Everyone is out at the moment, either doing bar crawls or studying for an exam, which leaves me home with a William Styron novel and my own misshapen homunculus of a tome for company. It's weird; while I have internalized many of the lessons learned from RSBE's previous incarnation, this new material is most definitely still driven by instinct more than the planning impulse. I quite literally don't know what I'll write tomorrow and the reason that proposition thrills me is because I'm in no rush. There's no deadline with this one. Even if this is the only book for which that will be true. This thing will come to me when it comes to me. I'm not going to try to pull it out of myself faster than it wishes to emerge. I'm wiser with this one and I can tell already. It's no longer pitched at the same deliriously furious key the whole way through. It dips and weaves and has gained greater emotional texture. It makes journeys and it wanders and it covers ground, goes from forest to plain to desert, returning to verdant forest.

I've tried to keep from listening to music while I work on it, allowing myself various musical interludes while I'm researching or blogging or facebooking or haunting those "Art of Fiction" interviews over at The Paris Review. But while I'm writing, only household sounds. Only incidentals.

All these innovations of technique and still this feels like a crazy jazz solo of a novel. Some days, it feels like shredding. Some days, it feels like legato and picking all day long. And occasionally, when I look back at a week's work, it feels like a recognizable song.

Over the past two years, I tried not to get too invested in grades as 1) professors in this field were especially capricious about that sort of thing and 2) I was working to develop a craft, not learn a science.

That said, the last of my spring 2012 grades came in a few hours ago. Out of six classes (for a combined 18 credits), here is the final tally:

5 A's
1 A-

BOOYAKASHA!!!!!!!!!

Now, that's gangsta.

I'm gonna heave a sigh of relief so heavy the house is gonna shake. :)

Oh, and in other words, the new RSBE has gained over the past few days 3405 new words. AND it has whiskey bootleggers! From Kentucky!

#BAWSE

Currently reading: Lie Down in Darkness - William Styron

-- Cory Booker: The Dilemma of the New Black Politician - Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker

"But in a curious way, Booker’s comments also underscored, and possibly exacerbated, his own political problems—and not simply because his attempt to stand above the fray made him look something like a guy who refuses to help a friend in a bar fight because fighting is immature."

1026 words on the (new) novel snuck up on me today. No idea where they came from, they rather just ambushed me on my way to the library and before I knew it, I was back home with Microsoft Word open and words cascading down the screen. Figured out a few major things of this whole new chunk I'm adding, which is always fun but will very likely not continue to be. Funny, I was in the middle of a whole host of errands when the subconscious decided it had spent enough time stewing and I knew it was time to get those first lines down. Paying more attention to prose this time and all those other layer-y things I tend to leave out of early drafts, so I'm expecting to take my time with this. Not a license for laziness, just a reminder that this book isn't gonna come all at once and that I've got to learn patience sooner or later.

I know I can't be the only one out there that sees the additions of Sotomayor and Kagan to the Supreme Court bench and the promising campaigns of Elizabeth Warren and Joe P. Kennedy in Massachusetts and detects a rumbling sea change in the American political landscape. Pieces of a larger puzzle?

This Grantland piece on the 10-round war between Micky Ward and Arturo Gatti in May of 2002 reminded me of the beautiful brutality of the sport when it's performed at its peak, but has also made me wonder anew what precisely what about that brutality I find beautiful.

Watching Arturo Gatti outbox Ward in the first couple of rounds felt much like watching beautiful passes thrown and caught, like watching reverse layups or a crazy off-balance backhand across the court. And those solid punches that land well, the really powerful ones, are like the touchdown, the windmill dunk, the ace serve.

But my heart does something funny in concert with my stomach when, in the middle rounds, the thing dissolves into a slugfest. It becomes a brawl and I'm enthralled. Frozen in my seat, unblinking, gut clenched, teeth frozen in what I later discover is a rictus smile. It's more than sport at this point and less than it at the same time.

I'm watching two men utterly destroy each other and I want to see it keep going.

I wince at the especially heavy blows, and when Ward lands that vicious lightning-fast combo of about 14 flushly-landed punches near the end of Round 5, I feel a grimace peel back my lips. Ward's trademark left hook to the body that drops Arturo in that infamous Round 9 had me nearly doubling over in shadow pain for Arturo, an empathetic burst that reached through history and the screen of my laptop and, however momentarily and ephemerally, linked us. After a point, it hurts to watch, but it's, at the same time, like watching a magnificent fire, a bloodied, bruised, sweating, cut-open conflagration.

But at the end of the 10th and final Round, both men turn their clinch into a hug.

They fought two more times, Gatti winning both bouts, and throughout that time, they became close friends. A retired Ward even ended up training Gatti for his final fight. And I'm left trying to figure out why that makes me so incredibly happy.

What happens to a man when he steps into the ring with the intention to dismantle and injure the man in the opposite corner? Without malice, without hate. With perhaps only a clinical disregard for the other man's humanity. And if both men are left standing at the end of the contest, no matter the results, it would seem, I imagine, for the good and honest ones, there's a respect that ferments between them. Ward and Gatti had granite chins during that first match-up, Ward often walking through hellfire and brimstone to get close enough to hurt Gatti.

It's the pain that compels me to watch, but, it's the surviving of it that compels me to keep watching. Every time I've watched a fight, especially one as brutal as the Ward-Gatti battle, I'm left with admiration for what the human body can endure. And because the meat-puppet is nothing without the mind, I'm left with even more admiration of the mental war waged between the two men. And even with the moral conundrum that ever-increasing speed and strength in athletes has made of combat/contact sports, I can't help but gaze in wonder at what's forged between two men who endure and dish out and are still standing at the end.

That 9th Round was murderous. And in its fires, a friendship was forged.

Wednesday morning, I had taken Metro-North down from New Haven to NY for the NYU Commencement ceremony at Yankee Stadium. I was all dolled up in my suit and tie and had my cap and gown (and umbrella) in my lap for much of the ride. An older woman in my compartment saw the purple robe and the cap and smiled and said "Congratulations," to which I replied with a full-hearted "Thank you."

Later that morning, I was waiting outside Gate 8 with many other degree candidates from the variety of schools under the NYU umbrella, most of them undergraduates, and I saw the very same woman, now donning her very own cap and gown. I smiled, nodded, and told her, "Congratulations," to which she replied, blushing, with an effusive and earnest "Thank you."

-- The Four-Year Career - Anya Kamenetz, FastCompany

-- How John Roberts Orchestrated Citizens United - Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker

-- The Visionary: A Profile on Salam Fayyad - Ben Birnbaum, The New Republic

-- Wilt vs. Elgin: When Their World Was the Playground - Dave McKenna, Grantland.com

Dang Yale art school grads had me out way past my bedtime. But it's what I get for taking any excuse to dress to the 9's. Did make for an interesting promenade back home. Favorite suit jacket just keeps picking up admirers. Even had one car stop at a green light just to say hi and wish me well on my evening (in not as many words, of course). But now? I crash.