Getting back into the habit of reading multiple books at the same time, swapping from one to the other. I suppose it is a bad habit, shows an inability to concentrate on one thing at a time. But I need to change. I read the first chapter of Portnoy's Complaint last night, and before 8am in the morning, then finished Wildlife. In between I read the first dense, lyrical paragraph of The Centaur again, as I'd found my old brown paged paperback copy on the table, in the kitchen. I did write "battered" but it came out as "nattered" , and then I decided that it was too cliched a description and deleted it. But "old brown paged paperback copy" seems too long and ponderous. Get rid of the copy. An old brown paged paperback. Still too long. a brown-paged paperback. But I don't like brown-paged, even with the hyphen. The pages are brown now, especially at the edges, and I wanted that to be known, but brown-paged?? It's too ugly a construction. Browned paperback. Maybe that's it - now it becomes a better piece of prose - I can get rid of the "old", as well and looking back on it I've retrospectively added the commas, after "dense" and after "table" - that just counts as correction. But maybe that first comma doesn't belong there. Maybe the second comma doesn't either. It doesn't read right. Maybe it should be:
In between I read the first dense lyrical paragraph of The Centaur again, as I'd found my browned paperback copy on the table in the kitchen.
Now I'm having problems with the "again". It jars the rhythm of the sentence too much. It could become:
In between I read the first dense lyrical paragraph of The Centaur , as I'd found my much read browned paperback copy on the table in the kitchen.
But "much read" is too twee. Just a reread" instead of a "read". And I've taken out all the commas again to make it one long trot of a read to the end of the sentence.
In between I reread the first dense lyrical paragraph of The Centaur as I'd found my browned paperback copy on the table in the kitchen.
Now I have an urge to to put "fiercely dense" in, which alliterates with "first", and gets across the intensity of that first paragraph. Over-egging?
In between I reread the first fiercely dense and lyrical paragraph of The Centaur as I'd found my browned paperback copy on the table in the kitchen.
This is why I like having a real life editor as well as an electronic capability to endlessly revise and revise.
Time now to pay homage to the computer and the word processor. But when I look back at pages of prose that I've written in notebooks way way before home computing I can see the same process going on, but just full of scribble and scrawl and crossings out. Might be interesting to try writing a whole story in Word with Track Changes on.
Here's that first paragraph anyway, with the second paragraph thrown in for good measure as I actually reread that as well. Being a favourite book I have it on the Kindle as well as in paperback.
CALDWELL turned and as he turned his ankle received an arrow. The class burst into laughter. The pain scaled the slender core of his shin, whirled in the complexities of his knee, and, swollen broader, more thunderous, mounted into his bowels. His eyes were forced upward to the blackboard, where he had chalked the number 5,000,000,000, the probable age in years of the universe. The laughter of the class, graduating from the first shrill bark of surprise into a deliberately aimed hooting, seemed to crowd against him, to crush the privacy that he so much desired, a privacy in which he could be alone with his pain, gauging its strength, estimating its duration, inspecting its anatomy. The pain extended a feeler into his head and unfolded its wet wings along the walls of his thorax, so that he felt, in his sudden scarlet blindness, to be himself a large bird waking from sleep. The blackboard, milky slate smeared with the traces of last night’s washing, clung to his consciousness like a membrane. The pain seemed to be displacing with its own hairy segments his heart and lungs; as its grip swelled in his throat he felt he was holding his brain like a morsel on a platter high out of a hungry reach. Several of the boys in their bright shirts all colors of the rainbow had risen upright at their desks, leering and baying at their teacher, cocking their muddy shoes on the folding seats. The confusion became unbearable. Caldwell limped to the door and shut it behind him on the furious festal noise.
Out in the hall, the feather end of the arrow scraped on the floor with every step. The metallic scratch and stiff rustle mixed disagreeably. His stomach began to sway with nausea. The dim, long walls of the ochre hall wavered; the classroom doors, inset with square numbered panes of frosted glass, seemed experimental panels immersed in an activated liquid charged with children’s voices chanting French, singing anthems, discussing problems of Social Science. Avez-vous une maison jolie? Oui, j’ai une maison très jolie for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain throughout our history boys and girls (this was the voice of Pholos), the federal government has grown in prestige, power, and authority but we must not forget, boys and girls, that by origin we are a union of sovereign republics, the United God shed his grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood —the beautiful song was blindly persisting in Caldwell’s brain. To shining sea. The old baloney. He had heard it first in Passaic.
Updike, John (2007-08-30). The Centaur (Kindle Locations 117-135). Penguin UK. Kindle Edition.
Wildlife has a strange distant feel to it - Richard Ford's 16yr old protagonist is nothing like as on fire as Alex in Portnoy. His view of his parents split is filled with pain, but it's unexpressed except in his blank thoughts, and his trying to say and do the right thing in a situation that he just does not comprehend. He is a lonely boy who only has his parents, he has no friends in Great Falls. I find these characters strange - the boy is very like the 16yr old in Canada - it doesn't feel like my experience of adolescence. Updike and Roth both capture this intense sexuality and richness of feeling and thought, whereas Ford is describing, is telling a story, though the eyes of an almost completely uncomprehending child who has not even begun to understand his own life.
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