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Tuesday, September 25, 2012

A few things.

From Verlyn Klinkenborg's "The Trouble with Intentions in Writing," from the Times today:

Become a connoisseur of ambiguity. Sentences are wily and multifarious, secretive, mischievous. Language is inherently playful, eager to make nonsense and no-sense if it gets out of order. Inexperienced writers tend to trust that sentences will generally turn out all right — or all right enough. Experienced writers know that every good sentence is retrieved by will from the forces of chaos.

From Don Delillo, Cosmopolis:

It was shallow thinking to maintain that numbers and charts were the cold compression of unruly human energies, every sort of yearning and midnight sweat reduced to lucid units in the financial markets. In fact data itself was soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process. This was the eloquence of alphabets and numeric systems, now fully realized in electronic form, in the zero-oneness of the world, the digital imperative that defined every breath of the planet's living billions. Here was the heave of the biosphere. Our bodies and oceans were here, knowable and whole.
 From Ann Berthoff, "Learning the Uses of Chaos":


Learning to write means learning to tolerate ambiguity, to learn that the making of meaning is a dialectical process determined by perspective and context. Meanings change as we think about them; statements and events, significances and interpretations can mean different things to different people at different times.  

From Bruce Beasley's "Having Read the Holy Spirit's Wikipedia," in Theophobia:

Glossolalic and disincarnate, interfere
in me, interleave me
and leave me through my breathing: like some third

person conjugation I've rewhispered
in a language I keep trying to learn, a tongue
made only of verbs, and all its verbs irregular.

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