Two Days Gone: Confession, Writing, Books

 Eyes watering from onions in the crock pot, an hour to write.

Yesterday, I tore apart what had been “The Kids Are Not All Right” and turned it into “Before Dying and Death.” 2853 words between 8 AM and 3 PM. Between those times I ate, showered, and maybe went to McClure's. Or was that first thing in the morning? I did go get smokes. Doing all tht writing, inputting all those words (maybe 1% came from the original version) drains me.

Okay, names are important to me. They have a purpose – sometimes it is for amusing a friend; other times I want them to represent more than themselves (and I do not want to get Dickensian in naming them). So, I have one character in this story I was working on yesterday, got a bright idea, and did a little research. Here are the items I read from the research:

1. List of Scottish Americans
2. Andrew C. McLaughlin 
3. Archibald MacLeish

Scotland and America by Judith Manning belongs on that list, except it comes with this:

In the 1820s Johann von Goethe attempted to move beyond what he regarded as the pernicious narrowness of literary analysis devoted to ‘national tradition.’ He coined the term Weltliteratur to describe how ‘marvellous things’ might be ‘brought forth through refraction.’ When Witherspoon felt the need to invent ‘Americanism,’ he was responding to something about how people in the struggling colonies used the English language, something for which the nearest equivalent – and therefore best comparison – was how Scots handled English. What, precisely, are we pointing to in noting that similarity? Returning to Goethe’s broad vision of imaginative connectedness, we might think about Scottish-American relationships as plural and multi-dimensional, in terms of exchange and reciprocity as well as one-way movement: truths in contexts, multiple, particular, and refracted; language at once at its most precise and most evocative. In part, this constitutes a plea for a return to the unfashionable realms of rhetoric–the techne or nuts and bolts of language use – as tools for comparison; if this sounds unduly off-putting, let’s simply say that literary critics have at their disposal specific analytic skills different from those of the documentary archivist, the cultural historian and the political scientist. When it comes to asking questions about the texture, the content, of ‘like,’ what actually constitutes the shared concerns and affinities we perceive between texts and differentiates them from others, there may be nothing for it but to get right into the texture of language use in particular instances.

I started working on putting them into a physical connection. The basics of creating a master document I may have glommed onto, but I need more practice.

Jerry came and went to vespers at St. George's when I made confession. Wonderful experience. My PO seems to think I have a secret life of debauchery when I really have lived a quiet life so that I do not need to worry much about confession.

I came back and worked more on the master document. I also found out that I had the wrong margins on a bunch of the stories. I knocked off at 11 pm.

A little reading Thanks to The Guardian's book review newsletter: ‘It’s time the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo grew up’: Karin Smirnoff on her shocking sequel (I read all three of Larsson's books in prison – a triumph of character over prose.); ‘You don’t know what you might have set upon yourself’: the best descriptions of ambition in literature (I think the title declares quite well the reason for reading this – unless you've never been ambitious); Back to school, Mr Gove: authors choose their GCSE set texts (I have no clear idea what is the GCSE, but I am a fool for lists and considering the list of writers, I wanted to see what they thought should be taught; good choices all.)

It is 7:25. More stored in the clip board to share from Friday, and a little from yesterday.

I do not think I told about the high school kid getting in a fight on the bus. That was Friday. Grocery shopping and that mess got me home after 4 pm. It seems to be getting shorter, the time to get work done.

 

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