Arrested

You get out what you put in. Garbage in Garbage out. Read enough junk and you’ll write junk. Truisms, but there you have ‘em. I’ve been scrolling and scanning through pages of articles and websites online and most of the writing is thrown together with one eye on the clock and one eye on Google analytics. So when I called a halt today and picked up an actual book to read, the difference was like being offered clear well water after weeks of drinking soda.

The book I reached for is Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis, a collection of short stories, stories that are oblique and moving all at once. Each one of these pieces is so thoughtfully made, that they make me embarrassed of my own recent flailing both in writing and visual art. I’ve clouded my palate lately, cramming too much junk info. The foundation of every one of Davis’ stories is the act of observation, something that would seem to to be so easy that we possibly for get how to do it. But the acuity of her perception makes it clear that much of what I think of as observation in writing is simply repetition. At every turn I encounter how much I overlook.

It’s funny that I wasn’t twenty pages into the book than I had an idea for a new piece. I think of my self as relatively democratic in terms of taste, liking to take a lot of things in. But there are times when that can be as big an obstruction as having nothing to bounce off of. Even the majority of what I read here on LJ doesn’t help, because so often its interest is social or emotional: I read things here to find out how friends are doing, not for their serious writing, which so often happens elsewhere. There are people here whose writing I admire but I don’t demand of them that they be meticulous craftsmen. Such expectations would be unfair. We are all writing on the fly here.