Last night, after the reading, on my drive home, about 10pm, I saw two foxes running across front lawns, sniffing the dirt and grass, crouching around car tires, one about three blocks away from the other. I'm tempted to think they were husband and wife foxes. The second one seemed much more feminine than the first. A more feminine snout (snoot?). I wonder if they have kid foxes somewhere squirreled away? Were they out gathering dinner for the family? Do they take home cats and birds? There are always so many missing cat signs in the neighborhood...the best sign I ever saw was for a cat named Sancho Panza. He was black and white and fluffy and fat and the night after I saw his sign on a telephone pole I had a dream that he was in my backyard (even though I don't have a backyard) and it was dark and I knew he was out there so I went outside and he was standing upright in the grass and he told me he didn't know where he was.
But the reading before the foxes was also very special. Christina and Julie rocked it, and J'Lyn knocked my socks off with her bird archive complete with a slide show of "found" dead birds. Her first publication just came out: Bear Stories in the new issue of Sleepingfish. I emailed her and told her I thought they were great and we got into a discussion of writing that sparkles, or sparkling too much, or not wanting to sparkle, or wanting to. I think we might define sparkly two different ways. She's worried about being too sparkly, I think. I kept pushing her, trying to get her to define exactly what she meant by sparkly, because I really want to know, but then she stopped answering my emails.
17 comments:
My favorite thing about foxes is that they wear black knee-high socks.
I, too, am wary of sparkly writing. For me, I don't want things to be too perfect, to shine to much, to be honed to a glimmering jewel. I want there to be some sort of light, but more of a sepia-toned one than Technicolor. At least I think so. I'm still working on it...what I think, that is.
I spelled that fifth "too" wrong. Lots of "to" and "too"!!!
That makes a lot of sense in terms of your writing...sepia-toned. I like it. I don't think I want Techincolor either, or I haven't so far, but maybe more of a jewel tone.
I will set some context because one day, in the future, it will matter. We were sitting around the table in Sara's living room and there was an antique table cloth and a white banister behind Sara's head. Me, Christina, Kristen, Sara, and Danielle.
D, when you said sparkly, I got this idea that maybe the sparkle in your writing (which you say you want) is more luminosity. I am going to qualify this in a second...just wait. Luminosity suggests all the light of sparkle, but not because there is a reflective surface that underneath might as well be rotting food (as in tinfoil on something left out too long). The light comes from within and, like a good diamond, the light is endless because of all of these reflective surfaces cut into the object. And the object is clear itself.
I think Sara's work is clearly luminous. It glows. But D, while I think that yours is just as penetrating, I think sparkle might actually work better. I mean there is something really arresting and almost mean about your work. I mean "mean" in the way that Estella found Pip's hands mean when she shook them and that she was mean, she crippled him and was crippled herself. It's all of that.
But this is all a walk toward what I really want to say. But for now, a list:
luminous = true brilliance from within, but also with an aesthetics of purity. In that purity is a style.
sparkle = eyecatching, aressting, not soothing, fierce. Ferocity as an aesthetic.
? = showy on the outside and feeble, immature, structurally unsound, capricious on the inside.
I am afraid that I will make this latter kind of light.
Mmmmm...fun. As I said last night, I've long used "sparkly" to talk about (my) writing, but without ever feeling a need or desire to define just what I meant. I felt what I meant, but I couldn't quite say it.
J'Lyn, I'm curious still what you mean by "mean." Maybe I get it...mean like with sharp edges? To me, something can only sparkle if it has edges, corners, surfaces at different angles...as opposed to shining or emiting light...or not opposed to but in addition to, as something else, another quality. Maybe I should go look at my dictionary...
Spasmodic; spaniel; spank; sparrow hawk
Sparkle: v. i. 1. to give off sparks. 2. to gleam or shine intermittently; to glitter; to glisten, as jewels, wet grass in sun, etc. 3. to be brilliant and lively; as in: her wit sparkled. 4. to effervesce
Sparkle n. 1. a spark; a glowing particle. 2. a sparkling or glittering. 3. brilliance; liveliness; vivacity
OK, two things: "intermittently" seems very important to what I mean, as does "vivacity."
What word should we use for J'Lyn's latter kind of gleaming?
Yes! "Intermittently" IS important, probably to all of our definitions. I think intermittency, in addition to the sparkly definition, is what prevents a work from acheiving perfection. Which, in my mind, equals sterility/plasticity (perfection, that is). There are moments of brightness but it is only through the moments that are not bright that the work reveals itself. It's not a spot-light, but one of those spinning lights that throws soft colored shapes onto the walls. That kind of intermittent light.
I think I was resistant to "sparkly" because,without investigating its definition, is a cute word. At least to me. And I don't think any of our work is merely cute. But I like knowing these layers now.
J'Lyn's latter kind of gleaming (which should not be confused as a descriptive of J'Lyn's work!!) I guess I would define as empty. But perhaps that's too general. Or too dismissive?
okay, this is my second attempt. I wanted to distinguish between sparkly writing and shiny writing. yes, I'm appending yet another word of surface and light. sparkly (I have to agree with j'lyn) seems to have something to do with the ability of a piece of writing to capture the eye, to arrest attention. I'd also throw the word verve in here, for good measure. shiny writing, on the other hand, is about so much surface; it is slick, it is chrome, it is shiny, and not in a neat firefly kinda way, but in the clean, superperfect, superwrought way that sara is rightfully averse to. I'd should also distinguish between "wrought" and "overwrought," as all of our works are wrought, but overwrought, well, that's just too much performance to be believed. am I getting myself into trouble here? have I said too much?
What about tinfoily? or foily? although that sounds like something else literary. Gumwrappery? I'm trying to find a word that suggests surface and nothing else. Rhinestone?
Yes, Danielle, by mean I think with sharp edges or crudity even. It's an important element of your work and you do it really well in the different kinds of languages and words you use, in the ability to have something tender and then something really jerky like S & M.
But it can go bad when someone can't do it well, you know. It's dangerous in that way. I like how "sparkly," as seen in these comments, toes that threshold. It should...that's it's brilliance. Luminous almost toes the other direction, perhaps "purple."
here's several cents that this conversation yielded on my end.
intermittant may also have to do with patience and respect. like the writing is not always begging for your attention. in this way i disagree with lutz et al about each sentence needing maximum bang? sparkle? shine? filigree? whooziwhatzit? because the reader most likely has something better to do and needs to be captivated. while i like thinking about the reader as a crow pawing at shiny thing after shiny thing, for me this isn't a sound aesthetic.
not that sentence should go slack or anything. but that there is more to a sentence than shine, maybe.
shiny or tinfoily or tin oily or fin toily or whatever seems to operate like fools gold might. seemingly valuable but worth nothing although moving into economic metaphors is strange.
also, is there something bad about a "a reflective surface that underneath might as well be rotting food"? this seems like it might be a good thing.
ps sorry if i'm butting in.
Welcome Christina and Greg. No, you're not butting in. Or butt away. Butt butt butt. I like the magpie thing. Intermittent, too, seems to me to be about correspondences...things butting (ha!) up against other things. I'm sort of thinking that the thing J'Lyn originally brought up in our emails might best be described as just plain ol' shiny (no offense to Michael F). Sparkly to me, like I said, requires a kind of depth, energy, edge...whereas shiny is just working out, not in. Does that make sense? Not that we actually need a word for any of this. Who needs words?! But I do appreciate you all chatting about it. Chat away! Butt butt butt.
P.S.: OK, suggested writing assignment for the summer (I need an assignment): write something that operates (whatever that means) like a reflective surface with rotting food underneath. What would THAT be like?!
P.S.S. I like that we're having this conversation about writing/literature with such un-academic lingo.
I mean P.P.S. obviously. Or maybe I mean S.O.S.
p.s. a day later: to clarify any confusion, cmu is my bloggy name, mu being bosnian (greek maybe, originally) for my. my c. my christina. it was a thing someone called me once.
I like your writing assignment, Danielle, to write something like a reflective surface with something rotting underneath. But it also brings up a good point, with me excepted, I think all of you can do this and then, like Greg says, tinfoil and rot--that kind of shiny--becomes beautiful.
So, this suggests something about the issue: maybe there's really no kind of bad "type" of writing, just bad writing. Our words make it "typical," but the only thing typical about it is that it's bad. Maybe we should try to find examples of it and then explain why that example is bad.
It can be student writing, but wouldn't it be more salacious if it wasn't?
j'lyn i don't think its facile to consider the dead bird project shiny with rotting underneath and not just because of the rotting underneath content but also because of the movements the work makes: the first person plural kind of masks the pain but also dissolves into the pain when the "we" recounts personal anecdotes.
but you raise an interesting point. i wonder how that idea might manifest in each of our writing. i'm not sure how it would in mine. i;m not sure if it already does. sara's to me sometimes carries this dread with it that seems to accrue underneath a relatively placid surface. maybe that? hmm
bad writing. maybe it is obvious writing and not in the way that marty talks about it. but obvious like fools gold and so then shiny and obvious become analogues. maybe this also speaks to the intermittant thing? trying not to make sparkling so obvious (so consitent?) that it becomes shiny?
Maybe we're thinking of "rotting" differently too. But I definitely get your point.
Originally, I thought of it as something literally going bad. Like Marty's obvious.
But we're all so optimistic about our descriptions. We refuse for anything to be wasted.
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