M. David Hornbuckle

Blog

  • Dreamlog

    The dreams had stopped for a couple of nights, although I had a couple last night. In one, I was in high school, I think, and participating in some sort of statewide competition in Montgomery. I wasn’t sure if we were driving there from Birmingham or Dothan until I asked the bus driver, who said we were coming for Birmingham. He didn’t actually know how to get to I-65 from where we were, so I was trying to tell him, but we got lost. In another, the brakes went out in my car, and I was coasting backwards, eventually colliding with some parked cars. I read later in the paper that there was a passenger in one who had broken his back in the accident. The cops tracked me down and shot out the windows of my car during a chase. They finally caught up, and I was arrested.

  • On Influences

    I think I started wanting to be a writer when I was about 10. It wasn’t the influence of any particular writer. I just liked making up stories. I read things like Ray Bradbury, the Hardy Boys series, some other simple genre fiction of that ilk. I liked reading, but I had no literary heroes.

    When I read As I Lay Dying in 11th grade, I started to feel much more strongly about a deeper purpose for literature, beyond story-telling, which is just a pretext—something about the nature of mankind, something philosophical. I very quickly absorbed more Faulkner, took a deeper interest in Shakespeare, some of which I’d already read. In 12th grade I was introduced to Beckett and Joyce, deepening my respect for art created through language. I knew then that this was what I wanted to do.

    As much as I owe to Joyce and Faulkner (as well as Barth, Barthelme, Coover, and most recently, David Foster Wallace), it’s Pynchon who I think has the most direct influence on the writing I’m doing today, and not just because I’ve been immersed in his most recent novel for the past 4-6 weeks. It’s been that way since college when I first read Crying of Lot 49 and then Gravity’s Rainbow. It’s the particular way he blends reality and non-reality to make a philosophical point.

    With Pynchon, it often has to do with entropy. For me, it’s something more epistemological. I don’t have time to work out a full essay on this. I just had a few thoughts about it and wanted to get it down.

  • Dreamlog

    In last night’s crazy assed dream, I somehow became friends with Steven Malkmus from Pavement, and then used that friendship to surreptitiously get my “friends” at Rolling Stone an interview with him by taking them, unannounced, to his house in New Jersey. Needless to say, this annoyed Steven greatly. I tried to smooth it over by acting casual about it and talking about some records I’d recently heard that sounded influenced by Pavement, including one by Jon Bon Jovi’s brother. Also, when Malkmus was just hanging out in his living room, he was listening to System of a Down, which seems pretty unlikely.

    I had another one that was alternately in a bookstore and a library. Both were near our apartment, somewhere in the West 40’s. There was a book that was supposed to have one of my stories in it, and I was supposed to get a free copy, but I hadn’t gotten it yet, so I was trying to get the bookstore to give it to me. At one point, I walked into the bookstore/library and my mother was sitting at a table talking to my ex-wife Doris. I avoided them.

  • Dreamlog

    Crazy dreams continue. This time, running into my writers’ group at a mall on their way to a class most of them were taking together. Then later at the actual meeting, they had invited a lot more people than the five I had initially counted on, maybe twenty people altogether. We met in someone’s house, and every time someone made an entrance, a group of young girl ballerinas would announce them, and if they were female, give them a tiara. Instead of going over the chapter I had submitted, I played Onion Man on the ukulele. Some people danced and others pulled out their own instruments to play along.

    Oh yeah, and there was also a dog that put on a puppet show. I can’t remember many details about that part, except that one of the puppets was an owl holding a book.

  • Dreamlog

    Still crazier dreams than ever. People setting up cots to sleep in the laundromat while their clothes were being washed. Wandering around in some kind of crazy appliance store. Very weird.

  • Dreamlog

    I had more crazy dreams last night. Our apartment had been moved two doors down. There was a hole in the bathtub, and a secret room. I was on the run from some people who were trying to shoot me, but I’d occasionally stop to make myself a sandwich.

    I often dream of secret rooms, and I’ve been told that these are hidden parts of my conscience that I need to explore. The hidden room in this particular dream was filled with children’s toys, and then it led to a long hallway in some kind of warehouse.

    There was another part of the dream that involved several different trips in different airports. First, I was going to Orlando, and there was this bus I had to take to some airport out in the boonies near Pensacola, which is nowhere near Orlando, btw. And in the bus, both ways, I was behind this fat kid in a weird, furry hat who struck me as somewhat effeminate.

    Then I was supposed to go to Birmingham, and M was with me, but we missed the plane, along with several other people. Helicopters showed up to transport everyone else, but we were left behind, presumably because I didn’t ask the airport staff the right question. And that fat kid in the hat was there again also.

    This is all similar, in ways, to the Fisher King myth, which I was reading up on yesterday and trying to incorporate a little more into ZMS 3.

    Since I’ve been on the antidepressant, I sleep more, and I’m remembering my dreams more. Much like I used to when I was a teenager. I wonder what this is bringing up for me. It seems like something I’ve long neglected. I did find a shrink to see, but I won’t have my first appointment until Feb. 1. In the meantime, I suppose I’ll be able to explore these questions a little more deeply at that point.

  • Aliens Like Dead Rabbits and Poetry?

    To test the existence of aliens, a company in New Mexico sent a suborbital rocket up over Roswell containing the remains of a rabbit, some poetry and some human hair. They were hoping it would be abducted. They were trying to create “a product that would appeal to the extraterrestrials.” Needless to say, the rocket returned unmolested.

    What I wonder is, how did they come to decide what would appeal to the aliens? Very interesting. Save this for that story about Keel that I haven’t started yet.

  • Story Ideas

    Story ideas:

    Two feuding authors who both specialize in paranormal/alien myth who both live in the UWS and argue when they run into each other at the Fairway.

    A patriarch with children by several different women. On Sundays, the women and their kids get together for picnics and swap stories about the patriarch.

    M is working on a book that compiles front pages from every NYT ever printed. She sent me a couple that actually included Hornbuckles in them. Beyond that, there’s tons of interesting source material on virtually every page. Makes me want to set something in the 1850s.

    Feel like I need to take LSD. I haven’t felt like that in years.

  • Critic’s Perspective

    I was thinking about how one of the ways I use this journal is to get a critic’s perspective on my own work. If I see trends or themes emerging, I can start to move toward them or away from them. If I get too involved in it, though, I start to delve into metafiction, which a lot of people see as a bygone phase. However, I think to a certain extent it’s inherent in the written word. Other art forms don’t have that. Movies and plays are almost entirely voyeuristic. Life is just happening in front of you. With literature, someone has to have written it, and the author has to decide: do I want to be upfront about the fact that I wrote this, or do I want to put up a pretense that someone else wrote it? Or do I want to play with that uncertainty?

    Sometimes I think the critic’s perspective is none of my business. But then I start writing stuff that nobody understands at all, including myself. Or I’m just transcribing sex fantasies.

  • Excuses

    I have no progress to report, either emotionally or literarily. The heat wave hasn’t helped.

    I feel like I’m always making excuses for why I’m not writing. I have too much other work to do. It’s too cold. It’s too hot. I’ll be able to concentrate once the stress of moving is over. Every excuse feels real at the time.

    Truth is, when I look at my work on paper, I’m so hypercritical of myself that I get discouraged. That seems to be the main problem. To get anything done, I have to get beyond that. Anything that’s weak can be fixed later. The important thing is to get it done! Damn it!

    Really, it’s like I’m cursed.

    Anyway. I’m in the middle of a musical project. I was asked to write a theme song for a children’s traffic safety program using the catch phrase, “STOP (See The Other People).” I asked George to write some lyrics, which he did, and I set it to music easily after tweaking the words only slightly. I need to record it this weekend.

    Meanwhile, I can’t stop thinking about sex. I have all these stories about sex, and when I start editing them, I get all worked up.