Thinking about giant aunt and uncle sculptures made out of mashed potatoes and chicken gravy. Nouns, verbs, articles…teaching myself English. Wasted words. Rhythm. Studio 360. Kurt Anderson reading my journals. Electronic ink. Nicholson Baker, getting a character’s inner thoughts:
How clumsy, how broad, how expensive these cinematographic sign-systems seem, when compared to the dental trays full of pryers and pickers and angled mirrors that are the fiction writer’s rightful inheritance. Any mind Tolstoy wants to enter, he enters. It costs him nothing but a drop of ink….All the camera angles in the world couldn’t help you there.
Stories structured by an event. Ordinary passage of time. Repetition. Smoking into a wood-burning stove.
* title by Nicholson Baker