Yesterday morning I went outside with La Medusa and I sat on the porch and read. It was sunny and seventy degrees. I am in Tucson. The bit I read contained a paragraph that nearly made me cry with its simplicity. Vanessa Place is so cool. She writes for sound extremely well but I’m most attracted to the simple aching stuff. I knew I was going to like this book when I read the first page and a scene featuring a man eating a gas station cherry pie stuck itself in my head for a week.
Another thing is stuck but I can’t remember who said it. Something about how if you don’t read a novel in x amount of days you’re not truly experiencing it. Maybe DeLillo or Saul Bellow said it. Maybe it was my dad. Can’t remember.
Today was a good day for predators (hawks, bobcats) in my parents’ front yard. A dove flew into the glass door in front of the dining room table and a bobcat cold ate it off the welcome mat. My dad keeps saying “they’re getting their Christmas shopping done early.”
A couple weeks ago I said that writing is just the studious avoidance of cliché. I was talking words to see what they sounded like at the time but the more I think about it the truer it gets. Trouble is there’s cliché in words, phrases, sounds of words, ideas, plot maps, melodies, harmonies. Plus we’ve got our own individual clichés in the ideas we keep returning to over and over again because we can’t figure them. The best writing finds the unfamiliar in the familiar and the rest is some insidious cliché.
I thought you knew
There’s a clock in this house that has chimed every fifteen minutes for my entire life and I don’t hear it anymore. It is the extrinsic intrinsic, the cliché. When I was explaining this idea to my students a few months ago, I said that I was just as vulnerable to the commonplace as they were. They looked at me as if they gave absolutely no fuck.
Now I’m watching Star Trek: The Next Generation with my dad. It’s the episode where Riker is eating a lot of food and Picard is getting all judgy.
