THE LONELINESS OF SENTENCES

Once the words begin to settle into their circumstance in a sentence and decide to make the most of their predicament, they look around and take notice of their neighbors. They seek out affinities, they adapt to each other, they begin to make adjustments in their appearance to try to blend in with each other better and enhance any resemblance. Pretty soon in the writer’s eyes the words in the sentence are all vibrating and destabilizing themselves: no longer solid and immutable, they start to flutter this way and that in playful receptivity, taking into themselves parts of neighboring words, or shedding parts of themselves into the gutter of the page or screen; and in this process of intimate mutation and transformation, the words swap alphabetary vitals and viscera, tiny bits and dabs of their languagey inner and outer natures; the words intermingle and blend and smear and recompose themselves. They begin to take on a similar typographical physique. The phrasing now feels literally all of a piece. The lonely space of the sentence feels colonized. There’s a sumptuousness, a roundedness, a dimensionality to what has emerged. The sentence feels filled in from end to end; there are no vacant segments along its length, no pockets of unperforming or underperforming verbal matter. The words of the sentence have in fact formed a united community.

I have never heard anyone describe sentences in quite this way, making them bigger and bigger until it seems like they are all that's important in literature. which of course is true in a way, because in writing you have nothing but sentences. sometimes there are weird shapes behind the sentences, but as lutz is saying here, you can't get those shapes unless you have chosen exactly the right words for your sentence; you have to find the only words that could possibly work, and then you will have communicated the right shape or concept to the reader. at least, that is my interpretation of this article, which is fantastic.


yesterday I went to a bookstore I am fond of and had an interesting experience. I just went around the store and spent a lot of time looking at specific books, ones that I had read about and knew the names of the authors, which seemed to be a lot; I think this was because I am used to going to corporate bookstores and they have like nothing of what I'm looking for. as I went around looking at these books I had a weird feeling that I was having conversations with them, I do not mean I went around the store saying things out loud, but there are some times when your interior voice becomes very articulate and it was happening in the bookstore. I picked up one book written by an ex-drug addict and the blurb said something like "this book is full of fucking heart and will be remembered when the zadie smiths of the world are forgotten" and I said in my head to the book that's not fair, you can't compare things like that, what zadie smith and others are doing is sure more intellectual or concerned with aesthetics than the stories of an ex-drug addict, but that doesn't mean one is more worthy of people's time. I found a book by lydia davis in which she had written this little part about how this character felt like an old man most of the time and this made it difficult to be a young woman and when young men flirted with her she would think, why is this young man flirting with an old man? and the conversation in my head went something like, lydia davis, you don't understand, I fucking love you.

so I decided that, if I am ever at a point in my life that I am just without a plan and wanting to move somewhere anywhere, I will choose any place that has a good independent bookstore. I feel that good things will happen in a town with a good independent bookstore.