Post Day

I work for a company that at times works for a company that recently launched and made a bit of, but not a huge, splash. I'm actually kind of tired of working for them - as I'm tired of working, period - because the service has gotten some good and some bad reviews, it's clearly not hitting the ball out of the park, but it's not a failure either, but it's in such a field that people feel entitled to the service it provides. And so, a lot of people with no business acumen have been acting like total dicks about it. But the deal is, I don't care much about the service. It doesn't appeal to me and it doesn't repel me. All day I'm a neutral ion or particle or some shit in a charged field. That's sciencey, right? This has taught me a few things: Arts critics have no fucking clue how the business world works, and business people are incurable assholes.

So I change the subject. My dog died.

So I change the subject again. I've been reading Franzen's The Twenty-Seventh City. It's struck me, after reading some books by authors who have more flowery prose, how functional a writer Franzen is. He's, in this book, more of a craftsmen. With every book I read, I reflect on my own writing, which is so, so, so depressing. I have to say that I've come to admire the craftsmen, because while I'm talented in some way, I'm no Chabon. Brilliant, nuanced descriptions just don't come to me. I can write some, but I can't take forever trying to blow every line out of the water.
And if you try too hard to make those kinds of lines work, it fails embarrassingly. You write lines like: "Slowly, slowly the bell rung on the trolley as the clam-chowder-soupy fog lifted in the brilliantined town." You can't make eye contact with a human being for days after writing a line like that because you're sure they can see right past your eye balls into the cloying, over-written prose you spent all of Saturday afternoon working up from a three word sentence into a two-page reflection on fog back down to a story about the man in the fog on down to that sentence you see there. Except I didn't spend all day one day writing it. You can easily see how I could have though, right? If you know me, you could. Sometimes trying to write like that is like trying too hard to get an image out of one of those magic eye paintings. You start to see things that just aren't there, but you don't want to admit it to anybody because they might disillusion you and they will most definitely make fun of you. At the same time, I am wary of writing functional, generic workshop prose that just kind of languishes on the page. Lines that tell you well enough everything that's going on, but make you cringe in their lack of imagination.

This is boring. I'm bored now. I'm going. To a party. And I'm already twenty minutes late.