Copyright © 2011 Bob R Bogle
One meme that I absorbed in DC is that the news is a first draft of history. Of course the associations that a "first draft" has for a writer are not quite the same as for someone who's seldom worked on more serious writing projects than several dozen term papers or their ilk in college. Walking around Washington I found myself doubting how much one should be concerned with the news when the established history is congruent with the buildings, the architecture, and the artifacts manifest in every direction. It's the whole story hanging together that we want, not the preliminary observations and doodles in a reporter's notebook.
Memphis Blues Again requires an architecture that is much more internally-consistent than its first draft, the evening news version of the story, provides. A panoptic, holographic, self-referential context. I'm out here in a wilderness of words looking for a cathedral ceiling gestalt, and a means to consolidate the subthemes in a manner that provides proper buttressing support. The first draft is bursting at the seams with ideas that require streamlining and rearrangement into an aesthetically-meaningful framework. Something graceful and strong. Right now I'm moving, page by lonely page, through that incipient massive effort of will, madly marking up the text, and generating a list of all the memes it contains in order to devise a strategy for restructuring the whole. When I wrote that first draft, chapter by chapter, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, word by word, typing letter by letter, I was working up close with a raw block of stone; now I'm pulling back to embrace the whole, all at once.
Thinking of memes, and regarding them as blocks of stone to build this grander structure: that's what's going on with Memphis Blues Again right now.
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