-3

THE CEILING


I'd heard of Juneteenth before but would always forget the specific date over time. I can't remember when I first became aware of it, but I do know how: reading about Ralph Waldo Ellison whose second novel was named after the holiday and, well, remained unfinished at the time of his death. Juneteenth was eventually published in 1999 (five years after Ellison's death) and I have a copy that I picked up at a book fair years ago, but I'll admit I haven't read it. Just like having never looked into the holiday with the sort of effort it deserves. One has to wonder if people and the media will discuss Juneteenth with the same interest that they have now, leading up to today. It would be nice to think we will, but at the very least I'll be able to say I know a bit more about it.

Why haven't I read the novel? It's weird, but for being the second novel by the writer of Invisible Man, considered to be one of the most important works of African American literature, Juneteenth is surprisingly lacking in media coverage. I'm not casting blame here--I haven't read the damn book either!--but the Wikipedia article for the book does not consider anything of the plot and amounts to only 181 words in all. I know at least some of the why for this: Ellison had written over 2000 pages of the narrative at his death and these were chiseled down into the novel by his friend, John F. Callahan. A more extensive version of the manuscript would be released in 2010 and has a slightly longer Wikipedia article and, amazingly, two whole sentences of plot. When we return for summer at my high school, we discuss in the English department what books we've read during our time off. I can't guarantee it yet because it's a four hundred page book (the 2010 manuscript, called Three Days Before the Shooting... is 1101 pages!), but in the spirit of the holiday I think perhaps I'll try to read Juneteenth to talk about. It seems timely... but is it? I'm not sure because it looks like I won't find out much about the novel without reading it! 😅

If you're reading this on the day I'm writing it, you've probably heard enough about Juneteenth, but this blog post will live on through this current date. It would be great to think that we can look at the end of slavery in America as a day to celebrate alongside the end of World War One, but then again I'm not sure everyone knows that's where Veterans Day started so I should probably explain Juneteenth a little bit. Juneteenth is named in honor of June 19th, 1865, when the Emancipation Proclamation was formally announced in Texas, freeing slaves in this state which was distant from the North and had fewer Union troops. What Juneteenth isn't is perhaps as interesting as what it is: Juneteenth isn't when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, which was September 22, 1862, to be in effect January 1st, 1863 and it's not the end of legal slavery in America which held on in Delaware and Kentucky (not impacted by the proclamation due to not having seceded from the Union) until the thirteenth amendment was ratified on December 18th, 1865. Juneteenth then becomes a celebration in many ways of progress towards racial equality and freedom in America (the holiday is also known as Freedom Day), not a triumph of the end of racism. In a world where white America likes to pat itself on the back for beating racism ("we all live in a colorblind melting pot" /s) when racial injustice is still very obviously alive and well in this country, a day like Juneteenth is something we really need. Take some time today to think about what we can do to better enforce the amendments to the constitution that make the American ideal the dream we've heard so much about. Long after Juneteenth and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments following the Civil War, women would also be granted given the important freedom of the right to vote in, fittingly, the Nineteenth Amendment. Not to get too Stephen King here, but there's something about nineteen!

Speaking of THE ROOF, I don't mean to compare myself to Ralph Waldo Ellison in any way, but I can relate to the sentiment of being lost in a novel. I'm not sure I've written about Wonder Boys here, but Michael Chabon's novel about, well, an author with a two thousand plus page manuscript who isn't anywhere close to an ending comes to mind. Ironically, Wonder Boys was a pivot for Chabon who was working on his own bloated second novel and eventually gave up. In writing THE ROOF here and having previously written "Waiting for Gadot," I think I'm avoiding a bit of the meticulousness needed to write a book forever. When the poet Li-Young Lee came to speak to my grad school class, he said that virtually all of his poems are published because he sends his publishers a draft of what he's working on... and it ends up published. He didn't seem mad about it, but he certainly made it seem like his work is never finished in his eyes. On a blog, it's different. Finished and published are two different things. I'm sure no one was glued to my blog posts over the last few days, but in order to get some hyperlinks to work, I had to essentially publish incomplete posts here and on tumblr and then edit them to be able to link up with one another. It's a very different world to be working in. Not necessarily better, certainly not perfect, but fun in its way. It gives you the sense that you've said your piece. You're doing the work. Now that I think of it, THE ROOF 3 isn't even finished, because I'll have to edit in some sort of ending or a linking post at the end. After you've seen every corner of the roof, something has to happen to wrap it up.

I'm not sure what THE ROOF is anymore, because I had to write a lot of stage direction for you in this section which runs counter to my ideas for the play, but this is how I've gotten it written out. It is existing now, not just thoughts in my head. I can always revise it. Since I've been reading comics on Webtoon over the last few months (years?) I've been fascinated by the way people just get their work out there in webcomics. There are times where you'll think that the art could be more polished or the writing needs editing but at the same time this is usually made up for by just a sort of raw energy. I... feel like I'm repeating myself again but maybe not. It feels like this review of The Dark Knight Strikes Again that I can't find and might have to edit in later, but where the reviewer says the comic is proudly just Frank Miller going for it and his girlfriend coloring the comic on her MacBook. It's beautifully lo-fi. Now, Strikes Again isn't great, it's probably not good, but to be honest I'm not a big fan of The Dark Knight Returns. All that said, if Frank Miller is going to draw Plastic Man, I'm in--that's what reading Webtoon comics is like. They just have a certain pop to them that you know more practiced creators working on getting their work just right couldn't capture.

I certainly might edit the formatting on the opening. I even have some idea of doing color coding like I've done on this blog in the past, but generally I like the idea of beginning our "choose your own adventure" part of play by presenting all these snippets of conversation. For fear of explaining the joke, as it were, for readers that choose to keep laying down at the beginning of the scene, their character has the thought that the world is understandable but only from far away. Then returning to these snippets of conversation, they become almost poetic in a way. I wanted to create a scene like in those movies where a character learns how to read thoughts, but in this case the character perhaps just hears how all the things everyone is saying connect in a way. I'm sure I didn't do a great job of it, but it allowed for some fun transformative line breaks. It's mostly just to fuck with you, but it'd be great to hear someone with some sound editing knowledge actually try to create a similar effect (it's probably be done but I don't know offhand).

Andrew, present in the opening if you go back in look, named in NORTH, is from "Waiting for Gadot" and part of this weird story sequence that goes back to some of the first stories I've ever written. Here he's just a drunken old man sitting around these young college kids. I wanted to say "hobo" in the script but I'm not sure how that would seem. He's essentially the idea of a starving artist author character who here is just going through a list of four letter words that begin with R. It's a joke on the idea I've shared about the name for THE ROOF. Having The Room and The Road in mind, I thought it would be funny if every four letter R word eventually got its due. (I've had similar thoughts about albums and songs named after years, in the wake of Taylor Swift's 1989. One wonders what the album 2020 will sound like in fifty years.) NORTH departs from my initial notes for the conversation which were, "The ending of Inception," if I recall correctly. I worked it in there, but I had the idea about time travel and a lack of awareness. You might notice that a way of knowing you've traveled through time sets up something that happens elsewhere in another corner of this roof. I'm not sure I know how to write characters that don't all sound the same and I certainly don't know if I can create gender dynamics that aren't repetitive but I tried to some extent throughout 3. If I go back and edit the opening part of 3, James is the speaker who seems to be referring to a break up which continues here. I'm not certainly who the other two are yet, but we'll see. There's a Radiohead reference in this scene... is there one in each corner of the roof? I know there's at least one more. Hm...

EAST is a bit hard to parse out. It's Sarah and Bill but does it take place before or after 2? I'm not sure, to be honest. I'll have to think on it more. Random Stephen King mention in there, no Radiohead from a glance. Bill is essentially me when he talks about Roadwork. I think the actual quote is from a discussion about a character wanting to commit suicide:

"Have you got cancer?" she whispered. 

"I think I do." 

"You ought to go to a hospital, get--" 

"It's soul cancer." 

"You're ego-tripping, man."

I'm not sure why the exchange has stuck with me but it certainly has. I had an idea for a terrible, gross novel called roadkill that I probably even started writing at least once which was maybe in a similar spirit to Roadwork. I've never read King's Bag of Bones but I was inspired by imagining an angry widower thinking about his dead wife as just a bag of bones to consider a story about a man whose mother and wife were killed in a car accident and in his anger at the world he refers to them as roadkill. Gross, sick self-pitying shit. Not that surprising I never wrote it, I guess. When Sarah talks about Enochian, I'm not sure any of the supposed learners of that language looked at it that way, but in writing her I'm inspired by what Alan Moore does with the language of what I guess are angels in Jerusalem. Another book I haven't finished, fittingly enough. Hey, at least I finished the Frank Miller comic. Sigh.

My notes for WEST from April 13th: "Velvet underground, man out of time, the bends." Then I went and wrote it and didn't talk about "Man Out of Time" or "The Bends" so when I tacked them in afterward it might read poorly. Paul talking about "Man Out of Time" is just me remembering this from the Wikipedia article about the album it's on. "The Bends" bit is just from the fact that some people will post the song on YouTube without the opening section which is just a recording of some noise from a parade from what I recall of what I've read. In a way, "Man Out of Time" is also a reference to you, the character, which admittedly is not gendered in the text. I imagine Bruce's monologue in 1 reads different if you are a man or a woman reading the scene and imagining yourself as the you character, but then again it probably just reads different from person to person too. Either way, the man out of time is a recurrence as Bruce refers to Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five in that opening who is a man out of time. I feel dumb explaining the connection because I hope it's obvious but in WEST, the talk of speaking more than one word at once should flow with the ideas of EAST and Enochian angels doing just that in a way. Anyway, it's all just thoughts about Jerusalem still. The angelic language there is almost like a spoken telepathy. I'm pretty sure it's explicitly spoken but when you hear a word from one of these beings you also hear a deep meaning inside the word which allows Moore to perform some fun language tricks as well. I might edit in an example one day.

Hahahaha, I just went back to SOUTH and there's a third Radiohead reference when Isabella says "Planet Telex" which is the song before "The Bends" on the album The Bends. This scene is modeled on what I see as a bit of a weird women trope in Sandman. There are two sisters (I think they're sisters?) that were particularly weird and striking and memorable in Sandman Midnight Theatre when I went back and read it in prep for this part of THE ROOF and I think I connected them with Hazel and Foxglove in A Game of You who are lesbian lovers. So who are Isabella and Trish? I don't know; they could be lovers or they could be sisters. I know this is problematic but think of it like the way the White Stripes first presented themselves to the world. So these two women are having a conversation about The Matrix and simulation theory in a similar way to how the characters I've mentioned from Neil Gaiman characters talk to each other. Well, I take that back, in a similar way to how the narration of the comic would make you imagine said characters might talk. They aren't the main characters, so they don't have a lot of screen time, but like I said, they're memorable. I know Hazel and Foxglove come back later in Sandman or is it in Death? I might have to do a little rereading on that front. The notes for this one are essentially what you got: "Matrix and simulation theory." I'm actually not sure how I connected the two ideas two months ago, outside of the obvious. In thinking back about it as I wrote this scene, I wanted to be critical about the ideas of The Matrix, but that doesn't take away from it as a film. It's a great movie! Basically a lot of the point I wanted to get across echoes the discussion of simulation theory from Elon Musk's first (?) appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast. I think it's the one where he smoked the pot. Anyway, Musk is saying that if we can create a simulation, there's no reason to believe that aren't simply a simulation ourselves. He also goes into the discussion of the world outside of the simulation being less interesting than the simulated one we may inhabit--simply by comparing our lives with the entertainment we turn to (I remember wanting to write a similar idea as the Ultimate Marvel universe version of the Marvel character Fantomex. Ignore me!). The Matrix seems to fit with Rogan's response to Musk; he just kept trying to change Musk saying something like "we are in a simulation" to "we might be in a simulation." It was funny to me. Simulation theory really seems to make The Matrix seem a bit materialist with its focus on the real world outside of the matrix. That said, once again, great movie! I'm sure there's nothing I can do to hurt the movie here more than what the silly men's rights movement has done with the term "red pill" already but what have you.

Hey! I think we're just about done and it's four minutes before I need to leave my house. I finished on time! Hopefully it was fun to be able to move across the roof by clicking through to my tumblr. We'll see what I think up next. I think we'll get a scene about the origins of the group that meets on THE ROOF sometime soon. And hey, I know the beginning of this was a lot of words ago, but if you're reading this on a day that isn't Juneteenth and virtually anyone who ever reads this will be, still why not take the idea to heart? It doesn't hurt to take a few minutes on any day to think about how we can make the country and the world better for all different kinds of people. Be the change and all that.