Journals, XXII

March 25, 1988 Part One

Narcissus is at work until 10 p.m. It’s 8:05 p.m.

I think I’ve dropped the snakeskin story. I just didn’t have it elaborated well enough. There was so much ``stuff from the past’’ that the present action was delayed. I like there to be a lot of present action. Most of all, it didn’t seem like most of the events that were in the past would overshadow the present. The past stuff was very intricate and long and the present action (as I had planned it) was swift and decisive. Yet it still had to come to terms with the past. I imagine it would have encumbered the ending. I think I need to write about something else than violence, too. I really don’t know enough about it to write about it so much. I don’t want to get a reputation for it, either, that is if I get a reputation for fiction at all.

I decided to drop that story and I was playing my guitar when the theme ``the politics of solitude’’ came into my head. Later I thought I should write about a landowner. Now I think it should be about a landowner who takes meticulous care of his properties, and evicts tenants for the slightest transgressions. He should esteem the preservation of good property over the people who live in it. He should have a history of some sort. Something he wasn’t able to obtain or to create, so he purchases the houses and preserves their condition instead.

I know, he is a frustrated painter. The outdoors is so beautiful to him, but he can’t get it right. His properties have ``him’’ written all over them. And when he isn’t asserting control over his land’s tenants, it feels like it isn’t his, either. Things slip away.

But what is it about Martin Walker that captures me? The way he talks. It sounds like there are words which suppress another sentence underneath them. Maybe I could throw in a parapraxis or two.

There’s going to be a tenant who falls in love with him… A tenant whose car he has photographed to prove to himself that she is rich and has no right to complain. He has photographed her from [his] car in order to prove that she has nice clothes, to show that she is richer than he is. He will get to talking about his paintings, well, maybe not… he’ll have his snapshots of his exalted paintings, the ones that are good enough to throw away. --> Ownership, types of ownership, is the theme of <-- the paintings, which [i] aspirations, but are technically flawed, the exacting photographs, which are so dull. There will be hundreds that all look the same. There will be three paintings. Each time the landlord looks at them he will interpret them differently, like a free thematic [i] test. OR, a landlord who finds a tenant who’s hung herself in the basement nahh… well, maybe. I need to think about this.

All names have been changed except the names of public figures, such as public officeholders and celebrities. Errors, including misspellings and incorrect use of grammar, have been quietly corrected. The purpose of the corrections is to make the posts as readable as possible by freeing them of symbols such as [sic] and the placement of parentheses around improperly employed punctuation marks. In the case of words missing from the manuscript, the editor has inserted a word or phrase to clarify meaning of a sentence. In cases where a correct expression cannot be surmised from context, the editor will insert [?]. Illegible words or phrases in the manuscript are indicated by [i]. Datelines are used when the editor knows positively where the journal entry was written. The text has been modified to conform to Associated Press style.
These are transcriptions of private papers that describe private lives. Therefore the editor reserves the right to withhold portions of his journal for any reason. Areas of omission are marked by ***.

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