All posts by Matthew Callan

NYC

Tales of Suspense From Pre-Dawn Running!

I’ve been working out very early in the morning lately. My schedule and my waistline necessitates it. In the past few weeks, as the weather’s warmed up, my cardio workouts have been mostly running. I’ve been running off and on for 13 years now, and I know it’s good for me because I hate it.

Thanks to Daylight Savings Time, it’s usually still pitch black when I go out for my run, which is always unsettling. When you go out to run at dawn, you feel energized and accomplished. When you go out to run pre-dawn, you feel creepy. Especially if you’re doing the routine I currently am, which is to sprint very hard, then jog, then repeat. So to the casual observer, it looks like I’m running from some terrible crime, but I keep getting winded. “I really need to get away from the scene of this jewel heist I just pulled off, but…man, just gimme a second…”

So I get a weird vibe on any given morning I run, but this morning in particular felt more odd than usual. I can’t explain to you why, exactly. It was just a feeling I had, a sense that something was off or something was in the air that things weren’t quite right. I went off on my run regardless, feeling uneasy but knowing I’d feel worse if I didn’t go.

To combat the feeling, I decide to take a route through some more residential streets, thinking this would feel safer than my usual route around a local park. But the feeling persisted, possibly because it was pitch black, and possibly because it feels even weirder to sprint past people’s houses while they’re fast asleep. Especially the quaint little Tudor-esque houses that can can be found in my neighborhood, which look very charming during the day but gnarled and sinister in the dark of night. And when the occasional person did show their head, stumbling toward their car hanging onto a coffee mug for dear life, they looked as nervous and suspicious as I felt.

So I changed my route, heading toward the more industrial parts of my neighborhood, where trucks were already loading and gassing up for the day. This was more familiar to me, and yet I still felt that something was wrong, and I realized there wasn’t a whole lot I could do to get rid of that feeling.

However, it didn’t become much more than a feeling until I neared the end of my run. I was jogging an overpass that fords the LIE, which was already jammed to the gills with traffic in both directions. I reached a sprinting portion of my routine. And as I did, I got the sense that something else was running behind me. Gaining on me. I didn’t hear anything apart from my own footsteps, but I was certain of it.

So I ran faster, but this thing, whatever it was, kept pace with me. I craned my neck to see what it was, and it turned out to be my own shadow, cast by one of the huge lamps that lines the overpass. As I continued to run, it caught up with me, loomed over my head, then overtook me and disappeared as I neared the end of the overpass exit ramp.

This was when I thought to myself, “Wow, this movie about my life is terrible.”

Oirland

Two Views of That Day

I’ve written about this before. I know I have, and yet I feel compelled to do it again. “This” being my feelings on St. Patrick’s Day, which have evolved over the years from seething hatred to an uneasy truce (think Korean DMZ).

My animus has faded due partly to the mellowing of age. The older I get, the less I am able to muster the energy to despise things when I can merely hate them. But the other main reason for my change in feeling is because at some point, I realized my dislike of St. Patty’s Day was just a parroted expression of my father’s dislike of the day, and Ireland, and Irishness in general, or at least the most pronounced expressions thereof.

My dad hated Ireland because he was born there, and his formative years in the Emerald Isle were not happy, to hear him tell it. He had plenty of stories of sadistic Christian Brothers at his school and crushing poverty, all of which were very funny, as Irish stories tend to be. But behind the yucks, you could feel the privation and shame and pain.

He couldn’t stand to go back there, and did everything in his power not to, especially after my grandparents died. His work, whatever the hell it was (psst: spook), took him on insane business trips to India, Africa, former Soviet republics (the Icky-stans, as he called them), former Yugoslav republics, Afghanistan, Jordan…and the only place he expressed any real hesitation to travel to was Ireland. It made him nervous, I think because it made him feel emotions, which most Irish folks can’t deal with. That’s why they invented whiskey and dances where your upper body remains rigid.

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Literary Endeavors, Tuneage

Soundtracking

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I think I’ve mentioned this before, but writing a novel is kind of hard. One the main reasons it is so hard is the time needed to complete it, time that can be spent in so many ways that don’t involve sitting at home by yourself in front of the computer screen. Not to mention that simply being at a computer screen offers so many distractions. I’m constantly worried that I’m “missing” something on Twitter; breaking news about the Mets, perhaps, which I am semi-professionally obligated to keep on top of, or perhaps a hilarious meme that cries out for my contributions.

One of the biggest enemies of novel writing is lack of focus, be it internet enabled or just the wandering of mind that tends to happen when you have to do one thing and one thing only. My biggest problem is I’m a multitasker by nature. I find it extremely difficult to work on one single thing when I have ideas for a dozen others, all of them vying for headspace. When it comes to shorter nonfiction stuff, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with working on more than one project simultaneously. But that method is deadly for fiction writing in general and novel writing in particular.

Colson Whitehead (whose novels The Intuitionist and John Henry Days are in my own person canon) wrote a great piece about this a few years back for the Times, “What To Write Next.” The intent was humorous, but even more so than the jokes, what struck me about the piece was its subtext: The writer’s fear that you’re toiling away on one thing when you can and should be working on something else, an impulse that can prevent you from doing anything at all.

An excellent way to combat this lack of focus is through music. I’m far from the first person to point this out, but I feel compelled to share my thoughts anyway, as I owe a debt to all the music I listened to while writing this book. I know I wouldn’t have been able to do it without clasping headphones to my dome and letting music push the outside world away for a while.

I found listening to albums (remember those?) helped the most. A complete album–a good one, anyway–immerses you in a universe, which helps you focus your energies and attention for the running time and hopefully beyond. The albums I listened to most often while writing Love and a Short Leash were:

  • Miles Ahead, Miles Davis
  • Double Nickels on the Dime, The Minutemen
  • Mikal Cronin S/T
  • David Comes to Life, Fucked Up
  • Under the Bushes, Under the Stars, Guided By Voices
  • Get Happy!, Elvis Costello
  • Singles 06-07, Jay Reatard
  • The Tyranny of Distance, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists
  • Melted, Ty Segall
  • Murmur, R.E.M.

In addition to these records, I also got sucked into various boots of Petit Wazoo/Roxy and Elsewhere-era Mothers of Invention shows (1972-1974). I can’t quite explain why; I listened to a ton of Frank Zappa in high school and college, but only rarely since then. This was an addiction I thought I’d conquered. Whatever the reason, my desire to listen to this music again reemerged right when I was finishing up my final draft, and I’m glad it did. I found the funk-and-jazz charged jams of this era of Frank Zappa’s oeuvre to be helpful for this particular stage of my toil.

I found that commercial radio doesn’t help me all that much, with its incessant breaks and complete lack of imagination, but listening to WFMU definitely did. I did most of my work on the weekends, and the Saturday afternoon block of Michael Shelley, Fool’s Paradise with Rex, and especially Terre T’s Cherry Blossom Clinic powered me through many marathon writing sessions.

To honor this debt, I wanted to share a playlist of songs that were often drilled into my ears when writing the novel. Some have particular resonance for reasons related to novel’s plot/subject matter, some are mood setters, and some are just bitchin’ tunes. I’ve arranged them in an order that helps my own process: Get pumped up, settle in, shot of energy, scale back again, repeat. I’m not sure if this will be instructive to anyone or if it really shares anything except a glimpse into my weird headspace. But hey, you get some rad tunes, so shut your noise. Playlist available here, deets after the jump.

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