The wind is positively raging outside.
Every once in a while, I hear a crash and wonder what fell down. No rain yet. We had plenty of that last week. I’ve been reviewing a bunch of stuff for a ten page essay I have to write for language theory. Ten page essays are easy. The four page essay discussed below nearly killed me. I was so paranoid about the whole deal that I gave a copy to a good writer from the class (ex-nurse, no literature background) to review. Gina understood it better than the guys I read it to, and had some good suggestions. I’ll fix it in the next few days. When I gave it to her, she asked me:
“Who do you write for in terms of a target audience?”
I’m really not sure. The only real answer I had was to try to describe the few readers I know I have here, in terms of their oddness. I’ve reached a point where I want to write things that are fairly complex, and that’s impossible to do if you consider your audience to be simpletons. That thought never enters my mind while chatting along here. I often include some fairly sly stuff, but I want a person to be able to enjoy it even if they don’t get all the jokes.
For example, the line “screw my courage to the sticking-place” would be recognizable to some as a quote from Macbeth, but I think it’s funny even if you don’t know where it’s from. The added utility comes from its placement in the play, spoken by Lady Macbeth to bolster Macbeth’s failing resolve before the murders. I used it to lead to the demise of my college career. Gail didn’t know where it was from. She just wrote and said— “I don’t know why I like it but I do.” Now that’s the kind of response I like. And to think I thought it was perhaps a bit too obvious a foreshadowing. Daniel picked up an interesting sort of meme from I, Asshole regarding constructing blog entries in which each and every word is linked. Writing is like that for me already. Where I come from, they call it poetry— or at the very least, literature. Yes, I think it’s a meme worth picking up; but if I get the chance to do it, I suspect that I’ll be linking phrases rather than meaningless indefinite articles and pronouns. Many times, while composing my last essay I wished for the ability to include hyperlinks so that people could see the real appropriateness of my remarks. For another example, if you don’t know the meaning of Raconteur you miss another joke in Panorama. But that’s the problem. If you have to explain the joke, it isn’t funny, now is it?
Okay, so now at least one of the loud crashes is explained. I walked out on the patio to find a sofa sitting in the middle of the grass outside. I think someone pushed it from an upstairs window.
