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Squatters Report #1January 14, 2007 I have this hunch that for the foreseeable future most of my blogs are going to at least touch on the writing of Squatters' Speakeasy. The writing itself can only scrounge an hour or two of my day, but like Mud of the Place when it was in progress it's taken up residence in my head. What do squatters do, after all? They squat. Terminate their leases (if they ever had any) and then stay resident. I say this by way of warning to the bloggery's non-writer readers: some of the stuff you read here in coming weeks may be terminally boring. On the other hand, it may turn out to be useful if you're interested in abnormal psychology and wacko spirituality, because it's hard to talk about writing without sounding like a psycho whose meds need adjusting. I'm also guessing that I'm going to be ranting more about Vineyard news and views -- I nearly strangled the last person who told me how lucky I am to live here, and the ongoing transformation of Martha's Vineyard from an island off the Massachusetts coast to a moated non-community for the affluent and clueless (also the filthy rich and malicious) is the internal combustion engine that's driving Squatters' Speakeasy. A major challenge for the first half will be to keep the internal combustion from turning into an external conflagration that lands the instigators in the slammer before their amorphous notions and visions take shape and solidify. The author lies when she says she's not an instigator, but don't tell Homeland Security or the FBI that I said that. As of last Wednesday morning, I've been actually writing, as opposed to just getting my bearings: figuring out where I was when Squatters' Speakeasy got sidelined by the author's errant retina. "Getting my bearings" (I just typed "bears" -- that too) involves rolling the bearings (bears) around between my fingers, sorting them into different boxes, packing some of them into hubs, and frequently muttering, "Jeez, you sure can be wordy, eh wot?" In the process I sketched out a trajectory -- filename ToC, for Table of Contents, although it isn't -- which should get me to the establishment of the speakeasy if I follow it. Which I won't, but I trust it to get me to where I'm going regardless. I know the right track less by the terrain under my feet than by the signs in the air. Yesterday morning I got two signs from Highway 61 Revisited, a Saturday morning radio show hosted by Barnes Newberry on WUMB-FM. I'd just ditched a reference to a major character singing "Here, Blue, you good dog you," mainly because the character's dog, whose name is not Blue, was highly critical. What comes on the radio? James Taylor's very fine version of the song. STET happens . . . Barnes also played a solo Paul Simon performance of "I Am a Rock." I've been a major Simon, and Simon and Garfunkel, fan since high school -- when, like many another alienated intellectual in training, I took "I Am a Rock" as my personal anthem. (Even at my most alienated, however, I never disdained laughter. The rest of the song is teenage and twenty-something me to a T.) I knew all the words, of course, and still remember most of them -- "I am a rock, I am an i-i-island . . ." -- but it never really registered that the very last line of the song is "And an island never cries." Put that in your book and riff off it.
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