I woke up early this morning and, not knowing what to do with myself, ate some cold pizza and watched part of an episode of Orange is the New Black. It’s a lazy way to begin the day, but it’s Saturday morning. When I was a kid I used to get up very early on Saturdays because that’s the day for cartoons. No Cartoon Network, no cable television. I liked to watch Super Friends and The Jetsons. Bugs Bunny was my favorite, though. Till this day, when I hear even a few bars of Wagner’s “Flight of the Valkyries,” I think of Elmer Fudd singing “Kill de wabbit, Kill de wabbit.”

I really can’t stand to watch cartoons now, as an adult, because I no longer find them to be as transporting as they were when I was a kid. I’m not saying that the older cartoons are better than the new ones. I’m saying that my sensibilities are different. I require a lot more substance from the popular culture I consume, even if my tastes are sometimes a bit lowbrow (sometimes I can’t help but binge watch Netflix shows). In any event, this is part of the mystery of growing up: what happened to Saturday morning cartoons?

Writing is not really a replacement for something as airy as Saturday morning cartoons, but I prefer writing, these days, to other trivial pursuits. Writing is a way of clearing my mind of its cluttered thoughts. Freewriting, in particular, feels cathartic to me. In fact, this entire blog of freewriting is like cheap therapy: I blurt out my thoughts and feel some relief for having unburdened myself. It’s not as expertly moderated as a good therapy session, but it’s free. I like free.

One of the things I would like to do in my life is to see if I could write a novel. I’m not sure how I might tailor a blog such as this to create a fictional narrative. Maybe a narrative already lives in this jumble of freewritten blog posts, but I’ve been thinking a bit lately about the structure of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire as a way of writing. My memory is that the novel is written as a forward to and footnotes on an epic poem written by another (fictional) writer. I can’t remember any of the substance of the novel, but it reminds me of the footnotes I wrote for my dissertation. In some places the footnotes are the most interesting bits of writing on the page. They act as a metacommentary on the larger narrative of the diss. What would be interesting is to cobble together some sort of narrative from these blog posts, and then write a second narrative as a commentary on the first. I don’t know if other writers have used Nabokov’s novel as a blueprint, but it’s an idea worth exploring.

I’ll need to re-read Pale Fire. Let me order a copy online just now.

Done. I’ll be very interested to re-read this book. I think I read it as a Freshman in college, and I’m sure my understanding of the work will be much different. I still have some snapshot memories of the book, beginning with an image of the writer sitting in an easy chair writing his poetic couplets on index cards. My memory is that the writer has died before the poem was finished, and the narrator is a fellow academic who edits and publishes the poem, sometimes at odds with the writer’s widow. It’s a complicated narrative, though, given that Nabokov basically had to write two books: the epic poem that serves as the center of the novel, and the commentary, which is the bulk of the book.