Eccentric Flower:199811/blind spots

sixteen eleven thirteen

blind spots

Running a little late today. The usual crises. Hope you had a nice weekend, although my mailbox seems to imply otherwise. For some reason a lot of people were at low ebb this weekend. I am now psychically exuding goodwill into the aether, in hopes of cheering everyone up. It may not do much good, but short of lending an ear - which I do anyway - it's the best I can offer.

Oh, and I annoyed someone this weekend because of a bad habit of mine - a habit of fussing at someone because I'm concerned about them. Sometimes I see someone who really causes my heart to bleed. I want to help them, but I also want to pick them up and shake them and slap them a little, just to wake them up: You're not thinking clearly, you fool. You've got a big blind spot.

Unfortunately the urge to shake them sometimes wins, and many people interpret this as being kicked when they're down, and I always regret it later.

The flip side of my email this weekend was people commenting on the excerpt from A.D.'s journal. Everyone said, in nearly these exact words, "So what happens next?" which I guess is a good sign - it means that at the very least I held your interest.

(I also worry that I'm leading you to the wrong expectations. The book doesn't really begin until A.D. leaves the planet, and the other characters in the excerpt, after a few more days in A.D. time, will never figure again except tangentially.)

I wrote about another 3000 words of the revision this weekend, so that's coming along. I also finished reading my book on entophagy, bought a slew of the Dover reprints of the Oz books with original illustrations (Dover rules - I may have said that before) and read a bunch of them, and began reading V.

The problem with Pynchon is that there's only enough room for one Pynchon in the universe. If I wrote a book that rambles as much as this one does, my panel of esteemed literary advisors would tell me to cut the fat. No one else will be allowed to write like Pynchon until Pynchon is dead.

Of course, given that I argue that no one is allowed to steal the way I say things, and that only I have the rights to profit from my own writing style, it's obvious that I'm at cross-purposes with myself again. Big surprise. I want to filch good things from other people but I don't want anyone filching mine.

Wow, that's kind of an eye-opener. I hate becoming aware of yet another personal hypocrisy. I have too many.

Like this morning, when I read a letter in Entertainment Weekly about MTV. Now, I have the same complaint about MTV that all the other children of the eighties have: They don't show videos anymore. I mean that they don't show little short movies with storylines to go along with whatever pop song happens to be the current radio darling. VH-1 shows a video now and again, but it's telling that the videos on Pop-Up Video are all usually several years old.

Anyway, an EW critic panned MTV's strategies a few issues back, for different reasons. In this issue, there was a reply from the president of MTV, Judith McGrath, and her reply made me aware all of a sudden that the reason I don't like MTV is that it's become all music for an audience I don't belong to.

A largely black and Latino audience. Uh-oh. Racism alert.

It's not so much the fact that, with rare exceptions, I don't care for rap - that's personal taste. It's more that I found myself thinking, "Why don't they play any good music?" and was actually asking "Why don't they play any white people music?" without realizing that's what I was doing.

Cut to Columbine hiding her head in the sand.

Meanwhile, Jette talks about how Austin is one of the least conservative places to live in Texas. That's as may be, and I tend to agree, having hopscotched all over that state ... but Austin is also one of the most segregated cities I've ever been in. The interstate bisects the city north to south ... and there are no black people on the west side of it, no white people on the east.

We all have blind spots. It's always disconcerting to become aware of what you weren't seeing, or were refusing to see.

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