The fate of True Librarian Confessions: Librarian versus Writing. How frustrations and delights over library school created a foul-mouthed other me...

BLOT: (13 Aug 2010 - 04:12:07 AM)

The fate of True Librarian Confessions: Librarian versus Writing. How frustrations and delights over library school created a foul-mouthed other me...

A little over a year ago, late June 2009, I penned a short short story (only maybe 2-3 printed pages, possibly longer if you like big type) called "True Librarian Confessions: Librarian versus Zombie". In it, an unnamed librarian, roughly equivalent to me but with some changes, wakes up in a strange house after a massive drinking binge, finds zombies in the basement, and burns down the house. It was obscenity laden, and very much so a product of the frustration meets elation I was feeling in the second semester of grad school. The classes were long (summer classes met four or five hours, twice a week) and some of the conversations had nose-dived passed the boring and tedious into the potentially mind-rotting, and I had to get it out. So, this couple of lines were written, and it went from there:

"Zombie" wasn't the first TLC I had planned to write. I think "Librarian versus the Gay Mafia" must have been, or "versus the Ghost of Charles Dicken" (a running joke of titles is that the enemies were always presented singular, though in some cases this meant dropping the "s" off of already singular words). It wasn't meant to be the last. In fact, the next week was supposed to be "versus White Supremacist" in which the night librarian had to fight off angry Klansmen who were pissed about a short story he wrote in college, a story involving the daughter of a Black Panther marrying the son of the Aryan Nation**. The initial version of this involved him jumping, with the chair he was tied to, over a railing and smashing him and it but getting up out of the wreckage and slugging his way out.

There were two problems. (a) The vulgar intensity of the first one, in which a hung-over librarian punches a zombie in the face before setting rum on fire and burning down a house, was kind of hard to replicate on a weekly basis without working up to it. TLC was like a stage play, improvised and acted on the page in borderline stream of consciousness narrative, with me playing an angrier and less settled version of myself*** fighting bad media stereotypes—the Gay Mafia were going to demand "protection buggery" from the library with the library claiming it was already pushing the Gay Agenda and should be paid in full—and classic monsters. (b) Second, a series of twelve stories about a man punching wildly and fleeing has a charm, but doesn't quite get the writing goat up. Sure, the "versus Charles Dicken" story was going to be about how Dickens actually wrote the ending to Edwin Drood but the publisher didn't put the remaining parts out there because "he [the publisher] was tired of all the damned coincidences", but by the time I had established the mythos of the world enough to go more meta-literary, there would have fights with all sorts and little flair left. "versus Zombie" retained the most charm as an standalone piece.

Over time, though, I have been thinking about the "versus White Supremacist" one and expanding it, adding more flavor and background. Rather than one story, he wrote about an entire town, which completely and coincidently turned out to be true (with small details excepting) and the town is pissed about it, and the Klansmen are pushing them into action because of his long forgotten short story. The zombie episode will be folded back into the front of the book. It was meant to be, technically, a three parter. Turned out he had a drunken fling with a local witch (local to him, separate from the town) and she had brought back loved ones from the dead to answer questions. She wasn't able to summon just spirits, so had brought back whole corpses which she then would hide in the basement to answer questions through a microphone set up. By burning down her house and destroying said loved ones, he royally pissed her off. I'm going to blend those stories in to him being hunted in this small town and then she comes along trying to save him from the townspeople just so she can get her revenge.

Then, in some long distance backburner, I'll set aside the ghost stories to be something like "Librarian versus the Ghosts of the Writing Dead" and work that out, with the other ones ("versus Gay Mafia", "versus the Robot of Death in the Cave of Mystery"—which was talked about in "versus Zombies" as the episode where his brother died or was lost—, etc) as bridging short stories or somehow, and I don't know how, bent back around to somehow fit into one really weird narrative.

Anyhow, just wanted to get these ideas down so I have something to work from. By the way, since the work will be longer, he won't be able to keep my [unstated] name, so he will become Damon Wyndham Graeme: the night librarian.

* Actually inspired by a real-life event. I woke up one day, after a night of drinking, and had been reading Harold Bloom.

** The reverse of genders-to-races would seem to just too stereotypical.

*** The story went that I went to library school immediately, and so missed out on meeting my wife and so forth. Meaning that by getting my life together sooner, I missed out on some emotional growth and was generally lonelier.

BY WEEK: 2010, Week 32
BY MONTH: August 2010