Hello, all! It is Monday - and I am always full of pep and vigour on a Monday (or at least a Monday in my current world where I don't have to earn the daily bread). After a weekend at home with my family I am more than usually inspired to go out and get 'em. This means a return to serious thought and actual action on the "what will I do with the rest of my life" front. To this end I have volunteered legal aid with my local Women's Center and have an interview tomorrow for a research assistant position on an upcoming international law/intellectual property treatise. Oh! And I started taking lessons in Italian. That should make the JAG waiting process that much less gruesome...
Speaking of career calls, last week, after watching Breakfast at Tiffany's for the third time (my sister is on an Audrey Hepburn rush at present) I thought, hmmm, let me take a line from our friend Paul (you'll know him as Fred, baby). Maybe I should try to write. I spent the following afternoon staring blankly at my (even blanker) computer screen and randomly wikipedia-ing. When I decided to try and clean up my inbox I came across some stories I wrote a few years ago. I include one rant below:
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This is how it is: I’ve never understood the dialogue in short fiction: the language so wistful, bitter, and truncated. The characters never saying what they mean, instead staring off into space, noting a fly on a wall and reflecting about life, or a leaf falling from a tree and thinking about death, and all the while really only concerned about sex. It is all about sex, but no sex that I have ever known - sex like an incomplete poem or an impressionist painting. The artist purposefully removed – because it is not something that you can examine too closely, the more you concentrate on one aspect the more it changes.
That is what irritates me so much about these short stories. The room is cold – it hasn’t been this cold for a while. Autumn is ending. That means that the lovers must part. Why didn’t he just say as much? Pinter’s dialogue is supposed to reflect actual speech and actual speakers. But people don’t talk like that. We don’t say too little – we say too much. We go on and on and on about nothing – and somewhere bobbing to the surface in this endless stream of self-absorbed reflection there are little nuggets of reflection and revelation. Our speech is all expository – and eventually, circuitously, it exposes us. So let us have done with this restraint and vague reflections. “I’ve never had a whore under this roof. Since your mother died.” We don’t speak so purposefully or cleverly.
Then let us say it as it is. The sky is blue. Sometimes the sun, when it sets, is red and violent and the smell of green and new born things is so beautiful it hurts.
