The Saturday Before The Day of The Dead

Today is a very fall day. I’ve woken up with a headache. And it’s raining outside. It’s the Saturday before Halloween, so there’s a party tonight. But dressing up has finally lost its excitement. Actually, reading an article this morning from the Saturday Gazette on Muslin women and the hijab had me realize that dressing down no longer interests me either. Artifice in general has lost its appeal. Jérôme, while walking up University street last night and talking about something else, put it this way: “le charme discret de la bourgeoisie,” the discreet charm of the middle class. Like a pumpkin with its carved triangle-for-eyes pushed back into place and a web of slimy seeds and fibered filaments that harness the inside, too taut to scrap off.

I have nothing to read. Last Monday I finished a very sweet book: “Ensemble, c’est tout,” by Anna Gavalda. Wednesday, the first of November, I begin my novel. After years of suggestion from Patrick and putting off from myself, I’ve decided to do the Nanowrimo challenge. So Wednesday, after the Running Room meet, I’m off to Caroline’s place, my fellow runner and writer, a sushi supper and my iBook in tow. She has an outline and an idea for a main character. I have nothing of the sort. I have the image of a man and a woman discussing in a dark hospital room. Maybe an image of blindness. And a latent desire to write of sex and love in a loving and sexy way. But I’ve warned Caroline that the fruit of my labour will most likely be a strife-full piece of shit. A jack-o-lantern with an abject face. Because I want to avoid the auto-biography, but am not a mature enough writer to write around it. And I don’t know fiction as a form of writing. The result will most likely be seamless, and afterwards I would be able to call it “experimental” – and tacitly insult several authors I greatly admire.

I say I have nothing to read, but of course that’s a lie. I have plenty to read. My bookshelves are gorged with books bought and never opened. But I grow finicky with age. I want what I want when I want it. And now I want a good, captivating little book that I can be done with in two days time, which is hard to find seeing I’m a slow reader. I don’t want to read while I nanowrite. I don’t want to share my imaginary space with some other person’s novel (already written and published, and bought, at that!). I figure that the best way to keep at it is to become as consumed with the novel I will be writing as I would with a novel I would read. So I’m off reading until Wednesday; I am starving myself to be all the more gluttonous in my creation.