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.

A NONSENSICAL PROSE STYLE THROWS THE NORMS OF THE WORLD INTO DOUBT

I opened up the new issue of tin house and I was immediately bored. I already knew that I am easily bored; but I used to have more interest in what was being accepted in mainstream magazines. every story seemed to have the same setup - mention some kind of historical circumstance, bring out a main character to guide us through this factual morass, and, I assume, although I wasn't able to read more than a few sentences of every piece, have that character go through some kind of change and triumph.

I know fiction is formulaic, and this is both comforting and frustrating. the question is whether I am ultimately interested in fiction, or something else. I have decided that I am not usually a storyteller. stories don't occur to me. characters, positions, ideas, random thoughts - those seem to me much more immediate and pressing than some kind of this-happened-then-that-happened sequence. I'm really not usually interested in setting a scene, although that has been known to happen. but if I could somehow boil fiction down to some kind of written-out thought process, I would. I'm trying.

lydia davis does this. she doesn't have stories, she just has these things - essays, testimonials, lists, or whatever - that give you information without bothering with story. the reader can construe a story if she wants. for example she has a thing where she just lists the various maids, over 100 of them, who worked for this woman named Mrs. D., and if you want, you can superimpose a narrative which includes the decline of the maids, although they don't necessarily get progressively worse. they just come and go. this is both closer to reality than most fiction and also less "interesting" because it doesn't spend every sentence trying to entertain you. I got bored while reading it, but I read the whole thing, then wasn't sure how I felt about it.

then there are books which are both nonlinear and nontraditional and entertaining. I read frances johnson for a class. this book is fucking hilarious in a way that is impossible to explain. there are beginnings of storylines - stupid, bizarre ones - but they kind of fizzle out. the only thing unifying the whole mess is the consistency of the characters. otherwise, it's just a collection of funny sentences.

this is the main fake plot, the quest to get this totally bizarre item that makes no sense and is hilarious:

The man scooted forward. "Frances, what if I were to ask you to help me with an errand?"
"Errand? What errand?"
"I'm no competer," Palmer began with controlled excitement. "But like most professionals, I've long been drawing up elaborate plans in my bedroom at night. I may have mentioned my experiments before...you see. I've been tinkering with a wax-and-oil compound for quite a while. The project excites me terribly, Frances. To be exact, I'm trying to invent a special balm."
She listened with absorption, watching the man's chin and its movements.
"I hope that one day, this balm will stand up to criticism, and maybe even help people far away. Does that sound silly?" The man stared ahead, pushing his glasses up his nose, resting his forearms on lean knees. "Well, you see, there's a particular ingredient I need to finish the project, but lack. The stuff isn't available in Munson - "
"You're not like anyone," she observed.
"...and which is not exotic, by any means. It is, however, an unusual, semihardened oil with some far-reaching, healthful properties I've long admired. I want my balm to have pizzazz! Searching for far-flung ingredients is not my forte, however, and I can't take time to travel, not with my responsibilities in town. Frances - can you help? If you find the oil for me, I think it would help us both. Besides, travel makes me queasy. I need the darned oil - "
"What sort of oil?"
"Chicken-beak oil," he replied, "and lots of it. Can the stuff be found in this state? Christ, no! You have to look elsehere," he added softly, and his light eyes bored into hers. "This errand could help you leave town, Frances, as a push, a starting point, a way out of your own hesitation. If you go, I'll be standing right behind you."

I know I am not the only person who gets bored with realistic fiction, and I'm wondering what is at the root of that boredom. it seems connected to this problem of whether or not to accept archetypes, or narratives, which is also bothering me. when I first read joseph campbell I thought that this was essential knowledge that was being forgotten, that every strong story has some kind of mythic basis; but now I'm not sure we should really be reinforcing the same old stories that have been told for years and years. I think many of the people who read a lot are totally bored by them, and tired of being forced to read shakespeare or melville or whatever.

on the other hand, I think there is a lot of stuff getting written now that is not serious in any way, which is good, but I also like serious stuff. even frances johnson has some serious stuff going on which is thematic and can be explored in a conceptual approach. I think it might be an extremely strong example of merging a new style with an old one, although I wish it had been a little more conclusive instead of just meandering until it was done. still, for an audience that gets bored pretty easily, it's more than satisfactory.

narrative is addictive and I don't know that the new crop of writing can do without it; at the same time, the usual causal chain of events that normally drive a narrative might not be enough. certainly, a story based in reality where a character learns from the external world and has a growth experience is easily recognizable to most readers. I think writing a story based in reality is the first mistake a writer can make, I think realism is a myth and my brain won't accept it. whether or not the rest of the world is heading this direction I can't definitively say, but I think there has been a huge upsurge of fiction which deliberately avoids reality in order to interest the reader and be more accurate. I am a fan of this kind of fiction. I think I see realism as a lost cause, as striving toward some perfection of artifice where the reader forgets it is artifice. this is totally impossible.

it's not even "magical realism" I'm talking about, although that definitely fits; it's the kind of fiction where the universe is represented in a manner that is skewed somehow. sometimes the irregularity is in the actual events of the story, which might be impossible in the real world - magical realism - and sometimes it's in the way the thing is told. in either case, we are being confronted with the fact that everything we see is a metaphor, as nietzsche said.