February 15, Sunday evening -- Reading Todd Perkins

At a taco shop on Market Street
Reading Flash CS3 Professional, by Todd Perkins, for his Flash class at the Academy of Art. Right now he doesn't have time for books outside of what he's assigned.

For leisure reading, he and his friend go to Borders to read art/design magazines, like CMYK, and also Forbes.

The last book he read was about a year ago -- Less Than Zero, which is set in Los Angeles, where he grew up. It's a semi-autobiographical novel by Bret Easton Ellis, about teenagers, partying, money, cocaine and, as he lived in a sort of parallel/overlapping world, he read it out of curiosity.

If he had a year to write his own book? I love this question and I described, as I usually do, the typical desert island scenario.

His answer -- he'd write in the moment, what was happening to him, how he got to the island, survival.

I've asked this question at least a couple hundred times and...
this answer is way outside the box. Usually people tell me they'd write an autobiographical book, a reflection of life lived before the island came into play. It's as if, to most people, me included, the island is a metaphor for time and when you do have time to reflect, your actual life during that time of reflection becomes irrelevant. I think of a quote in Stephen King's book, On Writing: "Life is not a support system for art - it's the other way around." Writers have to make a sacrifice and draw the line of how far to step outside to make art. Maybe I should ask, instead, to suggest that life doesn't become simply a support system for art, what people would write about if, suddenly, for a whole year, it was possible to reap the full benefits of sleep through communion with Microsoft Word? ....as I type now, on Blogger, not Microsoft, I've just had a eureka. In my Bikram Yoga class, occasionally the teachers say that thirty seconds in the half tortoise pose gives you the benefits of eight-hours of sleep. I don't do yoga often enough to have coincidentally pulled an all-nighter on a night where I've gone to class, and I've never questioned the teachers as to whether all the benefits of sleep are inherent, but this may be worth checking out. We'd all have time to write more and to read more....not just what we're assigned or pushing to finish before book club!