(no subject)

[proximoception]

Sometimes looking out the window there's never been anyone in the world.

Others hills behind hills of multitudes staring right back.

We can only proceed assuming both.

One of many impossible thoughts proving oddly workable.

Comments

[fingersweep.livejournal.com]

I'm reading Cheever now, and came across this great interview tonight, where he says: "The room where I work has a window looking into a wood, and I like to think that these earnest, lovable, and mysterious readers are in there."

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

I had lunch with him once. Well, ten of us did. I said I thought Falconer was a little like Robbe-Grillet. The same detached narrative voice. I loved it. But he was full of scorn. He kept repeating "Robbe-Grillet" with the a contemptuously exaggerated patrician accent. I guess I still think Robbe-Grillet was the greater writer. But Cheever was really good.

[fingersweep.livejournal.com]

I'm about a quarter-way through the Stories, now, still enjoying his style, though no longer enchanted by it. I noticed the scorn from the get-go. He's polished and succinct -- but it's really that scorn that separates him. I notice the way he describes light -- it's peculiar.The green malevolent light of the radio, the diamond glitter of the sidewalk (in A Pot of Gold), the grief of the children in The Summer Farmer is "crystalline," the manhole covers in The Sutton Place Story "dominate the brilliance of the day like the reverse emphasis of a film negative." The skyscrapers, to a couple from the midwest in O City of Broken Dreams, "were lighted and seemed to burn, as if fire had fallen on their dark shapes" (interesting how often fantasy or fantastic things creep into these stories). The light in The Season of Divorce is "clement, pure" -- but then a squadron of bombers flies overhead, deafeningly.

It's a strong, destructive light. Hurts the eyes -- but somehow with this light he was able to see so many things I've never seen before (and often I have this feeling, reading him, that I've never looked at NYC correctly in my life). At the moment I'm reading to find his best story, and then hold on to it. "Torch Song", so far, is the one story I really admire.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Wasn't thinking about writing, but about an interview question John Crowley answered on the Little Big 25 site. But Crowley analogizes, even dovetails, writing/reading with how the generations use one another, so that fit makes sense.