2025-04-22 Journal Entry

I’m mostly just sitting around and waiting for my glasses to arrive. I’m so pissed that I lost them somewhere at Thorne’s house. I bought these new ones sight-unseen, and I really hope they turn out alright. They’re a bit smaller, more circular, and I hope they don’t make me look too much like a little turtle. There’s a certain trope that I both want to embody and that I also don’t want to overembody, which is that sort of thin bookish man with the small frames that rest on the edge of his nose. These ones I just bought entirely from the fact that they look like my perscription sunglasses, which are sort of the same shape and don’t look too bookish but do still have that little bit of round quaiantness.

I’m reading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek at the moment. It’s a beautifully written book, but I’m also somewhat struggling to really wrap my head around it. It’s nice to hear someone describe these beautiful little charicatures of what’s happening outside her house – the flocks of starlings and the sad tale of the frog getting liquified by a water bug – but something feels a bit hollow about it to me. I peeked at the afterword briefly (I was in fact looking for her little quip where she bemoans the fact that this is on too many high school curricula, something I definitely felt when I had to pick it out of the School Reading section of the library and deprived some 11th grader from reading it) and agree with her own assessment of the book by suggesting that it’s perhaps too grand, her attention spanning these really grand and lovely sentences and grand writing. It’s lovely, especially in small doses, but a whole book of it is almost overwhelming in its richnesss, a whole meal of chocolate mousse. The subject matter reminds me of the music of Sibelius, but it’s not like every moment in Sibelius is some grand, sweeping orchestral moment, but rather it starts small and simple, these little fragments, that build into something beautiful. Thus far, the book feels like it’s trying to luxuriate in itself just a touch too much, and I wish for some of the observations to be more straightforward. I’m reminded of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass: “Sing God a simple song: Lauda, Laudē \ Make it up as you go along: Lauda, Laudē \Sing like you like to sing. \God loves all simple things, \ For God is the simplest of all.”

But I still have the last 250 pages to go, I’ve barely even scratched the surface here. There’s still much to discover.

Hmmm, what else what else what else. I thought more about the structure of a novel the other day. I walked several miles, just on a whim, yesterday, and I kept revisiting NEC as a suitable subject for a novel. It’s so enticing, so interesting, and then perhaps BPYO really became the most interesting place, just because of the international intrigue and the money at stake the and the real charisma of the whole thing. In the novel, I suppose it doesn’t necessarily have to be set at NEC, or else it could just be a youth orchestra that hires out professional players. I don’t want to cloud the story too much with both the required orchestra rehearsals and BPYO on the weekends, which is more than anyone would really care to hear about. But I had this thought that there could be a whole story about Hans Jorg Weiss doing something insidious (although I have no doubt he’s a lovely person in real life), like laundering money through the orchestra or whatever. I supppose from that perspective it doesn’t really have to be a youth orchestra at all – it could in fact just be BPO, just sketchier. It could be all musicians straight out of school, hired as a sort of training orchestra or whatever. I don’t know.

But essentially there’s a similar sort of triangle going between Hans Jorg’s own scandal, the performers in the orchestra, and probably something else. I keep thinking of a meditation retreat center or a temple or whatever, just because it’s a place of silence. A library could also be something like that. What other places are quiet? A recording studio where nobody’s playing, one of those soundproof rooms that’s so quiet you can hear the electricity in your nervous system buzzing. A cabin in the woods, someone building this little hermitage that someone finally escapes to and gets some fleeting sense of serenity.

I can just see the closing scene, BZ at the podium, arms outstretched, laughing and laughing, dancing to a Mahler symphony coming to its crashing end.

I’m back again. It’s raining outside, and I got my new glasses. There’s something mildly disorienting about them, or at least there was at first. I think it’s just that I had spent two days largely not wearing glasses at all, and so I had this kind of weird feeling of my eyes re-adjusting to them. Plus it feels like every pair of glasses is all slightly off and different in their own unique ways – my old pair, my sunglasses, and the new pair are all the same perscription after all, so it’s kinda silly that they would really be all that different.

I don’t really know what all I have to say at the moment. I’m going to spend some time outlining my novel for a little while, because I think that will force me to get some ideas out onto paper. That said, I don’t really know how well to outline a multi-narrative novel like this. It might be more like there’s basically three different outlines. Imagine a triangle and a line starts at each of the three corners, and then all three of those head towards the middle. That’s basically the structure of the novel. Except that’s kinda not how it goes, because characters from one line will actually eventually end up intersecting with other ones to increasing degrees. So it’s more like a car crash in slow motion. Or three car crashes. I don’t know.