I suppose I could go into yet another spasm of hand-wringing and tongue-lashing (that's GOTTA hurt - saw it on a porn site) about how Facebook has destroyed blogging and Twitter has destroyed all mindless morons, I mean CAUSED once relatively normal (slightly above and below middle on the bell-curve) people to become mindless morons (outliers on the low side!), but I won't (go into a spasm). Or maybe I will. I can never anticipate what I'm going to type when I fire up the create-post page of Blogger. What? You say you've noticed this?
That uncertainty may in part be the reason that Facebook and Twitter are doing so well viz-a-viz blogging (at least by me). There's no chance in one's posts on these brain-fart sites to ramble-on, no opportunity to let the flow of words take you where they might (may?). You can put in a YouTube or a link and make some terse and pithy comment, but that's not the same as blogging. Except when it is the same, c.f. most of my recent posts.
Time is short, precious, money, fleeting (fugit). Just gimme the precis, the 240 character pitch, the short version, cut to the chase... There's too much stuff coming in, not enough time to sort it and analyze it all, or even AT all. And Google doesn't always help.
I read something the exhaustively prolix William T Vollman said to describe himself, by way of apologizing I guess for his recent 500(!) page book on Noh theatre - "Rarely able to compose a short sentence, let alone a short book..."
Well, it's become fairly obvious, at least to me, my friends and everyone I know, that I will never write MY apocryphal book, long or short, unless I stop going out partying with said friends, etc... 365 days a week, it seems to my liver and brain (substance not consciousness, except for memory and the incredible and explicable rise of my typo ability lately). So let's skip that bit about writing novels. As for sentences, maybe I can do them. The ability to put together a paragraph that has variety of sentence lengths, some short, some shorter, some really quite long as they become full of divergences (and asides) as one brain-fart incepts (new verb? No. :-( ) new brain-farts within it ad ridiculum until that sentence stretches out like those immensely long, colonated and semi-colonated sentences, perhaps in some German text you were forced to read in high-school; in translation of course, as German was not so popular in schools back then (or was it, because anyway I did French - didn't EVERYONE learn French?): One in which the sentences went on and on, one of those sententious, immensely and unnecessarily detailed, all-in-one, sesquipedalian sentences by, say, Thomas Mann or someone of his national ilk (also guilty is that silly Frenchman, Marcel Proust, who wrote a 3000 page sentence about remembering something we'd all already forgotten by the end), so that the overall deadening and confusing effect of trying to read and hold all the meaning in one's head of such a monstrous string of allegedly linked words, rather than instilling a love of the Reich's Kulture and its jolly Volk in your impressionable soul, instead turns you off Germans, German literature (no Goethe! no Schiller! no Schopenhauer! no Nietzsche! no Grass! no Handke! no more!) and Germany all together, without even having to consider the Holocaust (or the great literature that might come out it, like, um, say, Sophie's Choice) which is of course ironic if you "decide" to marry a half-German fraulein (no longer a jungfrau, oops) as I did, and then it has the verb right at the end, so you get lost, not certain if the sentence - with all its sub-clauses and inter-locutions - actually still makes sense, is something I think I can manage. Hands up if you agree.
I mean, why would anyone NOT want to read this blog? It's beyond me.
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Ah, no, my blog is not dead - it's only half way through March, there could life in the old
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E@L
p.s. It was in June last year that I was linked in Izzy's blog... Who woulda thunk. Sigh.
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5 comments:
sweet jesus, that was too damn many words!!! *snickering* can you give that to me in 144 characters? actually, i really am glad you can't. i enjoy reading blogs still, i just haven't been able to really write. i do have to admit, i've been using twitter a lot more because of everything going on, but blogging is still my favorite. i don't always comment, but i still read, sugarpie! xoxoxoxo
I'm still not sure if it scans, and I realise the verb ISN'T at the end after all. Should I rewrite?
I just picked up some DFWallace last night - OMG can HE diverge?!?!?!?
And yes I alsways see some Savannah Georgia hits on the stats, thanks for supporting!
Could you post that on FB, so that I can read the Readers Digest version.
If you're going to write that novel then write it. Set aside an hour a day and hammer out as many words as you can. Forget about tools, technique and just write. Once you have that first ugly version then the real work begins. Proust didn't start out as Proust nor did Hemingway. If you don't put one foot in front of the other you're never going to get anywhere, eh?
Or just admit that you don't want to be a writer; there's no shame in that. It'd put you one step in front of Mel Gibson who can't seem to admit that he doesn't want to be an actor.
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