Greetings Friends,
Happy Summer!
I’ve been moving things around, putting them in their right places and my, how the time goes.
I painted a painting then threw it in the trash. Walking away from the communal bins at my studio, I thought, “Good. Now I won’t be tempted to salvage that.” Then I tumbled in after it.
Just kidding.
Turns out, you can’t rush art.
If you go to Midjourney and feed the AI some key words, it’ll generate something shitty for you. Or at least I think so. Something more contrived than the two digital collages I put below. You can tell me which one you like better, if you have an opinion. Maybe I’ll still paint one or the other. Truthfully though, the compositions can be stronger when I leave them this way.
After throwing away the painting, I drafted a post for June then deleted it.
I then deleted a large chunk of this post explaining why I deleted the post for June. I described how the excerpt in that post had come from Chapter 2 of the first draft, now Chapter 25 of the revision. Gave all of my reasons for first making Chapter 2 Chapter 2 then deciding to make it Chapter 25.
But then I decided to scrap all that and tell you only that I also decided to break down the novel chapters more, so you won’t be getting an excerpt from each and every chapter. Though I’ll still aim to send you one monthly. And, the protagonist’s name is now spelled Rae, not Rhea, in case there was any doubt about pronunciation. (There was, with a couple of readers!)
Some context for the excerpt below, from the re-arranged Chapter 3, “Everything in its right place”: We go back three years to Rae and Elliot meeting; Elliot asks Rae to borrow a pencil in art history class. After the class is over, they go to his place on the outskirts of Dallas.
Elliot turned the key and unlocked a blank space
They stepped inside it
Endless white walls and a fat white column, too chunky to wrap one’s arms around, holding up the ceiling like it were no big deal. They navigated around it, Rae following behind Elliot, unsure of what else to do, how to move across a space with no beginning, middle or end.
There was nothing to suggest that the space was lived in. No furniture, photographs, mementos or sentimental objects. Nothing to pin a person down. Just the stark unavoidable present. Pure bare-boned potentiality. That color reflecting all colors.
She was looking for signs of life, when a faint rotting smell caught her nose and led her eyes to a pile of moldy dishes in a stainless steel sink. Elliot saw her eyes alight on a swarm of fruit flies hovering above the flatware like Petri dishes and yawned, “I’ll have people do all that for me someday,” in other words, someday will afford him the means to keep up his uncluttered mess.
For a minute she thought, “He must be a real estate agent, or of stolen some keys to an apartment that isn’t his.” He could be anybody, for all she knew. A nihilist, a Buddhist. She didn’t even know him. But he moved with such controlled panache that she could see he must of owned whatever it was he was moving toward, and then she saw the set of turntables like a pair of magnets pulling him toward them. A couch and a mattress on the floor.
He announced that he was a DJ and his DJ name was Red Monk.
His empty loft made a show of his sparse possessions. He was attached to nothing, but the power button on his turntables seemed to beckon to him and he pushed it like he couldn’t control himself. She sat down on the couch, still with a view of him from behind. He busied himself thumbing through records in one of those red plastic crates you find in Kroger storerooms. Long lithe arms, tensing and relaxing. So as not to be just watching him, she looked out a window behind the couch, onto more blankness: a strange pearly gray Texas sky, with clouds covering the sun as if it had something to hide.
The wasteland around the Southside lofts spread itself out thin to touch far and wide. Something like artistic alienation. Out of the corner of her eye, Red Monk stirred (was he Red Monk to her now?). She could sense some nascent idea taking root inside of him. She didn’t dare move a muscle and make it stillborn. She trained her eyes on the DART tracks running across the scorched earth pointing to the fugitive sun. The Dallas Area Rapid Transit, rumored to serve the Dallas Area, shown out here in these urban sticks not to be a rumor. The tracks ran across a field to a forlorn station you were probably better off leaving alone. A barren place where nothing good could sprout. The horizon had a stark planar quality to it. Here was actually a line. Not those hazy, undulating lavender lumps of the Tennessee Smokies, like God had taken His thumb and—smudge—given it that soft look.
"I know—" Red Monk asserted, and she turned back toward him, fingering a record, prismatic mountainous shards on its cover. She felt a tingle like beginning all over again something that had never begun. Déjà vu. The vinyl slid out of its snow-capped sleeve like a magic card, through Elliot’s palms touching only its razor-thin depth. It settled on a turntable and Elliot lifted the needle. He let the record spin and as it was spinning began rolling his wrists. This was almost too much. All of the revolutions took a lot of mental fortitude but then something in the movement of his wrists...Rae understood that the turntables were an instrument he was getting ready to play; it was all necessary for the music. Elliot set down the needle on aqueous black. A cascade of electronica came out, phenomenal as G-force pinning her to her seat. And it sounded like
And it occurred to her that vastness must be a series of openings inside of openings, not one way inclined but turning inwardly as well as outwardly, collapsing and expanding, splitting and multiplying. Everything and nothing all at once.
And it felt like