Current Entries

More Promises

More than a year has passed since the last update to this site, which continues to wait patiently for more content, more visitors, more more.

I'm working on it, on the more. For the time being, those of you searching for a cv will find one under the Site Notes link.

The Photo Galleries are also still viewable!

My best regards to you, whoever you are!

--S.O.

Hiatus

The hiatus caught up with me in the spring, when the world was waking up but seemed to me to be falling asleep. A world in hiatus is a world without qualities: things register with decreasing effect, with the synesthetic result that all of the qualities of the world take on shades of grey.

It has been some since this site was updated; now that I think of it, in fact, this note, which was to have been merely an excuse, is the update that I have failed to make for so long: once you read it, you will begin thinking of the site as having been recently updated and no longer neglected, and my immediate task will be done.

See you soon!
— S. O.

My aunt teaches physics

The Death of Narrative

Consider the following passage, taken from page 204 of the Canadian Oxford Guide to Writing:

My aunt teaches physics. She is tall and thin and forty-five. She has a happy personality.

This passage is dull, even boring. But it makes plain narrative sense, and the lonely transitive verb (“teaches”) offers at least a gesture of life: narrative power, however muted, can still be detected.

Now consider the revisions of this passage offered on the same page of the Oxford Guide:

1. A teacher of physics, tall, thin, forty-five, my aunt has a happy personality.
2. A teacher of physics with a happy personality, my aunt is tall, thin, and forty-five.
3. My aunt is a teacher of physics-tall, thin, and forty-five, she has a happy personality.

These revisions are barely sentences at all; they are instead a tangle of adverb-like constructions that are not grammatical (no speaker of the language freely utters sentences of these types). The single transitive verb has been effaced: all narrative energy has been eliminated.

The death of narrative is marked by the disappearance of verbs, and the smuggling in of “facts” by way of clauses pretending to modify subjects and predicates: narration is replaced by enumeration.

(The authors of the Canadian Oxford Guide are identified on the cover as a “former professor of English” and a “university president.”)

When the twilights got long

(How the first person works in narrative)
A passage from Joan Didion, taken almost at random:

When the twilights got long in June I forced myself to eat dinner in the living room, where the light was. After John died I had begun eating by myself in the kitchen (the dining room was too big and the table in the living room was where he had died), but when the long twilights came I had a strong sense that he would want me to see the light. As the twilights began to shorten I retreated again to the kitchen. I began spending more evenings alone at home. I was working, I would say. By the time August came I was in fact working, or trying to work, but I also wanted not to be out, exposed. One night I found myself taking from the cupboard not one of the plates I normally used but a crackled and worn Spode plate, from a set mostly broken or chipped, in a pattern no longer made, “Wickerdale.” This had been a set of dishes, cream with a garland of small rose and blue flowers and ecru leaves, that John’s mother had given him for the apartment he rented on East Seventy-third Street before we were married. John’s mother was dead. John was dead. And I still had, of the “Wickerdale” Spode, four dinner plates, five salad plates, three butter plates, a single coffee cup, and nine saucers. I came to prefer these dishes to all others. By the end of the summer I was running the dishwasher a quarter full just to make sure that at least one of the four “Wickerdale” dinner plates would be clean when I needed it.
 —Joan Didion, A Year of Magical Thinking, p. 163