Nicholas Tyler
I said, "What time is it, Charlie,
where did we go all day? We seem to get nowhere
and do nothing but sit looking at each other."
He said, "I know, I been doing the same thing for weeks."
--Van Morrison
August 28th:
The fool's simplification of what's happened to The Goat: I wrote a story, and then someone else wrote the story again, and then a bunch of people each rewrote little bits of the story in front of a camera, then that first someone else I mentioned put all the little bits together. The fool's simplification is usually misused in the service of a bullshit Socratian demystification--think of those folks who think they've solved the question of the Middle East by declaring it "a hot, dry place where everyone argues about religion"--but I just want to highlight the multiple retellings. I've watched the first cut of THE GOAT. (the period is part of the title) and, boy howdy, it was uncanny, thrilling, and humbling.
Uncanny because a world which I had dreamed up (if I may be bold--certainly I didn't create a Middle Earth, or even a Middlesex, but it's my own fictional world nonetheless) and only saw inside my head was outside my head. Events which I had coreographed down to the timing of breaths played out in only loose agreement with my vision; everyone looked different than I'd pictured them; sentences which I wrote were spoken in a way I never heard them in my head.
Thrilling because, well, shit, somebody made a movie out of something I wrote. That's the American Dream, isn't it?
Humbling because everything wrong with the story was made glaringly obvious in the film version, mostly because the film maker had left it all out. Also humbling because the life the actors brought to their characters made it clear how flat I had written most of the characters. Two of them, whom I had written no dialogue for and had described vaguely at best, are people now. And, as I said before:
I was lucky enough to sit across from Dustin Untiedt (Seth) and Barry Kidd (Chuck) as they, prodded and goaded by the director, crafted a moment for the film that had no equivalent in the story--they were drawing details on a map I had sketched in a hurry--and showed me something I didn't know about the characters. Something I couldn't have known about the characters, because I hadn't done the work on them that these actors had.
August 2nd:
This website has become a work blog, and since there hasn't been any work in a while, there hasn't been much of a website. This summer, however, someone else was working like a madman, and one of my short stories is part of that madness. Check it out.
April 10th:
Hugh McLeod's cartoons intersect my headspace in wonderful ways.
March 29th:
I've written very little for this website the past half-year; I lifted the "Happy Birthday" stuff from Doghouse Riley to keep the front page changing--made it my own as much as I could, mostly by focusing only on artists that have affected me deeply (occasionally a person who was or is not an artist), but it's a gimmick.
I think of entries on the front page here as a work blog, and I haven't been doing much work. I've been writing, certainly, but I haven't been working. I've been waiting, in the sense that I'd burned most of the wood of my raft (where did I read that metaphor first? I can't remember, but it's a great metaphor. You have a person on a raft in the middle of a freezing sea, trying to find land, and trying to stay warm. The raft is your life, the fire is your work. Gotta stay warm, gotta stay dry) and now (this past year) I'm replenishing. Maybe there's a book waiting to grab me and not let go, but it hasn't yet.
March 3rd:
My father left me a phone message, which included this:
"Hey [affectionate nickname that only my family knows about], when are you going to get that old geezer off your website? A little too close for comfort, I'm tired of looking at him."
The sublime joy of this phone message is that my Pop's voice sounded different than usual--a little more nasal, a little more midwestern, as if he were doing an impression of the old geezer in question.
is a struggling fiction writer living in Atlanta, GA.
Email: nickATclockwatchingDOTnet.
East Commons, Georgia Tech Library
Godspeed You! Black Emperor, etc.
Oblique Strategies, Randomized
