Because what a writer does is write. Because I said this blog is updated weekly, and it's been a week. Because when my brother owned a doughnut store, he got up at four or even three every morning to make the doughnuts, yeah, just like the guy in the commercial.
Because there's no such thing as writer's block. There's only the writer and the page and the words and you have to put the words on the page or you're not a writer.
You have to put the words on the page even when you think there's nothing to say. It's only when you start putting words on the page that you remember the German tourist in running clothes asking how to get to Castro, and then to Golden Gate Park, how you point back in the direction he came from and he's off and flying, ready to cover the whole city in his white running shoes.
And his shoes, like a dotted line, point the way to the blond sitting in a doorway, her head down. She asks for a cigarette when you're already past her. She doesn't look up, the words coming out of her like she's been saying them for years, pull her string and Spare a cigarette? and the string runs out and someone else walks by and her string is pulled again: Spare a cigarette?
From her to chalked exhortations on the sidewalk:
It May Not Seem Like It, But Things Will Get Better
You Rock My Socks
I Am A Better Person Because Of You
A neighborhood crackhead wavers on his feet, burning cig between his fingers. His eyes trace the one that reads:
You Are Exactly Where You Need To Be
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4 comments:
Did someone say, time to make see doughnuts?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biolc6FLVws&feature=player_embedded
OK, your post was better than my reply (natch)
Hey, there. This is a bit random, ma belle, but tangentially, it's about a writer and I found it interesting b/c I like her work and b/c you know how I keep getting attracted to Hollow Persons.
"How good a writer was she? Strangers On A Train, The Price of Salt, and The Talented Mr Ripley, are hypnotic and amoral novels, pushing past any genre, unsettling the reader and using the limitations of her prose style – her karate chop syntax - to create a powerful effect. My own feeling is that when Highsmith consciously tried to be literary it never worked, and when she went for money and fame (the more she earned the meaner she became), she found a formula and lost her form. It wasn’t the supposed confines of crime writing that was the problem, but her increasing refusal – in love or in work – to let a relationship happen. And art is always about relationship - to the material, to the self, and to the world in all its chaos and intrusion, its terror and its glory." Jeanette Winterson
Off-topic, but I think you'll like reading this piece a friend of mine wrote:
http://peoplerunningpeoplewalking.blogspot.com/2010/02/stories-maybe-only-dog-story.html
Dr. Stockton, you make me laugh.
Bee and Geo - I love that you've been prompted to lateral connections. Thank you both!
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