The Best Sentence

The best sentence I have read in a really long time came up today, in a book that was written not by one person but by a collective of people; a group of artists called Bernadette Corporation. (I personally like thinking about Bernadette as the first name of the "author," and Corporation as the surname, because that's kind of funny.) The sentence, written by this group of people, was about one person, Reena Spaulings, who is the main character of the book Reena Spaulings, where I found this glorious sentence. The sentence goes like this:

Something in her face said "ocean...radar," and something in her face and body said "Trampled Grass."

OMG, right? Where on earth have you read a better description of a person? And with better, more appropriately random capitalization of letters (see Trampled Grass)? And perfect ellipses? And beautiful juxtaposition of friendly and unfriendly nouns?

As I read this book I get the feeling the author is reading a mind, which happens to be mine. Because this is a book written with association and intuition at the forefront of its priorities, rather than logic or plot. And this is how I hope to view the world and write it down: as a series of oceans and radars, written by a group of voices rather than just one.

I Woke Up With This Haiku in My Head

Ring tone of lover
There ain't no sound in the world
As timely each time

If Only Writers Were Actually Anti-Social

Here’s the writer’s dream scenario: a cabin in the “middle of nowhere,” (which actually means some town “upstate” that’s close enough to New York or San Francisco for social or intellectual emergencies), preferably surrounded by birch or redwood, preferably with an organic garden situation going on so you can get “back to the land” while you’re getting back to the drawing board, where you can just sit, and think, and finally get all that reading done, and write. And write. And think. And write.

Because your life now just doesn’t allow it because everyone’s calling you, emailing you, texting you, asking you to work their shift, facebooking you, asking you to drink beer with them, asking you to drink whiskey with them, asking you to have a glass of wine with them, cheese with them, Thai with them, Thai fusion with them, and it’s really hard to say no when your apartment’s kinda shitty and you’d rather not go back there and you kinda feel like a beer/wine/whiskey anyway, and writing sounds kinda hard anyway, and you should catch up with that person anyway and there are so many anyways it feels like there’s no way that there could ever be any “real” writers in this world because those cabins are not real!

Here’s the predicament: writers are supposed to be anti-social by nature, because writing is something that you have to do alone. But writing is also something that’s so hard that you’ll do anything to avoid it, so by nature you say yes to every social activity you’re invited to. And because you don’t have a “real job” and you haven’t “published a book yet” you can’t really use “work” as an excuse to get out of the social activity anyway. And this is how it happens. Writers, who are supposed to be dweeby, end up staying up the latest/drinking the most cider at the Chirstmas party/ talking too much and too long so that they don’t – god forbid – have to do those same things alone. At their desk. At their kinda shitty apartment.

And so the cabin idea is actually bunk. We don’t want to be alone out there! We don’t want to be even lonelier than we already are! We write because we’re lonely, not in order to be! The birch trees would kill us! The silence! And worse, we’d get so much writing done, which is the scariest thing of all, because someone might actually read it, and ask us about it at the bar.

OMG II

Holy mackrel I'm reading with theeese people! If you're in SF on the 16th, come by the Coffee Bar and watch me get nervous and read about a homeless guy who hums into a jar and sleeps with other people's girlfriends.