got a healthy six hours of sleep today. except it was from 7pm to 1am. had not slept the night before. i attribute this to the fact that i drank a ‘neuro sleep.’ did not expect to feel the effects of this drink but i did. roommates were watching a movie but i thought i could fall asleep so i retired to my room, where i lay for the next 7 hours before going to work in the morning. think i may have been feeling a little bit too good to sleep. maybe i was nervous about something. work was patently absurd. spent most of the morning pounding out coffee drinks, having lots of physical energy from fast-paced work, wanting to make jokes too, struggling to make anything make sense. sense of humor was not so much ironic or sarcastic as manic.
this could be the first year in a few that i do the book a week thing. just finished the marriage plot. it was at its best when the kids were in college. felt like i was there again. a weird book in that it states its admiration for old-fashioned realism and then tries to update it/bring it back. the struggle as it is identified is an admirable one, just one that this book does not bring anything more to. also, with leonard’s resemblance to david foster wallace/mitchell’s being from detroit (as eugenides is)/madeleine’s love for victorian literature but also for leonard, eugenides seems to be evoking the struggle of the writer of his old-fashioned kind of fiction against that of a man like wallace, with his unabashed post-modernism and comparative unreadability, the manic highs and lows of reading something like infinite jest. i am not a particularly deep or analytical reader in the way that i am an analytical film-goer, so it’s ususally a bad sign if i pick that kind of stuff up immediately. obviously well written, but at times feels like an illusion of depth. just gonna say it: pretty sure i will write a better novel than this.
in unrelated news i have made it to the finals of the austin chronicle short story contest again. i’d love the prize money so that i can buy the original presses of the negative approach 10 song ep, along with poison idea’s “pick your king,” and quit my job. not just being coy about the unrelated-ness to my saying i will write good novels. the contest has a lot of money, but it is not a good one. i can tell these stories i’ve written are not all that good. greater work lies ahead, hopefully. i have been called an excessively pessimistic and cynical person, but am generally optimistic about the possibilities that life holds.
