fine whine

Chuck Palahniuk is a really cool guy. According to some marketing copy on Diary he's a nihilist, but that's nothing to hold against him, ha ha ha. I finished reading Diary tonight, having also started it tonight. There is a lot to be said about a book that can be read cover to cover in one evening; take notes here Clancy and Ludlum and all your word-heavy ilk. I enjoyed as thoroughly as I would've any longer book by a good author, because that's the key: Chuck's a good author and Diary's a good book.

Having finished reading it, I also feel purged of my earlier reading today, Bernard Levy's Who killed Danny Pearl? which is one of those self-important novels about writing a novel that hides the actual material in with page after page of filler about that tiny bit of actual writing. I hate those books, and I've even written a miniature version of one now just to prove a point or other. Levy's dust cover proclaims him to be France's finest philosopher and many other things, yadda yadda yadda. France's finest? Says who, asks I? Maybe it was the translation, but I didn't stumble across any great philosophy in the book I read, just a day by day account of what he did, where he went, and the events he may be imagining or fictionalizing but without separating them from the actual facts. That's not philosophizing, that's called bullshitting. And I slogged through that tome for several days for that revelation. Maybe I'm being hard on the guy but I wasn't engrossed in reading his book nearly to the degree he was engrossed in writing about writing it. How does a great philosopher and prominent author go about outlining such a book?

A self indulgent work of staggering banality

• Introduction
• write this a year later
• better yet, have a good friend write it and gush praise on with a trowel
• Chapter 1
• write about getting ready to write chapter 1
• drop lots of hints about what you will be writing about writing in subsequent chapters
• note for later: never write anything as promised
• Chapter 2
• write as though you're getting ready to start getting into the real meat of things
• write about how difficult something like chapter 2 is to write
• note for later: never get into the real meat of things
• Chapter 3
• ...

And so on? Or do they just keep writing and writing until deadline and ship it off to a publisher? I've gained a lot of respect for Jack Kerouac, who apparently (or better, supposedly) submitted the manuscript for On the road as a single piece of paper in a continuous stream of writing. Now that's cool, and I bet you he didn't have an outline planned out beforehand. Just as I had no plan for this rant before it started but it just started flowing, HTML syntax and all.