Left Over Inserts (Orphan Notes).

Copyright © 2011 Bob R Bogle



As I'm writing a first draft I start adding notes to the end of the manuscript:  items I want to insert into either a later chapter, or back in some fitting point in an earlier chapter.  So when I reach the end of a novel I always have these random scraps.  I have 17 pages of notes that I need to insert somewhere into the text before I can start pruning the whole thing.  These ideas are seldom thought-out, and although I may put them in one character's mouth when I jot them down, later they may very easily end up being the words or thoughts of another character altogether.  Here are a few examples of some of these orphan notes:

plant early:  The hands of all Americans are still stained with the blood of what our ancestors ‑‑ Northerners and Southerners alike ‑‑ did to blacks in this country.  And still do to blacks, and to any other downtrodden race or group.  Just ask the people in Birmingham how long it takes to wash the stains away!  How long you have to pay and pay.  Not to mention to Native Americans.  We haven't even begun to address that matter in any serious way at all.  And for the crimes that America has committed around the world, and continues to commit to this day.  That's a lot of blood that we pretend not to see.  But some day like Lady Macbeth we must see it.  We must deal with it.  We'll be generations trying to wash it clean.

The fundamental trouble with micromanagers is not micromanagement itself, but the concomitant and all-consuming myopia afflicting almost all micromanagers that leaves them incapable of discriminating between the relevant and the insignificant.

During the country's first hundred years the West was a relative concept that only meant west of here.  Thus a lone log cabin in the piney woods of Illinois could be considered to be a frontier homestead in the West.  But after Polk's Manifest Destiny succeeded in shoving the Indians and the Mexicans out of the way, and after all the trees were felled and all the buffalo were successfully slaughtered, the West became an absolute place.  We are Westerners who are untroubled by all that complex, dirty past that made our lives and times possible, struggling to comprehend what all this ancient nonsense in the South and the East was all about, for it has so little to do with our own neglected and forgotten heritage.  Ten thousand revisionists have successfully cut up the past and re-knit it together into a comforting narrative that suits the present.  Pain, death, deceit, vainglory, cruelty, wickedness, depravity, even evil, all victoriously trivialized away into a few bland sentences in a high school history text.  What do we really know about the past, any of us?  We're nothing more than clumsy, sloppy mythmakers, amateurs without the time or interest to track down the primary sources.  Interpreters and misinterpreters and political spin doctors and wolfish corporate yahoos and even mildly stupid but jackass-simple, everyday amicable, cloddish, unwitting depreciating distorters of events.

in Arkansas chap, Jessie points out that "criticism" implies the rigorous and consistent application of "criteria," not of opinion or appeals to emotion, and that history is always a matter of probability, not certainty.  this provokes a reply from Charlie abt quantum mechanics.  (in chap 22, Teddy bemoans that Jessie and Ras have been talking into the night abt such "esoteric philosophical matters" into the night during this trip.)

"¡Muchos tacos!"
"De nachos."

Time collapses between the Southern Manifesto and the Civil Rights Act of 1965.  Whites who had been won over by Martin Luther King, Jr and nonviolent resistance overcame bureaucratic resistance.  And then the fall of racial segregation, coupled to the black vote, changed the political context forever ‑‑ at least, until Hurricane Katrina.

Charlie:  I do not inhabit your pathetic world.
Teddy:  What pathetic world do you inhabit?

Charlie:  "I met Prince Phillip at the home of the blues. . . .or was that King Phillip?  We'll see. . . .​​"

Tyrants, artists, paupers, con men and kings all alike manufacture history, and nearly all their names are, by and large, forgotten within a few hundred years, no matter how outrageous their crimes.  History issues forth from every thought and every action:  we are all designing the lives of our children's children's children, and their own children's children's children, in each moment.  How we live our lives has consequences not only for us, but for thousands we'll never know, and whose lives only a few decades from now we can't even hope to imagine.  Whatever you're doing right now matters.  So try not to spend so much time being a grouch.