He shall Purify the sons of Eli...
Scottie Bowman (bowman@mail.indigo.ie)
Tue, 03 Mar 1998 09:13:35 +0000
`...The conventions of prose,' writes Eric, `are startlingly
limiting...'
What most of us have to face are more our own limitations
in clarifying our thoughts & then writing them down in good,
clean prose - that more than the range of available formats
in which the stuff can be laid out on the page.
The charming, distinctive, even exotic, look that can be given
to the most mundane material after a little experimentation with
fonts, layouts, & so on, is something we all discover in the
honeymoon of our first word-processor - or even, in the old days,
typewriter.
It certainly took me a while to realise that writing is less an act
of seduction than a process of refining. It's quite easy by the use
of printing pyrotechnics to draw attention to what you write &
at the same time to conceal its hollowness. But in the end it's
a very great waste of life & spirit. Once it starts & in no time at
all, the whole shebang will start to rot.
I almost feel one should try for a masterpiece each time one starts
out. Most of us will never achieve it, of course, but if the
thoughts have been really tested in the furnace & if all unnecessary
words & enchanting tricks & similar crap are burned off it will at
least have a chance of lasting until evening.
I keep asking & KEEP asking & no one answers me. What did
Jerome Salinger mean - speaking through Buddy - when he said
all his instincts were for a lower-middle-class resistance to Cubism
in writing ?
Scottie B.