Words

It is ending October. One more day after this one. I note the date for reasons of my own that have nothing to do with All Hallows’ Eve festivities. On Wednesday morning, when I wake up, it will be November 1st. This becomes a new morning. Have you ever heard Bob Dylan’s song, New Morning? It has leapt into my head with typing these words. It’s actually the title track on his album of that name, which came out (I looked it up), funnily, in October 1970. I remember buying it new, vinyl, hot off the press. I still have it, but no longer the mechanical means to listen to it, the vinyl album. A shame. But a choice. For neither have I the receiver to capture the tones from the record on the turntable, nor the audio speakers wired to the receiver to enable Dylan’s then young, comprehensible voice to fill the room I am in. I do have, in my head, him singing it, and I am enjoying it.

Can’t you hear that rooster crowing? / … So happy just to see you smiling/Underneath the sky of blue/On this new morning, new morning/On this new morning with you.

Speaking of words. I was thinking about words today, and writing. This time it is because of the novel I happen to be reading. It is a novel of beautiful, beautiful turns of phrases, and choices of words to describe action, to describe environs, and words to insert history that feeds/backstory’s the events of this particular novel’s story and main protagonist. It was, for the first 1/4 to 1/3 a novel that in this beauty and story pulled me along breath-held at how palpable and personal it was. I am now about halfway through. I am pausing. I am looking for something to do–Oh, I know, I say to myself, write a blogpost! The novel has lost my being and holds now only my eyes, as they skim the words, hoping for an insight into the protagonist and into her story that will grab them again and hold them steady, slow, in awe as it talks, and holds them between its very hands so they don’t blink and miss something.

Do you see what I did there? I was going to write a paragraph about how in the past few years I have read more than a few novels that have, with beautiful scene setting, magnificent phrasing, off-balancing themes, caught me up in paragraph one, and held me longer than the story being told could have on its own merits. So, you say, they did well!! No, because the bottom did fall out. I did stop reading despite the words that were as beautifully shaped as a work of visual or tonal art. I lost interest in the story. Or in the protagonist. In such cases, I am especially disappointed, because the artistry promised so much. It is like the carapace of a gone butterfly–no longer growing, promising caterpillar, and nowhere the dusty, iridescent wings present to be admired.

Do you see what I did there? I got caught up in my visuals. My similes. My metaphors. My images. I got caught up in Kate the writer.

This is what these disappointing novels–novels of artifice and poorly told, or absent story, or worst!! buried story–do.

Look at me! A literary critic!

No credentials. Consider my expressed thoughts, or not, as you wish. Thanks for reading this far.

And as a small, additional nudge, I find that literary criticism is also becoming a form of beauty that wanders far away from its reason for being. I spend my time, while trying to read this critique of a particular book or writer for insights into the book or writer, looking up words for what they mean, and puzzling out allusions for what their insiders-only message might be.

That is it for today, for the second to the last day of October 2023, a month of deep sadnesses around the world. May we remember them to encourage not repeating them, to not repeat them.