water (does that work?) and tourists would one day wander our streets as we wandered Pompei - well, maybe they'd snorkel our ancient streets, or use scuba gear, and think we were very quaint and magically tragic (bam! brilliant writing again - it reads like music!) and mysterious and ill-fated and get goose-bumps when they gazed up on our aged and corroded basement junk that we never threw away because we knew how interesting the piles of it would look in 2,000 years.

Somewhere along in these ruminations I had the fantastic notion that in this entry there would be some kind of a verbal zoom out, out to a view of the Earth from outer space, and my voice, deep and powerful like the guides of Pompei Scavi; describing the possibility of humanity's future demise, complete erosion and dissolution of even our greatest monuments, nothing but a layer of polluted carbon in the strata of the earth's history, but zooming out and out again dramatically, to humanity's final, most indestructible, most vast and stupendous and truly embarrassing monument, the TV transmissions we've been emitting for 50 years or so, and with that to end the entry on a powerfully ironic note...

- but I can't do that because they've already used that idea in a couple movies, Galaxy Quest, and this 90s movie about little kids in a homemade spaceship who meet TV-quoting aliens. These movies, of course, are also now being transmitted out into space, to whatever alien intelligences are really out there. We can only hope they understand!