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Went to a Democratic “Unity Rally” yesterday. Mostly ‘cause I wanted to check out the venue, which was the Rhinecliff Hotel, originally built in 1855 and designed by the same architect who did Wyndcliffe thereby instilling in the novelist Edith Wharton a deep and abiding hatred for all things Hudson Valley. By 2006, the Rhinecliff had become a tumbledown wreck. Couple of Brits bought it and renovated it. Now it looks like a Brentwood condo complex. Which is to say completely charmless.
The rally was disorganized and not in the least inspiring. Maybe all political rallies are that way? I hadn’t been to a political rally since the bad old days back at U.C. Berkeley when politics took a waaay back seat to sex, drugs, & rock ‘n’ roll.
No sex and drugs at this rally. Plenty of hip-hop, though! John Faso has begun hammering Antonio Delgado about Painfully Free, the album Delgado made in 2006 under the nom de rap AD The Voice. Lotsa niggahs, fucks, and derisive remarks about dead white Presidents.
Hip-hop in Delgado’s past! Of course, that makes me like him much more!
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I am imagining a scene, though, in which I’m canvassing deepest, darkest Schoharie County, and I manage to make it up over the crest of a hill that’s strewn with Repeal the Safe Act and Hillary for Prison signs. (Yep, those Hillary for Prison signs are still out there! Rural America really hates Hillary!) At the top of the hill, there’s a dilapidated house. Dead washing machines and weird rusting condensers litter the front yard. Pitbulls are chained to its battered porch. Hungry pitbulls.
The porch appears to be covered with several weeks worth of used diapers.
I knock at the front door.
A guy with a ponytail and a week’s worth of stubble answers the door. He’s so pale, I wonder whether he’s got a skin disease. He is shirtless. He has a tattoo: an anatomically precise red heart clutched somewhat unrealistically in the talons of a grey American eagle. He’s holding a rifle.
“Good morning, sir!” I say brightly. “Don’t you support Medicare for all? Don’t you want your children to be safe from gun violence? Wouldn’t you like to see an end to environmental pollution? Well, so would Antonio Delgado!”
Needless to say, I don’t get that guy to sign my petition.
This is why I campaigned for Jeff Beals in the primary. Jeff Beals spent the early years of his career in the CIA safeguarding American interests against schemers with funny Middle Eastern accents. Jeff Beals is a much easier sell in Schoharie County.
And Schoharie County—along with Columbia County, and Delaware County, and Greene County, and Otsego County, which are just like Schoharie County—comprises the greater part of New York’s 19th Congressional District.
Delgado is gonna be a tough sell.
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In other news, I am plugging away at the Neversink story.
It would be nice to finish it today.
In her wonderful, wonderful book Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose notes that the question of voice is really secondary to the question of audience:
…in fact, the truly problematic question is: Who is listening? On what occasion is the story being told, and why? Is the protagonist projecting this heartfelt confession out into the ozone, and, if so, what is the proper tone to assume when the ozone is one’s audience?
I’m writing Neversink in what one might call the omniscient third person. I guess my audience would be anyone who happens to run across it in this journal plus anyone who reads it on the Clarion Write-a-Thon site. Although when it’s done, I will try to sell it.
In contrast, Elliott Roosevelt’s Motorcar was written in what one might call the close third person—meaning that it would have been very easy at any given point to take out all those third person pronouns and replace them with first person pronouns. In fact, I invented a device that allowed me to do just that in a couple of scenes.
Elliott Roosevelt’s Motorcar was also the first piece of fiction I actually rewrote while I was hammering out a first draft.
That’s not my preferred way of writing.
Usually, I keep a kind of log while I’m writing a first draft, and into that log go all my ideas for substantiative edits like Introduce new character in Part III; foreshadow this character in Part II.
Then I write a second draft incorporating those ideas.
And that second draft is pretty much my final draft.
Selling Elliott Roosevelt’s Motorcar is problematic because it’s 13,000 words long, which makes it a novella. There are absolutely no markets for novellas. So, I’m at a bit of a loss with this one.
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Date: 2018-07-15 08:25 pm (UTC)What did he say to you? Or did he just slam the door?
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Date: 2018-07-16 12:35 pm (UTC)That was an untrue story (hence the entry's title. :-) )
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Date: 2018-07-16 12:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-07-15 11:02 pm (UTC)Actually, it IS piss. The DNC just added some artificial coloring...
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Date: 2018-07-16 12:37 pm (UTC)I mean, I do hate both political parties at this point. But I don't hate them equally. The Democrats are marginally better than the Republicans, and I will vote accordingly. :-)