![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
and we walked without words, and we walked with our lives
I am telling myself there is nothing wrong with slovenly behavior for a week after eight months of academic strain. I tell myself this, but don't believe it. I feel as though I should be doing things, but there is nothing to do.
I wish Joy weren't still in Wales. I miss her unique brand of psychosis.
Yesterday I escaped to Barnes and Noble. I thought of buying PJ Harvey's To Bring You My Love, but did not. I own too much poetry as it is, and steered clear of that aisle. I spent an hour in fiction, but those endless shelves overwhelm me. I do not hate fiction. Some fiction I like quite a lot. But so much of it I do not. So I seldom buy it, though I often long to. I wish I could magically know what novels to read. It would save time.
I have pondered this more. It's simple, I think, in that I am a fan of stories more than anything else; quality is important but the story is so, so much more. I find much of contemporary literary fiction to be a wasteland of poor storytelling, the writers too bent on psychoanalyzing the world and creating twisted familial dramas that simply bore me.
If I want words for words' sake, I will read poetry. Or I will read essays. Essays can be beautiful and they have a point. I do not get to the end of a book of essays and feel cheated by the hollowness.
Examples, examples... The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood- not literary genius by anybody's measure, somewhat hyperbolized characters, but oh, the story. The genius is in the richness. You can make up for so much with that.
("It's rich," my father said of Buffy the other night. He has seen only several episodes, is somewhat scornful, perhaps because I could not convert him with Spike's appeal the way I did L and my mother. "The story is rich. I can understand why you like it." And it's true. For all its superficial silliness, Buffy is a wonderfully rich story. It has a depth of complexity no other show I've seen has matched.)
Anne Tyler, now. Her books, those I've plodded through, have all been entirely character-driven and bored me to tears. There was no story to hold my interest. And her prose was far too flat. Margaret Atwood; brilliant when she has a story to tell, rather silly when she does not.
Excellent prose can make up for a thin story sometimes, but not always. The God of Small Things I read this past summer after hearing wonderful things about it, and I could have ripped the book apart by the end of it. Gorgeous prose, but an entire lack of substance, lack of characterization, lack of motivation for behaviors and actions that made up what little plot existed. No new thoughts, philosophies, anything to justify reading the damn thing. I felt very cheated by the end. I wanted those hours back.
I'm a story whore. If I don't have a good story I go a little mad. This is perhaps why I sometimes read silly things and invest myself so deeply into the plots of television shows and can't stand reality television or mtv or cooking shows or hgtv and seldom watch the news.
I would look deeper into this for some indication of some deficiency in my character, except I've been this way all my life. If anything, I blame my parents, for reading to me so much. And my grandfather - but I'd never blame him, would never want to.
I don't know why I'm an English major, exactly, except I'm good for little else.
I wish Joy weren't still in Wales. I miss her unique brand of psychosis.
Yesterday I escaped to Barnes and Noble. I thought of buying PJ Harvey's To Bring You My Love, but did not. I own too much poetry as it is, and steered clear of that aisle. I spent an hour in fiction, but those endless shelves overwhelm me. I do not hate fiction. Some fiction I like quite a lot. But so much of it I do not. So I seldom buy it, though I often long to. I wish I could magically know what novels to read. It would save time.
I have pondered this more. It's simple, I think, in that I am a fan of stories more than anything else; quality is important but the story is so, so much more. I find much of contemporary literary fiction to be a wasteland of poor storytelling, the writers too bent on psychoanalyzing the world and creating twisted familial dramas that simply bore me.
If I want words for words' sake, I will read poetry. Or I will read essays. Essays can be beautiful and they have a point. I do not get to the end of a book of essays and feel cheated by the hollowness.
Examples, examples... The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood- not literary genius by anybody's measure, somewhat hyperbolized characters, but oh, the story. The genius is in the richness. You can make up for so much with that.
("It's rich," my father said of Buffy the other night. He has seen only several episodes, is somewhat scornful, perhaps because I could not convert him with Spike's appeal the way I did L and my mother. "The story is rich. I can understand why you like it." And it's true. For all its superficial silliness, Buffy is a wonderfully rich story. It has a depth of complexity no other show I've seen has matched.)
Anne Tyler, now. Her books, those I've plodded through, have all been entirely character-driven and bored me to tears. There was no story to hold my interest. And her prose was far too flat. Margaret Atwood; brilliant when she has a story to tell, rather silly when she does not.
Excellent prose can make up for a thin story sometimes, but not always. The God of Small Things I read this past summer after hearing wonderful things about it, and I could have ripped the book apart by the end of it. Gorgeous prose, but an entire lack of substance, lack of characterization, lack of motivation for behaviors and actions that made up what little plot existed. No new thoughts, philosophies, anything to justify reading the damn thing. I felt very cheated by the end. I wanted those hours back.
I'm a story whore. If I don't have a good story I go a little mad. This is perhaps why I sometimes read silly things and invest myself so deeply into the plots of television shows and can't stand reality television or mtv or cooking shows or hgtv and seldom watch the news.
I would look deeper into this for some indication of some deficiency in my character, except I've been this way all my life. If anything, I blame my parents, for reading to me so much. And my grandfather - but I'd never blame him, would never want to.
I don't know why I'm an English major, exactly, except I'm good for little else.
no subject
charms for the easy life perhaps.
no subject