How Are You Shaped By How You Write?
A reply to Chris Jesu Lee
Dear Friends,
I have a piece up at
on the ceasefire proposal. At the partner site , writes on kombucha and on tennis.Best,
Sam
HOW ARE YOU SHAPED BY HOW YOU WRITE?
Parchment — A precious, rare resource. Tendency towards the sacred. Tendency towards palimpsests and overlays. The sacred and the profane in tension. Are you, the writer, worthy of the material? Scribes taking a ritual bath so as to write without a single impure thought entering their minds.
Paper (i.e. long-hand) — The document spreading ever outwards, the excitement of putting down a mark and having your thoughts in the physical world. Edith Wharton dropping the completed pages of her manuscript to the side of her bed for the maids to pick up. Proust scribbling endlessly in the margins, rewriting on his deathbed.
Paper (notebook) — Your closest friend, extension of yourself. Tendency towards fragments. Tendency to enclose your own thoughts. Difficulty of sharing.
Typewriter — The sheer energy and brio of creating. The physical exertion it involves — an aggression built into it. A tendency towards economy, towards crafting the perfect sentence (Hemingway and Babel). An analogy to technology. Writing participant in the same propulsive energy as trains or electric lights. Kerouac’s long scroll. Hubert Selby replacing his quotation marks with slashes because the slash was easier to reach — not wanting anything to break his clacking flow.
Word processor — Typing as fluent as a pianist playing a keyboard. Approaching the speed of thoughts. A tendency, even, to write a little faster than one can think. Nicholson Baker and writing that focuses in exactly on the shape of thoughts, the way thoughts interact with our surrounding gadgets.
Computer (with internet connection) — The tendency to browse, the sense that the blank page isn’t its own island but is part of an archipelago of different pieces of information, of the wider world. The anxiety this causes. Jonathan Franzen turning off his internet during the writing day. David Foster Wallace’s footnotes — the un-self-contained text, looping back on itself. The fear of atomization.
Notes (smart phone) — Writing as a physical activity, as something that can be done anywhere, integrated into regular life. The relatively short attention span, the way your swiping finger gets tired fairly quickly. The tendency towards the note, koan, aperçu. John Barth describes 17th century poets writing their sonnets on the backs of barmaids. Maybe a return to something like this.
What does it say about me that when I read about the sonnets on the backs of bar maids, I immediately thought of a strange, historical prequel to "Silence of the :Lambs?"
Notebooks. To be placed into the heart of my 10 foot tall compost heap of decades of tree prunings once they read false or unfriendly 🐈⬛