Side Bar

Everything is a side-bar. I OD on my own work trying to decide what to read to the Chinese students. I have piles of pages on every flat surface. I find that I generally make sense, and where I don't it's because you need to understand the context, which had been covered in an earlier post. I just need ten or twelve pages, to read the students, but I didn't want anything in those pages to contain something that needed explaining. After two days, I can honestly say that if you hadn't been reading me for years (or writing me for much longer than that) the flitting about might prove disconcerting, but it is the way I think. And I've spent decades trying to get my voice on paper to be the same as my speaking voice. I want to include certain things in the reading: a sense of the driveway, the sense of living alone, the sense of living in the woods, a recipe, a weather event, something about an animal, a noise in the night. The bird-shot approach. I always (the last fifteen years) read chronologically, in case something is explained, and it might help the understanding if you got things in the correct order. These considerations might matter, and they might not. I don't know. My intentions are to do my laundry, so I will smell clean, make the final cut tomorrow, read through the pages, as a sequence, a couple of times tomorrow night. I'm capable of reading the hell out of this stuff, but it all depends on so many extraneous distractions. I read best in a living room, with a smoke and an Irish whiskey, but I can do alright in larger venues because if I use my reading glasses (which I will have to) I can't actually see the people anyway. Reading myself requires attention to detail. I read, now, in a fairly flat, only slightly inflected way. Flutter my hands a bit. Gesture is an important part of rhetoric, additional punctuation. Nothing histrionic, but if I read something that has the phrase 'tree-tip-pit' embedded, I might punch the air for each of the words, as if they were a line of music. For all the casual qualities, my recent work (I've read two years, the last two days) attempts to be fairly precise. I had to laugh, reading about the fox, how she became a metaphor for everything hot and steamy. That's pure Harvey. He was a piece of work. Ultimately, it's the eccentrics that matter. I'm nearly normal, all things considered, I try to stay between 40 and 80 degrees, so that my fingers work, Black Dell is operational; and when that fails I just crawl in my mummy bag and go to sleep. Fuck a bunch of distractions.