Spontaneous Musings

I've lost track of how many introspective posts I've written on why I read or write in this medium. So many, I'm certain if you searched my lj, you'd probably find a few that contradicted each other, if you were so inclined. And it is for that reason that I did not stay up until 2 am in the morning last night writing yet another post on the subject, inspired this round by two contemplative and interesting posts I'd read on lj over the weekend and the last five pages of "The Combray" Chapter of Proust's Swann's Way, which I've commented on so often in this journal, even I'm growing weary of the topic.

But, again, today, an article read aloud by my mother over the phone about the Director Clint Eastwood, just a few words, not overly important, you can most likely locate it for yourself in this past Sunday's Parade Magazine, nudged the same flurry of thoughts nudged by those two introspective posts and that passage of Proust...actually it did more than nudge them, it more or less brought them full circle. Answered the last of what amounted to three questions that someone else's journal prompted in my head...(Note the journal did not ask those questions, what they were writing about did - they came up with their own theory, one that niggled at my brain over the weekend, only to have the niggling answered by a passage in Proust and a conversation with my mother.)

1.Why the urge to write these snatchs? Proust mentions at the end of the Combray chapter - the release he feels after he's jotted down a few paragraphs about steeples. On steeples - which he goes on about for two pages, he writes " I had finished writing it, I was so happy, I felt it so perfectly relieved me of those steeples and what they had been hiding behind them, that, as if I myself were a hen and had just laid an egg, I began to sing at the top of my voice." It is not until he writes of them that he is relieved of them. He throws the thought out of himself, so it is no longer rattling around like a sqawking bird caught inside the light fixture that is his brain. I write to get the thought free or to be free of it, released from its clawlike grip on my conscious mind.

2. Why the urge to post these snatchs online in a live journal of all things? Am I just talking to myself? Is this all about me? Ah. Not as easily answered as one may think. No, I am not just talking to myself. And while it may appear to be "all about me"...I'm not sure it really is, so much as my take on things, my perspective, my point of view - but since I allow responses and have a flist saved to read - along with memories from that list - I'd say it's about "you" too. So yes, it is about me, but it is also to a degree about my relationship with you, and how I percieve you. Just as your journal is about you, and your relationships with others on your list, and how you perceive them.

If I were just talking to myself, I'd privatize my posts, disable comments, or logically just keep this journal on hard drive hidden from the world. Yet before I write them they are internal. Words from my brain. Conversations I've had largely with myself. But isn't everything that we speak or communicate to someone else just that? Aren't novels, essays read in magazines, and poems all about the author? Or just the author talking to him or herself? When we talk, write a letter, send an email or write a post - it's not until we get a response from that person that it becomes dialogue. Prior to that it is merely a monologue. If we intended this to be a communication with ourselves or a computer screen, why bother posting it to a forum filled with people that can question what we've said, post a response? And often do not agree? Granted we can delete those responses, screen them, even disable the function all together, but in the same way a television commentator or talk radio host is not necessarily talking to themselves neither are we. What we post is what we want someone to see. Is it something we wouldn't show someone else? Most likely. But isn't that the case with all our discourse? All relationships? We choose who we share what with. So that those who know us, no matter who they are or what they mean to us - will only see a fragment of who we are. My LJ is just a fragment of my personality. To say you know someone based on that fragment is a bit like saying you know an actor based on one role.

So if I'm not just talking to myself - who am I talking to? Ah, harder still. In friends locked posts, the people I've deigned to friend and who have decided for whatever reason to friend me back. In public posts? Anyone out there who just happens to find it. And I don't know who these people are. Often I will direct a post to a certain group of people, but I can not ensure only that group will read it, unless I apply a filter - and I've discovered I'm too lazy to do filters. Rarely apply them. And yes, I've regretted this decision at times. There are posts that I really wish a couple of people did not read - but I don't regret making the post. Just that it may have offended or hurt them, when nothing could have been further from my intent. And yes there are posts I really wish I had not read. I figure I'm pretty safe in stating: "There is no one in my life past or present that has not at one point or another made me want to strangle them and vice versa." The closer we are, the more likely it's happened more than once.

3. Why do we read lj? Or read anything? Personal essays in particular - which appear much like most lj posts to be about the person writing it, an introspective or internal monologue? Ah, after talking to my mother it hit me, why. Again not a simple answer. To connect - I think. To find someone out there who feels as we do. For me, today, it was a comment Clint Eastwood, of all people, made in this article - which both my mother and I connected to, but in different ways and for different reasons. And it is I think the reason we post our ramblings about books, tv shows, music, movies, and sporting events online - the desire to share how we feel about something with someone else. And to know how they felt about it. This is important - I think - and I can only hope I can find the right words to express it, sometimes I feel crippled by my inability to locate the right turn of phrase - when I post something in my lj, no matter what I might say or think, if I'm honest with myself - I'm posting it because I want to know what "you" think. When I read your lj, I am reading it because I want to know what "you" think and feel about life. And I want to desperately understand and sympathize, no make that empthasize, with you. To identify. I want to feel connected. I want to know that someone else out there may be feeling frustrated in the dating world, lonely because they are single, or hopeless about ever finding the right job. Or find someone who just for no explainable reason feels a mindless thrill when watching a favorite tv show. Or thinks that maybe there isn't a god. Or hopes desperately there is. I want to hear ideas different from my own. To know there are other possibilities. To find a way of handling a situation I have not considered. Or a recipe that I haven't tried. I want to connect with someone who lives in another country, another culture, a world outside my own - yet loves Buffy the Vampire Slayer or hates George Bush or thinks green olives are gross but adores black ones.

I think what I got addicted to when I started posting essays online in 2002 was not the validation - the applause, because if that were the case - I seriously doubt I'd have stuck on the ATPO board for as long as I did, nor would I have decided to do an lj. No. Nor is it just to write. That I can do without lj. And often struggle without it. It's the interaction. And like all things I love or am somewhat, ahem addicted to, I have a love/hate relationship with it. Cursing it one moment, worshipping it the next.

So, no, I don't think this is me talking to myself. But rather me sharing my thoughts with "you", unknowable until you respond. And that is actually rather frightening at times, because you can, like me, be a walking landmine. I've no clue what will set you off or how or if you will respond. Which is how the blog or letter is different from a novel or a tv show or a film - when we post, assuming we haven't disabled comments, we are interested in a response and open ourselves up for one - not one that involves someone buying our written product, but one that involves them telling us how it made them feel or what it elicited in them or just sharing an antecdote that they feel fits it. Even if there isn't a response - the silence says something and sometimes it is the silence we want and sometimes the silence hurts more than any words - like a slap of cold water in the face, however unintentional. Or even if we don't respond to the comments, fearing our response will take away from them or elicit something we do not intend, because words can be limiting. And even if we don't like the reponse, because intentional or not, and it is mostly not in my experience, it feels like a barb that hurts us. Yet, regardless of what we are posting in our own - We remain interested in what others are posting and discussing at the same time in their journals. Even more so, when they mention us. Although at times, at least in my case, relieved when they don't and we can just read - knowing that unless we respond, they may not know we have even read their words.

Live Journal is less a personal journal, then an inter-personal correspondence club - but the club encompasses the world and we don't know the names of most of the correspondents. It's not letters to "good" or "old" friends, necessarily. But letters to undiscovered and potential new ones as well as old ones, close ones,and ones we have lost contact with or are unlikely to see or meet or interact with in any other way. Through written words we are searching for someone who gets us, for comfort from someone else, like a smile from a stranger on a subway at a shared joke over a shared experience. A way to connect to the outside world beyond our own internal ramblings.

I've linked the two because I read an essay regarding Proust and the novel by Milan Kundera on the way to the Spainish Guitar Festival and then portions of Swann's Way on the subway ride home. By the by - it is not easy to read Proust when two people are having a heated debate about the ethical conduct of their mathematics teacher right next to you.

The Guitare Festival was basically two hours of classical guitare music performed for free at Julliard to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of its Pre-College Guitare Department. ( Listening to Spainish Guitare )

On the subway ride to and from the concert - I finished an article in this week's New Yorker entitled What is a Novelist? or How Great Writers Are Made. by Milan Kundera Milan Kundera wrote The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality. He's a Czech novelist.

( About Albertine, who apparently appears in the second volumn of In Search of Lost Time and the divine alchemy of the novel )

In case that makes no sense, which it doesn't unless you know who Albertine is - he revists Proust in the next passage of his essay, entitled "Marcel Proust's Verdict" - which he states and I'll transcribe it in full for those on my flist reading Proust at the moment and those who are or attempting to become novelists:

In In Search of Lost Time, Proust is absolutely clear:'In this novel...there is not one incident that is not fictional...not one character a clef.' However tightly bound to the life of its author, Proust's novel stands, without question, at the opposite pole from autiobiography; there is in it no autobiographical intention; he wrote it not in order to talk about his life but to show his readers their own lives. "Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth." Those lines of Proust's define not only the meaing of the Proustian novel; they define the meaning of the very art of the novel."

I think this is true of most art, great art, in that what we see in it is often what it tells us about ourselves. How it reflects much like a magic mirror might an unseen truth. People have told me that reading Proust changed their lives - I think what Kundera states above explains to a degree what they mean by that - how a novel or work of art can in fact change, save, or even affect us on a spiritual level.

There's a passage from Proust's By Way of Swann's or Swann's Way that I'd like to share with you, which in some ways encapsulates this:

[The narrator is describing the experience of reading a book he's recently picked up. It's on page 86 and the narrator has just told us how he's acquired a book recommended by a friend.]

" After this central belief, which moved incessantly during my reading from inside to outside, toward the discovery of the truth, came the emotions aroused in me by the action in which I was taking part for those afternoons contained more dramatic events than does often, an entire lifetime. These were the events taking place in the book I was reading; it is true that the people affected by them were not "real", as Francoise said. But all the feelings we are made to experience by the joy or the misfortune of a real person are produced in us only through the intermediary of an image of that joy or that misfortune; the ingeniousness of the first novelist consisted in understanding that in the apparatus of our emotions, the image being the only essential element, the simplification that would consist in purely and simply abolishing real people would be a decisive improvement. A real human being, however profoundly we sympathize with him, is in large part perceived by our senses, that is to say, remains opaque to us, presents a dead weight which our sensibility cannot life. If a calamity should strike him, it is only in small part of the total notion we have of him that we will be able to be moved by this; even more, it is only in part of the total notion he has of himself that he will be able to be moved himself. The novelist's happy discovery was to have the idea of replacing these parts, impenetrable to the soul, by an equal quantity of immaterial parts, that is to say, parts which our soul can assimilate. What does it matter thenceforth if the actions, and the emotions, of this new order of creatures seem to us true, since we have made them ours, since it is within us that they occur, that they hold within their control, as we feverishly turn the pages of the book, the rapidity of our breathing and the intensity of our gaze. And once the novelist has put us in that state, in which, as in all purely internal states, every emotion is multiplied tenfold, in which his book will disturb us as migh a dream but a dream more lucid than those we have while sleeping and whose memory will last longer, then see how he provokes in us within one hour all possible happinesses and all possible unhappinesses just a few of which we would spend years of our lives coming to know and the most intense of which would never be revealed to us because the slowness with which they occur prevents us from perceiving them (thus our heart changes, in life, and it is the worst pain; but we know it only through reading, through our imagination: in reality it changes, as certain nautral phenomena occur, slowly enough so that, if we are able to observe successively each of its different states, in return we are spared the actual sensation of change.) "

In short a novel or piece of art can affect us more than a real experience, for it is an experience lived in the mind, the imagination. It can change you. You can experience a piece of artwork and leave it, different. Because you have spent a moment inside a point of view you may or may not have imagined or looked in the mirror and saw something reflected back that you did not know existed. According to Kundera, that is what a novelist does - creates a work that provides the reader with a window into the reader's own soul.

There's other passages I'd love to share from both the article and Swann's Way - I've only made it to page 140, partly because I feel this overwhelming need to inhale the words on the page and discuss every ten pages in my lj. That would slow anyone down. By the way - pages 137-140 explain the titles of the volumes. He goes into detail about what by way of Swann's is and by way of Germantes. If you skimmed them, go back and re-read. Quite important thematically speaking.
( Description of Way by Swann's literally. )

[Okay watching tv while writing this, so there are typos aplenty and it might sound off in places. Yes, I'm multi-tasking.]

About thirty some pages into Swann's Way, initial impressions? The narrator has an oddly Oedipal relationship with his parents and seems to be "in love" with his mother. That said this passage is beautifully written:
( bits on Proust's Swann's Way )

Reading Marcel Proust's "Swann's Way" at the same time as Francine Prose's "Reading Like A Writer" (*edited to add: Prose not to be confused with Proust. One is dead, French, and male - one is alive, female, American, and living in New York. One of the problems of doing kitchen sink posts is I indavertently end up confusing readers.) is an interesting experience. I find myself paying more attention to the author's style more than usual. And often pausing to re-read a sentence more than once. Marcel Proust's writing style - propells one forward, yet equally asks that you go back, re-read, ruminate on what he has written.

Francine Prose made a few interesting comments in Chapter One of Reading Like A Writer. The first point relates to well reading a masterpiece like Proust. She states how "a work of art can start you thinking about some esthetic or philosphical problem, it can suggest some new method, some fresh approach to fiction." Then, in regards to reading Proust - "It's like watching someone dance and then secretly, in your own room, trying out a few steps." Even though your novel is not Proust.

1. "Not long ago, a friend told me that her students had complained that reading masterpieces made them feel stupid. But I've always found that the better the book I'm reading, the smarter I feel, or, at least, the more able I am to imagine that I might someday, become smarter." Would agree with this.

2. "I've also heard fellow writers say that they cannot read while working on a book of their own for fear that Tolstoy or Shakespeare might influence them. I've always hoped they would influence me, and I wonder if I would have taken so happily to being a writer if it had meand I couldn't read for the years it might take to complete a novel."

Yes! Okay, I've had this debate with numerous people online and off, and I've always maintained that the reading while working on a novel can only improve it. Let me explain - the published authors I've run across who avoid reading while working on a novel are not authors whose work I'd want to imitate. Frex - John Jakes and John Maxim. Both interviewed by my father and both went on record stating they fear reading fiction while writing novels since it may interfer with their plot, they may discover their idea has been grabbed by someone else (sigh), or unduly influence them. Now does anyone remember any novels these people have written? Here's a list of writers who read while writing and state that they've learned from reading other's works: Stephen King, Dean Koontz, James Joyce, Maria Doria Russell, Elizabeth Bear, Francine Prose, Shakespear (yes, Shakespeare read other plays and freely borrowed from them), Margret Atwood, and Jane Austen (who often made fun of the books she read in her own).

I honestly do not understand people who write fiction but refuse to read it. It's like learning to dance or writing a song without listening to others. Bob Dylan, argueably one of the best songwriters out there, listens to a broad range of music, he borrowed sounds and styles from other artists to create his own interpretation. He did not stop listening to music while writing his songs for fear that he'd steal something from someone else. Same deal with acting, actors will study Brando, Dean, watch hours of others' performances, borrow things - James Marsters mentioned in interviews how he borrowed from people like Brando, Dean, Anthony Stewart Head, and others he worked with. Marlon Brando - a fantastic mimic, mimiced others styles. Boreanze enjoyed playing off of Denisof and Marsters - two actors who helped his own style. Or how about painters? Painters study other painters. You study how they drew, their technique, some students may even apprentice under a painter, copying their style for a while then eventually creating their own. Art, my friends, is not created in a vaccume. At least "good" art isn't. We borrow. We play homage to others. Look at film - Whedon plays homage to John Ford and Howard Hawkes. JJ Abrahms to Joss Whedon. We take an idea, a style, twist it about, play with it, and make it our own.

Prose goes on to state why people fear reading good works, and I've experienced what she describes - who hasn't?
"To be truthful, there are writers who will stop you dead in your tracks by making you see your own work in the most unflattering light. Each of us will meet a different harbinger of personal failure, some innocent genius chosen by us for reasons having to do with what we see as our own inadequacies. The only remedy I have found is to read another writer whose work is entirely different from the first, though not necessarily more like your own - a difference that will remind you of how many rooms there are in the house of art."

Hence the point of following a novel by say George RR Martin or Diana Gabaldan with one by Marcel Proust.

The other point of reading others works is it can help you figure out how to do something. Fix something. Prose suggests Isaak Babel for violent scenes - which ahem, I'm struggling with writing in my own novel at the moment, making me want to go out and grab a book by Isaak Babel, damn Prose. Wasted time on net last night looking for a free short story to read.

3. Prose comments on how much trouble her students have in reading a simple short story, that they were too busy forming critical opinions of the work, as opposed to paying attention to the words the writer uses. "They had been encouraged to form strong, critical and often negative opinions of geniuses who had been read with delight for centuries before they were born. They had been instructed to prosecute or defend these authors, as if in a court of law, on charges having to do with the writers' origins, their racial, cultural, and class backgrounds. They had been encouraged to re-write the classics into the more acceptable forms that the authors might have discovered had they only shared their young critics' level of insight, tolerance, and awareness." While it is great to analyze a work of art, to think about it critically, to do so to the extent that the work disappears and all that remains is the critique in our mind, we lose the art. I saw this a lot with analysis of tv shows, films, and books online. People stopped enjoying it. They were caught up in defending or prosecuting it for being "too white", "racist", "politically incorrect", "misogynistic", etc - and I've done it as well. I think sometimes there is such a thing as being "too critical".

Prose gets around this problem by changing how she teaches her reading course, focusing instead on how the book is written as opposed to what it means or its relevant themes. She focuses on what the writer does brilliantly. How they use a strand of dialogue or a bit of description to get across a point. I did something similar with Joss Whedon's BTVS - analyzing in my head how the writer used dialogue to distinguish characters, to describe who they were yet at the same time propell the plot and action. I'm not saying one should not be a critical reader, just that there is such a thing as going overboard.

Half-watching tv at the moment. Bones was surprisingly good tonight. And reading an article in the newest "New Yorker" on Bill Clinton, who fascinates me. I honestly think he may be the only living US President I'd like to meet and chat with.