thisnewday

I've been reading Dennis Cunningham's The Hours, a few minutes at a time. Ha! See what I did there? Thought so. And I truly love his writing. It's like reading Woolf's Dalloway had she been, perhaps, mildly sedated as she was writing it.

It's, I dunno, accessible and sad and strange without the manic outpouring of images and feelings, the frenetic jumping between narrative points of view. I like it, I do, for all of its sadness and not quite aimless interior wanderings. Or wonderings. It's all wanderful, one might say. Oops, I did it again.

Anyway, I'm gonna have to accelerate things a bit because the LPL book club, which I regretably missed last month, is moved up a week due to Thanksgiving.

I'm not worried yet, I may still be able to salvage the upcoming one because I read the book, J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, earlier in the year. It's only 250 pages and the style, the voice, is much more casual, much less dense, and the narrative stream much less intricate, than anything I've been involved with recently.

And today, well, nothing until the granddaughter's soccer game this evening, and that isn't mandatory or customary or even casually expected.

Aside from that, a few estate things, the loose ends of a life now ended. Which is sad and depressing but quite mandatory, a task better not left to someone so incredibly busy with her own family and life as my second daughter.

So, almost noon, I'm hydrated, medicated, and fed and now must get dressed. The weather has turned cold overnight, snow has fallen, a light dustung only, and the temperatures will continue downward, they say, into single digits tonight. And so I'll dress in layers, as I used to when commuting to work on my converted mountain bike.

Except that now the layers serve only to keep an aging body warm, as I sit and peruse the catalog images of bikes and bell-forward mellophones and other things of a now-past life.

And also read the things that writers write, as I once did when I thought I might, someday, be one of them...

LPK
Dreamwidth
11.10.2017

The possibilities, when putting together words or groups of words, can seem almost infinite. Which, if you fixate upon it, can push the task of writing beyond merely daunting to nearly impossible.

Which, I guess, is what I've been experiencing lately. The dauntingness of it, not the impossibility. Not yet.

Because it's been a long process, with some of these entries, to allow them to say what they need to say instead of what I once thought I wanted them to say.

Anyway, I've been thinking again about trying to move some of them to that next level. Which for me, and for them, is to find that arrangement which creates both harmony and dissonance from the proximity and sequencing of their individual notes.

Which is something that can happen between pairs or groups of words or between the segments of an extended piece or between the distinct parts of a greater whole.

It's that greater wholeness that I'm struggling with now, and the question of which entries keep their integrity, in that moment when they're read aloud, like drops of color fallen into a vortex of spinning water, before blending and disappearing into the neutral void, the background noise of listeners breathing, papers rustling, a pencil falling.

And, conversely, which others come alive with a discordant voice that mocks any silence or any harmony that might have ensued and through its discord forces us to reconsider what we've just heard or will hear next?

I know I'm mixing metaphores here, and that usually turns out badly, like all those colors of leftover paint mixed down, from their recognizable values in wavelengths of refracted light, to something as soundless and indistinct as mud.

But that's something else we need to discuss sometime, that if sound has color (a common musical description), then surely color must have sound as well...

LPK
LiveJournal
3.8.2012

So much of what I've written has started with the word "yesterday." Or, if not with the word, with the idea of yesterday. Maybe it's just what we do as writers. You know, look back at our experience and try to discover meaning. Or maybe just hope for that. Because sometimes that's all there is, just the hope.

And it's funny how, in a given moment, events can seem to converge, cross through, a single word. Like yesterday. Yesterday the word, not yesterday the point in time. Which is another thing about writers. Pick a word, any word, that's where it can start.

But after that, where does it go, where does it end? Again, hopefully, in meaning. Because, when it happens, that can be good...

LPK
LiveJournal
5.1.2007