Stephen King hates adverbs. I tend to disagree, but my brain is stuck in REVISE and EDIT mode. I am beginning to agree.
Yesterday I started thinking of how I am revising my life as well as my essays. This morning in Art of the Memoir Jill and Jess said they wanted to meet the author of Don't Let's Go Down to the Dog's Tonight, but they feared she was far too cool for them. Linda (the professor) told them that even bad writers can make good books through revision. Everyone gets better with more drafts. Then Linda said the author was still a first draft person. The co-incidences overwhelm. I was beginning to think that my body of knowledge was just getting large enough for me to see commonalities, but some signs suggest otherwise. Sure, repeated references of syllogism and syllogistic logic might just be something I can take for granted. I just learned the word, so now I see it sprinkled throughout everything I absorb. How does that account for outside references which expand on my own recollections? How does that account for a computer lab connecting me to ninjas via Watertown? Why does discussion of solipsism at breakfast cause it to be mentioned in memoir by unconnected person?
I am still looking for answers.
In all of my revisions, it seems I have begun to take out some good parts. More revisions will fix that. I tend to forget to place the essence of what I am writing about in my writing.
A memoir about Maren does not show why we are such intimate friends. A memoir about night and surreality does not explain why I am wearing pajamas. A memoir about √Örhus does not explain how I got to the airport. Oops.
The following exchange took place in Memoir today:
Me: “I must let Maren become the vehicle rather than the road we travel on.”
Jill: “I would shed a tear if I was not so dehydrated.”
Me: “That's poetry.”
One time Jill said of life's connections, “God must have been working overtime.” That came after a weekend of many such connections. A weekend in which Mike and I stood staring at postcards in Berlin, arguing about whether a good photograph needed a foreground. I said they did; the contrast of an object in the front, usually a person, gives scale and meaning to the rest of the image. It literally grounds it. I argued a lot of postcards are bullshit pictures because they are stale images of locations.
That day in Memoir Jess said she was going to start work on a piece attempting to describe sites within the context of the photo metaphor Mike and I had been discussing above. Is that too just a coincidence?
I talked to Mike a week or so ago about these connections. My reasoning then was that it was an artefact of memory. Just like we choose to believe horoscopes by applying the general to our specifics, I was(am) choosing to believe there are connections by only noting them. Something is not memorable if there is no connect. When I revised my theory to now having a large enough body of knowledge for it to overlap, Mike said, “Congratulations, you're a five year old. They have much more fluid memories.” I can't see now how that applies.
(So far I have edited out three adverbs. Have I missed any?)
I attempted to revise my √Örhus memoir in bed at 3am this morning. I kept falling asleep and gave up. “Wow, your life must be boring if you fall asleep writing about it.” Thank you Mike.
Today I was so tired in class and at work I became dizzy, a feeling very similar to being drunk. A new experience, and I have but a fortnight left abroad.
I should go to Wales tomorrow, but I won't because I am lethargic and off-kilter (“probably” and “slightly” wanted to join that sentence; I did not let them). Saturday and Sunday will be my farewell to London.
For anyone lacking something better to do, peruse http://www.d.umn.edu/~inteduc/student04-05 . It is the programme website I have been working on throughout the year. The spring break section under trips has a “Movin' Right Along” parody… it is awful (many adverbs wished to describe awful, perhaps I should have picked a stronger word than awful).
I am realzing questions might be the best answers.
What if Adam was straight?