What am I going to write? I don’t know. I look at some notes I wrote down to see if there’s anything to work on. Nothing. My wife suggests the color of the sky above Los Angeles and how it changes—some days a blanching teal, some days Bondi, some days the rich azure the Dodgers wear. So, I make coffee and think about the color blue. Nothing. I read a poem by Rodney Jones called “The Sadness of Early Afternoons.” I remember something once said by William Faulkner, along the lines of the mornings are for writing, the afternoons are for walking, the evenings are for drinking. I think, it’s probably too early for a drink? I go into the kitchen, sort the recycling. I go into the study and pick a page at random from one of Karl Ove Knausgård’s books and read the following: Everything is woven into memories. Everything is colored by the mind. I try writing a few sentences about the sky and don’t get very far, so I read a poem by Stephen Dunn, enjoy it, put the book down and close my eyes, remember how he and I once played ping-pong, a dozen games to twenty-one, and he didn’t lose once, not even once. Then my wife says there’s a beetle I need to see out on the terrace, so I go out and see it, it really is something, the size of a donut hole, the color of a green sparkler—I struggle to describe it accurately to myself, but it really is something. I go inside. I sit down. I turn the internet off. I turn the internet on. I turn the internet off.
The point is: procrastination. People talk it down, but I love it. The pleasure of putting off what needs to be done, the value of delay, the manufacturing of suspense. Thinking is a funny form of action. It occurs in the foreground but it also takes place backstage, while out walking, shopping for dinner, getting lost in a Rite-Aid. In procrastination I find anticipation, I find excitement. I find ideas like they’re lying around in the basement. The blueness of the sky is soothing, yes, but I crave a kind of internal murkiness, I feel an odd compulsion to watch it linger. Eventually, something glows.
“If Anybody Needs Me” (2020) by Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber
The William Faulkner recollection is from an interview about his relationship with Sherwood Anderson found in the audio archive “Faulkner at Virginia”
Any books mentioned in this newsletter are available in a Bookshop list