Breaking the Whaaaaaaa?

So at the moment I’m reading The Waves and taking a long time to do it. I’m the sort of reader who throws words back like lemon filling at a pie-eating contest, but that’s not a book you can do that with. It’s poetry. Reading it slooooowly is a joy – letting each character sink in – each clearly delineated person with their little motifs and their loves and their patterns of seeing, and then thinking about it during the day, letting it recur.

And such rich, fine language. You know, fuck Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene. I don’t really mean that, mind you, at least in Graham Greene’s case as I really do love him, but just to make a point for a second, fuck them. You want balls in your writing, you look at Virginia Woolf. She was willing to stretch language to the breaking point to get across the images and emotions she wanted to get across, and she did, AND she never quite broke the language. None of that pared-down choose-your-own-adventure shit for her.

I love her something fierce. There’s this one section in Orlando when she writes about how frustrating it is to have too many s’s on the page when you’re composing something, and since reading that I've loved her like she was some person I knew. She seems to have had such a conscious relationship with language, and a healthy one - one that had been psychoanalyzed by a competent professional. Pity that such a degree of consciousness wasn't the right kind to stop her drowning herself, but illness is illness and illness has got rid of lots of my favourite writers before their time. I'd punch myself in the face for another Emily Brontë novel, for example. Even if it was crap. Imagine. One novel from Emily Brontë, twelve and counting from Martin Spewbag Amis. What a vomitous world it is at times.

Last night, when I was taking a break from The Waves, I watched Barton Fink, and for the first time in a long time, a movie made me honestly think ‘what the fuck?’ Just to keep it simple for myself, I’m going to pretend the whole thing was an autobiographical movie script Fink imagined when writer’s block first set in and he looked at the picture of the lady on the beach while pondering the creative process in a commercialized context. I don’t fully believe that, but it’s tidy, and in any case as a plot device it’s better than anything they’ve done since they started using the A-list. I reccommend it, but I reccommend it with reefer, which I didn't have last night.