Friday, May 03, 2002
I wrote 1,101 wds. on Chapter Five today. I'm sure I'll finish it tomorrow afternoon. I'm pleased at how well and how quickly this chapter has revealed itself. I hope it's a sign of things to come and that the remainder of Low Red Moon will be similarly agreeable in its conception.
I also dropped by the McWane Center (the museum where I do volunteer work) to identify some mosasaur and other Cretaceous vertebrate material for a new exhibit on Alabama fossils. I may also be writing a little text for the exhibit, provided I have the time. And this evening Jennifer and I went to the Brothers Quay screening at the Museum of Art. It was a bit disappointing, really, as they projected from a DVD, which limited the image size. Worse, though, was the fact that attendance was so poor. Maybe forty people showed up for an event that had been advertised for a couple of weeks. Still worse, fifteen or so left within the first half hour, complaining, loud enough that we could hear, that the films "didn't make sense," were "silly," and such like. Why did these people pay their $6 to get in? Had they never actually heard of the Bros. Quay? Considering that this is Birmingham, I strongly suspect that many of them had not. I don't mind saying it's things like this that make me all the more anxious to get out of Birmingham again.
The work of Bros. Quay falls into that category of artists whose oeuvre adds to the frustration of my own prose work. Art that is so perfect, so completely enthralling, every image so vital and precise. Edward Gorey has done the same thing to me before (see "A Story for Edward Gorey"), to a lesser degree, along with a whole host of filmmakers. I often think I'm much too visually oriented to ever be a truly good novelist. I spent an hour today writing a scene that could have been expressed as, "She's watching a western on television. Hearing a knock at the door, she walks down the hall and asks, 'Who's there?'" But I needed 340 wds. to convey, to my satisfaction, the same basic action. This is not because my fiction is "wordy" (I adore the idiocy of that description of prose, and I'm still searching for that prose which manages to avoids words altogether), but because it is, or at least seeks to be, extremely precise.
And speaking of precision, and a lack thereof, I had a long rant today about "archaic" words and the continuing disintegration of the English language. Jennifer has to listen to these things and she deserves your pity for that. Anyway, this particular one occurred when I needed to use the word "attenuated" and I could just see some reader rolling his or her eyes. So I wound up using "long" instead, but, goddamn it, I meant "attenuated." When I was in college, I repeatedly had both literature and writing instructors caution me to use the simplest possible vocabulary at all times. Sometimes when I asked why I got answers (other times I didn't). And the answers usually proclaimed the virtues of contemporary American poetry and fiction, "postmodernist" writings, as having made themselves more accessible to the "common man" by eschewing (that's one of the bad words, sorry) a complex vocabulary and "speaking plainly." One professor went so far as to declare postmodernist writings "fiction for the people" (never mind that he was never able to actually explain what "postmodernism" is).
Anyway, even though I didn't always agree with these sentiments, I absorbed a lot of them, and only recently, as I've struggled for the aforementioned precision, and spent more time reading 19th- and 18th-century literature, do I realize how much more difficult my job has been made by our increasing tendency to jettison words that might fall outside the understanding of the average EH 098 student. The English language is a poor enough tool for communication, but one of the few advantages that it does truly possess over more logically consistent languages such as French is its vast and descriptive vocabulary, much of which it has accrued by frequently borrowing words from many other languages. As the roster of words which are not "archaic" or "difficult" or "pretentious" continues the shrink, English forfeits this advantage in the name of hoping to achieve clarity of expression for our society's lowest common denominator. Heaven forbid that someone might have to consult a dictionary while reading a book, or that they might learn a few new words in the process!
Perhaps, in time, entropy will have allowed us to come full circle and we will at last be freed forever from the shackles of grammar and vocabulary and will communicate in the smallest possible number of simian grunts and bellows. Simple expressions that everyone may understand, no more elitist thesauri, and the unfairness of literacy will finally go the way of manners and wheat pennies.
|
|
