Williamstown, Wellfleet, Kindle, BP, Cohen, Morton

Perhaps I have branded myself too narrowly.

See, I am so much more than the Big Man Getting Smaller.... Well, I am a few pounds more than I was (although I still look as good as ever, and isn't that what counts?), but that isn't what I meant.

So sometimes I need to shoot off in various other directions and I come back here and look at what is here and I just don't know what to make of it. What, I should eat more salads, well shouldn't we all?

A couple of weekends ago I was on a serious 48-hour bummer as a result of matters totally external and largely misunderstood by the participants (could I get a little more cryptic?), and I went so far as to shut this blog down.

Which was lame, especially when I have been so out of touch with friends the last few weeks, months, working away at this book.

So at least, I'm back up. And so is my blog.

And I have much to report, none of it about the big man getting smaller. But, you know? It's all good.

* Adrienne my amazing bicoastal daughter was out here a few weeks ago for some auditioning and interviewing and the wonderful result is not just one thing but two. She will be directing some theater at the renowned Williamstown Theater Festival in Western Mass this summer, and she has also been cast in a play at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater. She has negotiated schedules and as a result can squeeze in both and she will be back East for 4 months! And I will get to see her work, which I have not done nearly enough these past few years.

* Danny, my 9-year-old son, gets his Kindle tomorrow. When I began publishing material on the Kindle in December Danny immediately became my ace design and marketing honcho and, among other things, came up with the concept that I have used (thanks to a $30 stock photo) for nearly all of my Kindle title "cover" designs. In return, I promised him that his genius would be repaid with a Kindle of his own when my sales hit 8,000 "copies" of my Kindle titles. I told him if things went very well I'd hit the goal in May and, given the Amazon shipping backlog, he should have his Kindle by his birthday in August. We hit the goal last Monday. I ordered the Kindle Wednesday and it arrived yesterday. He's pretty jazzed. About a reading device. Go figure.

* Danny and I have also been making up for lost time with some regular Spring BP. He has a sweet swing from the right side of the plate and makes contact far more frequently than his old man did at the same age. As a batting practice pitcher, I leave a lot to be desired, but he is very gracious. During his summer vacation we are planning to write a book together, under the working title Do the Math, Dude: A Kid's Guide to Baseball by the Numbers.

* I have previously reported on my beautiful grandson and his beautiful Mom. Not much has changed in either case.

* Last night I watched a terrific film. I'm not usually much for documentary/tribute films about musicians, but I absolutely loved I'm Your Man, which is about, for, and with Leonard Cohen and a pretty amazing cadre of other musicians including Rufus and Martha Wainwright, Bono, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Beth Orton, Nick Cave and others. Cohen's a remarkable man, has been from his days as a novelist and poet in Montreal to a songwriting and singing career that reaches into and illuminates and gives texture to the most needful moments of so many lives to his own rekindling as a Zen monk at the still point of the turning earth, again and again. The film is a tour de force spiritually, musically, and as a filmed inquiry into the heart of human creativity. So I guess I have to give it a thumbs up.

* While I'm watching the Cohen movie again tonight I will be putting off watching something else I am looking forward to, the film version of Brian Morton's Starting Out in the Evening, which arrived from Netflix this morning. It's always good to have something to look forward to.

* I am also looking forward to finishing the book that I have been working hard at while doing a dozen other things in spare moments since December. I feel it is good, and even important, but it is hard to get people to read books that claim importance for themselves (one would call them, I think, "self important") so I am pulling a fast one marketing-wise and trying to pull off a hybrid between polemic and primer. People always buy primers, and indeed people have already bought several hundred copies of the primer excerpts, but it is no flippin' easy task to crowbar polemic and primer into the same book, even though Saul Alinsky did it. The tension is evident in the search-optimized (and ridiculously ponderous) title: Beyond the Literary-Industrial Complex: How to Use the Amazon Kindle and Other New Technologies to Unleash a 21st Century Movement of Readers and Writers. I posted one of the rather more polemic chapters on another blog of mine not long ago and just a couple of days ago I noticed this nice mention, way down toward the bottom of a page, from a totally unknown source. What a nice "long tail" moment for me. The kind of moment that is enough.

* Such moments are enough, especially when the wolf is backing away from the door now, thanks to the Kindle and to the forthcoming book. Soon I will be a better friend. Soon I will have a better house. Soon I will be doing better at paying my debts. I have had faith in these notions of "soon," but it is nice to get to the point where the book is almost done, the money is in the pipeline, etc. These topics are so boring and maudlin, it will be nice to be done with them.

An obvious soundtrack for today (if it doesn't work try right-clicking on this link -- Youtube seems to be acting a little weird today, but maybe my computer is straining):

"He has you at any stage in your life.
He has your youthful idealism.
He has you when your relationship is splitting up.
He has you when you can't face the world and you look for something higher to get you through.
He has you at all stages."

--Bono, describing the songwriter Leonard Cohen