I think I started to 'get' myself as a writer when I began using Scrivener, where I could easily add both footnotes (which are often things that editors have suggested "should" be worked into the main text—which I tried in my last book and found wanting) and comments, which are great places for me to dump the truly sideways ideas that crop up. So I have comments like (Does every book require a Blue Öyster Cult reference?) and, interestingly, in light of this piece, one from yesterday (Does this belong in another book?) -- which I suppose is my way of saying thank you for continuing to repost that Dillard quote!
I really loved John Higgs's 10-year anniversary edition of his book about The KLF, which he updated by adding footnotes commenting on the text. It enriched the book greatly for me, though I had never read the un-footnoted original. Another essay that springs to mind is Ursula K. Le Guin's Is Gender Necessary? Redux, from Dancing at the Edge of the World, where she first defends, then critiques, her choices about how to deal with gendered language in The Left Hand of Darkness. That is, the essay is written in two different times, one somewhat after LHOD's publication, and another much later. So she argues with her past self in a series of interjections. That's much more interesting than throwing out the old essay and writing a new one.
Here's a thing. When I was talking about Whitman, I used the Whitmanian form 'I / you' to directly address the reader. I did it right before I quoted Whitman doing that exact thing; just by thinking about him, I guess; or maybe it was using the form that brought him to mind and caused me to quote him directly.
But when I was trying to advise directly that people should read Lewis Hyde, I also wanted a direct-address word. In the past I have often used 'friend', but that didn't feel right. In Aotearoa we would say bro, sometimes sis, so I tried sibling, sib, also not correct. Then I hit on cousin, or as we would say here, cuz. That felt right and interesting so I left it in. What that word does is claims kinship of a more distant 'we're related' kind. (In te Ao Māori the name for establishing and maintaining relationships ((networks of relating)) is Whakawhanaungatanga, which has a family chime in the middle.)
Anyway this morning I was reading Gay's essay The Minor Cordiality about how he got extremely angry with a fake cop, an anger so immediate, he says, that "it seems to come from the long memory, epigenetic is the word". (He also says how the anger lasted longer than the allotted half-hour he writes his first essayette draft in, which was interesting info too.) Then he gives a list of antidotes to the petty tyranny encouraged by badge-wearing: "In addition to the porch-wavers and their ilk (the hat-tippers, the head-nodders, the thumbs-uppers and fist-pumpers) [Me: bro, you would enjoy NZ LOL] are whoever makes it their business, often (but by no means only) people working in diners, post offices, laundromats, cafés, supermarkets, bookstores, bakeries, train stations etc., to call us baby, or babe, or honey, or sweetheart, or love. There are angels in this world who call people they don't know love. Some of them... are like twenty years old! Sugar sometimes, too, people say. Along with pal or COUSIN or brother or youngblood or, here in Indiana... bub. Bub means "pal"; it means "friend."
There are interesting things here about time: about the way that Whitman reaches forward through time to claim friendship with YOU, the future reader, but also about the way that I picked a word- one I'm not sure I've ever written before- from Gay's essay that I hadn't read yet. A dropped pebble making ripples backwards and forwards through time? Writing is time-magic, I guess I'm trying to say.
Re the long sentences: GERMAN. In particular: Franz Kafka. A whole page of sentence.
I think I started to 'get' myself as a writer when I began using Scrivener, where I could easily add both footnotes (which are often things that editors have suggested "should" be worked into the main text—which I tried in my last book and found wanting) and comments, which are great places for me to dump the truly sideways ideas that crop up. So I have comments like (Does every book require a Blue Öyster Cult reference?) and, interestingly, in light of this piece, one from yesterday (Does this belong in another book?) -- which I suppose is my way of saying thank you for continuing to repost that Dillard quote!
I really loved John Higgs's 10-year anniversary edition of his book about The KLF, which he updated by adding footnotes commenting on the text. It enriched the book greatly for me, though I had never read the un-footnoted original. Another essay that springs to mind is Ursula K. Le Guin's Is Gender Necessary? Redux, from Dancing at the Edge of the World, where she first defends, then critiques, her choices about how to deal with gendered language in The Left Hand of Darkness. That is, the essay is written in two different times, one somewhat after LHOD's publication, and another much later. So she argues with her past self in a series of interjections. That's much more interesting than throwing out the old essay and writing a new one.
Here's a thing. When I was talking about Whitman, I used the Whitmanian form 'I / you' to directly address the reader. I did it right before I quoted Whitman doing that exact thing; just by thinking about him, I guess; or maybe it was using the form that brought him to mind and caused me to quote him directly.
But when I was trying to advise directly that people should read Lewis Hyde, I also wanted a direct-address word. In the past I have often used 'friend', but that didn't feel right. In Aotearoa we would say bro, sometimes sis, so I tried sibling, sib, also not correct. Then I hit on cousin, or as we would say here, cuz. That felt right and interesting so I left it in. What that word does is claims kinship of a more distant 'we're related' kind. (In te Ao Māori the name for establishing and maintaining relationships ((networks of relating)) is Whakawhanaungatanga, which has a family chime in the middle.)
Anyway this morning I was reading Gay's essay The Minor Cordiality about how he got extremely angry with a fake cop, an anger so immediate, he says, that "it seems to come from the long memory, epigenetic is the word". (He also says how the anger lasted longer than the allotted half-hour he writes his first essayette draft in, which was interesting info too.) Then he gives a list of antidotes to the petty tyranny encouraged by badge-wearing: "In addition to the porch-wavers and their ilk (the hat-tippers, the head-nodders, the thumbs-uppers and fist-pumpers) [Me: bro, you would enjoy NZ LOL] are whoever makes it their business, often (but by no means only) people working in diners, post offices, laundromats, cafés, supermarkets, bookstores, bakeries, train stations etc., to call us baby, or babe, or honey, or sweetheart, or love. There are angels in this world who call people they don't know love. Some of them... are like twenty years old! Sugar sometimes, too, people say. Along with pal or COUSIN or brother or youngblood or, here in Indiana... bub. Bub means "pal"; it means "friend."
There are interesting things here about time: about the way that Whitman reaches forward through time to claim friendship with YOU, the future reader, but also about the way that I picked a word- one I'm not sure I've ever written before- from Gay's essay that I hadn't read yet. A dropped pebble making ripples backwards and forwards through time? Writing is time-magic, I guess I'm trying to say.