Uncreated Conscience

The Libertines in 2002.

Since I’ve been blathering on about this band for the past few blog posts, I figured I might as well share a few of my favourite songs with you, or at least, as many songs as I could find on Playlist.com. (This is the shitty thing about liking a UK band with relatively little US popularity: YOU CAN NEVER FIND ANYTHING ON THEM. Do you know how many times I’ve tried to convince Verizon they should get “The Good Old Days” as an option for a ringtone?) Music beneath the cut.

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Photo credit to orangefruits at Deviantart.

Dear Readers, I’m not usually the sort to go about airing dirty laundry, but I must confess something: lately, my blog and I have been having…”troubles”.

Oh no, nothing huge or earth-shattering, but enough to make me guilty and uncomfortable whenever I look at it. No, no, I still love you, I want to say, but the blog is having none of it. It feels neglected and unloved and probably rightfully so, but the overwhelming guilt I feel at its abandonment prevents me from returning to it with the necessary vim.

Do you think it will accept flowers and an I. O. U.?

Things have been all shook up here at The Little Big Publisher, at least for me, having spent a hectic summer doubling up my assistant duties, plus participating in an auction. Now that summer’s winding to an end, I’ve been returned to my post as Cap’n Sweet Valley’s one and only, a welcome change in pace, only now I’ve been slapped in the face by the gazillion things I need to do for my boss. Namely rejections. Reading for Cap’n Sweet Valley has been slow over the summer, in part because the majority of my attention was needed elsewhere, and partly because submissions have been slow.

(Hear that, agents? Send us stuff!)

Other than that, what has been going on in your life, JJ? I hear you ask. (Or least, I will pretend I hear you asking.) Not much: devouring books, being lazy, doing a little writing, not cleaning my apartment (it’s starting to reach toxic levels of disgusting), and resurrecting my Libertines fangirl on the heels of their Reading and Leeds reunion. THE LIBERTINES: BOUND TOGETHER arrived from The Book Depository this morning and I have spent a vast amount of time quoting large passages to Lou Reed Girlfriend.

It’s hard not to love a band who made sure they always had a copy of George du Maurier’s TRILBY on hand. It’s hard to find a band who even knows who George du Maurier is.* Or who can quote Siegfried Sassoon’s “Suicide in the Trenches” off the cuff at a rock awards acceptance speech. DO YOU SEE WHY I LOVE THEM SO?

*George du Maurier is like your literary grandpa. He was the father of Sylvia Llewelyn-Davies–mother of the Peter Pan boys–and the grandfather of Daphne du Maurier, author of my favourite JANE EYRE reworking, REBECCA. He is also the man responsible for the creation of the trilby hat and the concept of a Svengali. THE MORE YOU KNOW.

I’ve been in a bit of reading slump lately, and not just in terms of work. MOCKINGJAY left me deflated and now I’m itching for something different. I’ve been stocking up on Victorian-esque literature, but I just want to immerse myself in something gothic and creepy and I’ve read FINGERSMITH too many times for it to satisfy. So halp. Somebody recommend me books. Or maybe I’ll just go and find my own copy of TRILBY to reread…

My latest obsession.

Halp, you guys. I am obsessed with a centuries-dead, genius composer. Halp. I dropped $50 I don’t have on all of Mozart’s piano concertos. (Yes, all of them. Nos. 1 through 27, plus two rondos.) I rewatched Amadeus last night. With the commentary. Again. And then I cried. With anger. Then sadness. Then anger. Then sadness. Then anger. I suppose this is how people felt when The Beatles broke up except I’m angry that a genius died almost 200 years before I was born.

I have periods of obsession with musicians. Not necessarily their music (although that too), but musicians. The most significant musician-loves of my life were Carl Barât and Pete Doherty of The Libertines, but I have others. David Bowie (but only from Ziggy Stardust through The Thin White Duke). Lady Gaga. (Everyone on Twitter knows of my adoration/love/lust of Mama Monster.) And now, Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart.

My dorkiness knows no bounds. For some reason, people find this endearing. Agent Kathleen Ortiz–to whom I shall henceforth refer as Rainbow Brite–thinks I’m “adorable” when I make a pretentious ass of myself. But then she calls me “adorable” when I dress up as a femme fatale from the 1930s, when I talk about literary fiction, or when I’m being cocky and full of myself. It’s the Boy Who Cried Wolf, missy; now I don’t know whether or not to trust you anymore.

I’ve got a lot of thoughts running through my head about books and publishing, but I think I just might listen to No. 15, KV 450 again.

Today I was going to blog about literary fiction and what comprises it (and I may return to that later when I am off Cloud 9), but right now I can’t form coherent thoughts because:

The Libertines are reuniting.

You know, I’m not being hyperbolic when I say I am actually crying tears of joy. No seriously, my cheeks are wet. And if this is an April Fool’s Joke, someone at NME will pay in blood.

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Whose brilliant idea was it to give me license to record myself playing instruments and singing badly online? Gaah.

Anyway, in a fit of Libertines-related nostalgia (as it appears that a long-hoped-for reunion is in the works?), I decided to record a cover of “Music When the Lights Go Out”. I use the term “record” loosely. This is about as “produced” a sound as I’ll ever get: vocals, guitar, and piano all recorded separately and then mixed together with sub-par equipment, yay!

I’ve actually been fairly good about working these past few days (just got the soundtrack for Battlestar Galactica—what?), but a while back, in a fit of huge procrastination, White-Harp and I indulged in a little silliness.

I loves my White-Harp, I do.

I have been struck with a sudden fit of nostalgia for London. I miss London everyday, but the memory of the experience of living there has been fairly faded in the three and a half years I’ve been back in the States. But lately small memories have been flaring with sharp clarity in my mind: the way the city constantly smelled of damp and wet and stone even on a clear day, the feel of the wrought-iron fences lining Russell Square, how I would wander by the fountains playing and walk past Senate Library and around the British Museum on a long, meandering walk back from class to my flat back in Clerkenwell. The taste of Marlboro Reds and the warmth of the lights under my hand as Sofa and I talked long into the night sitting in the niche behind The Guardian building. How Tesco and Sainsbury smelled. The sound of tuna cans clinking against my leg in their plastic grocery bag as I walked over the cobblestones outside Exmouth Arms. The unexpected jolts of bright red and green and blue and yellow and saturation in a City that I always think of as perpetually grey. How I never felt as though I knew her completely, the city, the way I know New York now, the way I knew Los Angeles then. I think I miss the feeling of being lost, of being new, of not knowing and finding my way.

I suppose it makes sense as I’m coming upon my quarterly “Why aren’t the Libertines still together as a band?” hissy fit. It’s like clockwork, really. I listened to them obsessively in the summer before I went to stalk Carl Barât study abroad and they played on my iPod (known as Gerty MacDowell then–I have since learned not to name a piece of technology after a 16-year-old Irish schoolgirl with a limp as my iPod continually broke down) as I wandered up and down the streets of Camden Town and Whitechapel. The result of this hissy fit is me working furiously on the thinly-veiled screenplay biopic of the band (similar to Velvet Goldmine) called What Became of the Likely Lads? I actually really love this screenplay to death but it’s a side project on which I’m frittering away.

The other is that a new scene unexpectedly arose in ELIJAH’S CHARIOT during revisions in which my three protagonists are wandering around Bloomsbury and I remember with such sudden fierce detail the bookshops and teashops and pubs and cafes of the neighbourhood. ELIJAH’S CHARIOT takes place in London, of course, or my version of Londinium which is an amalgamation of the Edwardian London I read about in fiction and the London I knew when I lived there in the fall of 2005. The ache of missing that city is now acute and specific, rather than the dull ache it normally is.

Oh well, back to revisions. Although it isn’t helping my strange nostalgic mood any.

The world is finally, finally all right.

Pete and Carl are recording together again.

A cover of a Beatles song, no less. “A Day in the Life.”

I. Can. Die. Happy. Now.

P.S. I love the picture in the article. Because everything needs to have a little (or a lot of) hoyay.

Once again, stolen from Overheard in New York:

Eight-year-old son: Dad, I can’t even tell the Ninja Turtles apart! They all look the same, they just have different bandages and stuff.
Dad: Well, do you know their names?
Son: Uhhh… There’s the blue one… Armadillo?

Leonardo, it’s LEONARDO, kid. Come on, these mutant turtles were my first introduction into art history.

First Grade Teacher: Now kids, this is the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci. Can anyone tell me who Leonardo is?
Little JJ: A ninja turtle!

Yes, even as a six-year-old, I unabashedly geeky. I learned pretty quickly three of four ninja turtles Renaissance painters were: Leonardo (lots of non-working inventions), Michelangelo (lots of robustly naked people), and Raphael (lots of cherubic babes, both maternal and angelic), but it wasn’t until I got to middle school that I actually knew who Donatello was (a sculptor, not a painter). Maybe this is the reason I always felt sorry for the purple ninja turtle; he wasn’t famous like his brothers. Also, he was kinda the wuss of the bunch: I mean really, computers and techno-gadgets when you could be whacking bad guys with a bo staff? I know what I’d choose. And in the lineup of ninja turtles, The Technogeek almost always got shuffled to the bottom against The Leader, The Badass, and The Comic Relief.

But more on the novel later. Maybe. For the first time in over a year, I’m writing significantly. It feels good. And no, I don’t want to share with the rest of the kids at the party, thank you. Unfortunately, this creative drive has rendered me completely antisocial at a time when my extremely social roommate/best friend turns twenty-one. Alcohol is repeatedly poured down my lightweight gullet when all I want to do is retire to a comfy couch in a cozy coffeeshop (with decent and free wireless) and write, write, write.

Timing. What a bitch.

I told Lou Reed Girlfriend that the reason I loved Carl (ex-Libertines, now Dirty Pretty Things) was Carl 1) looks like Neil Gaiman, 2) is in fact, a younger, rockstar incarnation of Neil Gaiman, and 3) writes like this.

I’ve been to Bunhill Fields a few times – right near Anto’s place. It’s old and eerie, it’s where William Blake is buried so it’s got a special resonance for me, it’s an oasis of Albion in the heart of the City of London, City of Commerce, City of Suits and all that lark. The last album was written a lot more in a panic and on the run. This time we’ve got the time to walk around the town and eat sandwiches with Blake.

Le sigh. Also, who can’t love a man who ends a blog entry by saying “toodle pip?”