special k said this to me today, holding my fingers in his.
“Even really good writers,” he said, “describe things you can’t feel as ‘palpable’. Why don’t they just write Holy shit, it’s tense in here!”
It made me giggle a lot. It is silly how writers take on weird, archaic ways of expressing things that they would never use themselves out loud. Or in their heads. Or in an email.
One more piece of evidence that thinking is good.
Does it work to have the spoken word as written word?? Or written word as spoken word?? Is it an aim that they become the same?? I don’t write down what I’m going to say to people because when I look at them, I can see they’re falling asleep. And when I quote from books during a presentation, I know that to the listeners, what’s being read is somehow too dense and unintelligible; it’s hard to switch from hearing the spoken word to hearing the written word spoken out loud. Reading the spoken word can be really uninteresting. Something very partial happens between the impulse to express the word and the mode of expression. Must be why a picture says a thousand words!