Here is a blog I read often. I like the writer. She is straight-forward and cute. She reminds me of someone I'd have been friends with if I were like 100 years younger and was less edgy, I mean, um, not a fucking junky disguised as a normal mother, wannabe teacher. The blog is called "Confessions of a Book Lush." I might've talked about on here before. Her blog compelled me to read The Bitch Posse.
Here's an example of how I simply cannot just fucking say something without going on and on in this ridiculously silly, digressive way. I'e got this digression problem, and though I want it to not be a problem, I also struggle when I a not digressing. As our brilliant character sys, "That digression business really got on my nerves." There is this book called Howard's End and the book's author, E.M. Forester epigraphs (not a verb, but I think it should be...) "Only connect." Well, English majors everywhere and Mr. Forester, don't you think it should be, "Only digress." I think this quote to myself, often. But about digression as a problem, a problem that gets on our nerves:
I was saying...Ahem, I mean writing, I mean trying to get the fuck on track somehow (maybe me telling ppl. that bupes are a solution is bad advertising?? I'm worried sometimes about this!) I was on the blog, Confession of a Booklush: http://booklush.com/2011/11/15/top-ten-books-that-have-been-on-my-shelf-for-the-longest-but-ive-never-read/#comments and wanted to tell the blog's author that she should read Summer, as it has been sitting on her bookshlef for some time, unread.
Here is what I say:
Hey there. Listen, Summer is a quick, easy, fun read. I read it when I was a library director and led a book group; this was one of our books. I seriously do not think anyone disliked it. We had a great time assigning current terminology to the older text. We kept referring to one character (not to gove too much away) as the baby daddy. For some reason we could not get over that being hilarious to us. The protagonist is a librarian, so I was identifying all over the place. And the tiny town where the novel is set is a lot like the town where I worked and used to live. I definitely recommend this book to you. I have never read another book of hers, but I keep meaning to. I was going back and forth with myself about turning m blog into a book/reading blog and was counting what I read and was also trying to push myself into reading "better" books (less chick li, more classics, etc.), but it made me feel miserable, o I am reading very much like the slacker I am. The point of this is: I prolly will not get around to reading anything by her or any one else of any higher merit any time soon.
To Lorrain above, I am now 38-years-old. I have not read a SVH book in years, but am interested in reading the sequel that came out most recently. My mother used by so irritated with me complaining I should read more classics and such. She and my Reading teacher even offered to PAY me (with my mother's money, not the teacher's obviously) to read books of a high caliber. I would not. I needed to be heavily involved with Jessica, Elizabeth, boring Todd, and that awful Lila Fowler. I think Jessica had kinda a "player" type bf, too, right?
I have a 12-y-o boy who is not a bog novel reader. He loves to read online statistics and sports stories, mostly about football, also baseball and hockey (and other sports, but those are more parenthetical for him). At times, I obsess about this and wish he'd read more fiction, thinking if he were more used to narrative form then he'd test better, and he' got SATs coming up (um, in like four years...) But we get along the best when I really stay out of what he reads. He has an assigned 0-30 minutes to read, nightly. But, knowing how much I hated having my reading controlled; it felt so insulting and like my mother was trying to control my thinking even. I would hate it if my son felt like this.
I wonder though if having some books frowned upon and some even *forbidden* (V.C. Andrews, other "sexy" books you'd find @ the grocer,etc.) made me feel that on some level that reading was/is a subversive act. I have a tendency to have a pull towards anything forbidden and hate to follow rules, thus, my reading always has felt a bit sinister, even if I am reading something mainstream, like Olive Kitwhatever (Pulitzer winner, recently).
I dunno. I am like a big epitome of a blogging digression. As I write, I think and as I think....
I hope readers everywhere have a super Thanksgiving and that they have a lot to read. I myself am pist @ the chick who is overdue with The Marriage Plot @ my library; bing it back already!!!!
Part of what draws me to good blog is what they look like. I am going to say some things here that might be a bit over to the top, and please understand, they have nothing to do with the aforementioned blog. There's tumblr blog referred to dot dot dot... It almost like inappropriate porn, really, but it mostly illustrates the images-within-the-mind that so many ppl., girls, women, have in their minds if they've also got a weird-o daddy complex, as I do. And for women who see themselves as much younger than they are, esp. sexually, this tumblr site nails it (no pun intended, iw.) I am not including a link to this site, as I worry about the legality of it; some of those images are too innocent. What the images do, the book by Jennifer Belle entitled Little Stalker also does; it encapsulates that pervy impulse we might have to be on the receiving end of a pedophile. It is a big, huge, unembarrassed Lolita POV. It is that weird, broken daddy issue that some of us have. I am growing fucking tired of this issue, btw.
Back to the digression: Am I deluded enough to think I am interesting enough for ppl. to read all of that shit? I am practicing concision, not IBS of the fucking digits. Shut it Violet, yer awesome and adorable, and man, sometimes you can spit out a smart sentence or conjure a lucid image, but calm down with the over wordy blathering on.
I write too much; I make sense not often enough; I make too many connection that other people fail to see b/c they do not scare my loosey-goosey brain. I feel lost in my thinking, often. I think that this blog in addition to other social media and ALSO the imagery that is not really organic the way it was pre1990's is a recipe for an utter ADD, disorganized disaster of any written thing, written by me.
Only digress. xo
I was reading a short article from The New Yorker from several years ago. It was an essay on David Foster Wallace. He too, was a big insister of digression using many, many footnotes (and other annotations, though I cannot really specify what they are @ this second). He felt that his use of footnotes--and other written digressive tactics--was like having a a second voice in his head. I feel like if I'd met this amazing dude that maybe I would have been too intimidated to really talk with him, and certainly, my writing would not have impressed hi, but on some tiny level, we'd have understood each other. I still have not read anything by DFW, but I intent to. The library only has one of his works, and it is not one of the pieces I'd be interested in; it is a lengthy history of infinity, a sort of literary mathematical work.
ReplyDeleteI do wonder though if digression is that sort of circular thinking that the psychiatrist told me. It is not a form of reasoning or logic, but it is more of a way of speaking to another person...It is the notion that I cannot chose what is important over what may be--at least to most ppl.--arbitrary or unimportant.