girlsdontcry's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- intralinear tensions OK, that was so pointless, what I just wrote, and I remembered something I'd wanted to ask anyone who might have an answer... suggestions for novels about writing or writers. I don't mean books like "How to write a super bestseller" by someone who hasn't ever written a bestseller, but presumably could if they decided to stop writing moderately best-selling guides to writing best-sellers. But books about writing. Like ... The World According to Garp is a book about writing. Sort of. That kind of thing. You'd think it was just self-absorbed for writers to write about writing, but I was thinking about it the other day, and then I realised that if there's one thing writers know about, it's writing, and it is, supposedly, good to write about things one knows about. So that's why I was interested. If anything springs to mind, please let me know. And in return, I'll tell you this. The French novelist Georges Perec wrote an entire novel without the letter "e" called "La Disparition", which seems to me an act of madness, but nothing compared to that of Gilbert Adair, who translated the novel into English, also without the letter "e". (It's called "A Void".) And inspired by wanting to delete things I've written and just put up the words **CENSORED FOR BEING BORING**, I looked up this on the internet, from Catch 22, because I love it, and sometimes I want to be Yossarian. To break the monotony he invented games. Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective. The next day he made war on articles. He reached a much higher plane of creativity the following day when he blacked out everything in the letters but a, an and the. That erected more dynamic intralinear tensions, he felt, and in just about every case left a message far more universal. Soon he was proscribing parts of salutations and signatures and leaving the text untouched. One time he blacked out all but the salutation "Dear Mary" from a letter, and at the bottom he wrote, "I yearn for you tragically. A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army." A. T. Tappman was the group chaplain's name. 10:34 a.m. - 2003-06-03 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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