riting and wreading
Santiago almost had an out-of-body experience yesterday, reading through some previous entries on the blog. In particular the more extended prose pieces. This self-indulgent revisiting of the past came about after santiago received yet another email about probably the most read, and most popular post on here. This piece on MDMA/Ecstasy. People come here accidentally because they're looking for something else. The three major categories are miscellaneous, pornography, and ecstasy.
As usual I checked the post to remind myself what I wrote, and was pretty impressed by the clarity. Now, there are a couple of places where it's not absolutely clear, and a lot of work was required to get where it does, but on the whole the piece communicates what it was meant to. So I started to read a few more longer posts, and to look at the huge amount of stuff produced this month, and I was pleasantly surprised.
Prose is something I find extremely tricky to write. Probably because I work well in short, intense bursts, but very rarely keep notes. That makes it difficult to pick up the thread of an argument at a later stage. Although I find it far too often, I have a great fear of cliche,
and also of conventional associations in language. For instance red meaning passion or sin, white meaning purity, black meaning something bad. This to me represents laziness on the part of the writer, and doesn't seem to be qualitatively far removed from talking about Hispanic passion, "Oriental" mystery, or Anglo-Saxon rationality. These generalisations are inaccurate, patronising, and actually obstruct understanding. I also find them harder to forgive or ignore in my own writing than in the work of others.
So to realise that with only the odd moment of obscurity I'm more or less content with a lot of the prose here is to experience a rare moment of satisfaction with my own work. It's actually quite a nice feeling, and not the morally questionable self-indulgence I once would have thought it.
Which is not to say that everything is beautifully clear or my satisfaction. Some of the prose, and a lot of the poetry is much more obscure than I thought it was at the time. There are poems which I know were very precisely written, and had perfect clarity in my mind at the time. Which even now clearly have a concision that only comes about when you're in absolute control of what you're doing. But which are inscrutable even to me without spending some time reading and re-reading them. Overall, though, much of the writing here is much better than I could have hoped for.
And I promise this will be the last self-aggrandising retrospective for a while.
.
As usual I checked the post to remind myself what I wrote, and was pretty impressed by the clarity. Now, there are a couple of places where it's not absolutely clear, and a lot of work was required to get where it does, but on the whole the piece communicates what it was meant to. So I started to read a few more longer posts, and to look at the huge amount of stuff produced this month, and I was pleasantly surprised.
Prose is something I find extremely tricky to write. Probably because I work well in short, intense bursts, but very rarely keep notes. That makes it difficult to pick up the thread of an argument at a later stage. Although I find it far too often, I have a great fear of cliche,
and also of conventional associations in language. For instance red meaning passion or sin, white meaning purity, black meaning something bad. This to me represents laziness on the part of the writer, and doesn't seem to be qualitatively far removed from talking about Hispanic passion, "Oriental" mystery, or Anglo-Saxon rationality. These generalisations are inaccurate, patronising, and actually obstruct understanding. I also find them harder to forgive or ignore in my own writing than in the work of others.
So to realise that with only the odd moment of obscurity I'm more or less content with a lot of the prose here is to experience a rare moment of satisfaction with my own work. It's actually quite a nice feeling, and not the morally questionable self-indulgence I once would have thought it.
Which is not to say that everything is beautifully clear or my satisfaction. Some of the prose, and a lot of the poetry is much more obscure than I thought it was at the time. There are poems which I know were very precisely written, and had perfect clarity in my mind at the time. Which even now clearly have a concision that only comes about when you're in absolute control of what you're doing. But which are inscrutable even to me without spending some time reading and re-reading them. Overall, though, much of the writing here is much better than I could have hoped for.
And I promise this will be the last self-aggrandising retrospective for a while.
.
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