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Dec. 1st, 2018 07:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landingtreeA can't stand B and finds C a maddening roommate despite evident heart of gold, my judgement of A becomes partly dependent on my observations of B and C who I rather like but am beginning to understand the irritating qualities of, the question of how unreasonable the parents of A and C really are becomes relevant and is probably unanswerable in this context, nobody likes E, and I have given the benefit of the doubt to one man of his particularly-male type of obnoxiousness already and consequently won't do it this time because the benefit of the doubt is one of the things it thrives on... Meanwhile F is low-key, charismatic, generous, easy to live with, and my roommate, everybody thinks G is lovely except presumably Q, for an unknown value of Q... And the in-jokes proliferate, such that I am widely known to have faerie powers. So goes the soap opera of a group of twenty-three twenty-somethings, and I look forward to seeing what's become of us in twenty days.
Today we caugt the bus to Thessaloniki, which is why we were all hungry and tired and jittery this evening, which advanced some of the soap opera's subplots. Filler, I say! I'm watching it for the scenery, apparently they're shooting on location but it's so underutilised...
On a plain with hills and mountains all around. We've been driving for an hour, out of Athens. Crop fields now; before that suburban industrial, before that conifers. Reading about Corinth, but my mind is off in the Farer worlds, and the great grey plain on which a hill-sized stone bowl is endlessly turning, grinding out the words of the treaty by which humans may come to that place and leave again unpursued by its inhabitants...
Earlier there was snow on mountaintops to the left. These low hills are scrub textured by stone, or stone spotted by scrub. Still windmills on the skyline. The road rises past a cliff on the left incised with vertical lines. While I wrote that (I'm copying from my journal now) a lake opened to our right, and the cliffs became orange - weathered white - and craggy. Lake shores below are fans of stone, knobbled - I want to say cracked, but not leaving any pattern of fissures, no gaps.
Another cutting.
What I'm used to identifying as swamp grass grows on limestone, on the big cliffs now to the right. Dark big shrubs here and there, something low and pale green and sprawling, and the grasses, are what grow on the whole hill-face.
Now to my left, mist at their bases making them pale as an empty horizon, are snowy mountains again. Snow broken by black stone. And now again we come into expanses of worked land hedged by water-channels head-high with dead-looking grass. Some fields bright green, others dry.
Green direction signs. A deer warning. And frozen turbines at awkward angles on nearer and much further hills: the flat opens in a curve on the right.
Not entirely unlike the falling angel statue from Athens, but standing watch here - only the hubs which make the turbines' heads grow too small at distance, so the ones furthest, on hills whose dark skylines stand on mist, I can't see as living.
A hill closes in on the right, blocking that vista. Thick scrub, limestone only here and there, but I can see it's beneath everything. Why you could besiege Athens from as far off as the Black Sea: grain supply.
The sun blazes in a faint cloud, and tall trees stand here and there in the scrub now. This sun seems more overwhelming than the Dogsbody Sol I say hello to sometimes. He's in a blaze of work, maybe. Our road turns, and the shadows of my head and the bus' windows slide left to right out of existence.
High face of stone to the left, orange brown mark - like muddy water, or the stain on a bandage.
In all this, what took me longest to write was positional. On the left. On the right. Where things are is trickier than what they are. Interesting too the difference between a simile that I created because I liked it and which grew stronger with thinking on it - the angels - and one I felt on the tip of my tongue, that colour on those stones reminds me of something, what? In fiction I naturally write the former, 'words can do this, therefore let it be done', creating from the language backwards. I have the sense from what I've read of him that this is what Peter S. Beagle does, much better than I do, which is both what I like about him and what I get tired of after a while in him. Sometimes I want a sentence that sounds less as though it has been crafted for sound. On my long plane flight home from the states I read a bit of a Delaney essay where he talks about his suspicion with talking about writing plot and writing character. Those are things he finds to be emergent properties of the kind of writing he does, which is to imagine a scene in as much detail as possible and then see what happens. I tried that. The snippet I wrote in precise physical terms (does she glance at the six woman in the bar as she stands swinging on the door in the crampt space at the bottom of the narrow stairwell waiting for her friends to descend? No, she can't, they're in the wrong corner, not visible unless she enters the room) and in similarly precise mental terms (which she doesn't because...) is vivid to me like memory, now, and I have much more detailed writing-process information about it than I normally would. I can answer more questions about why it is the way it is. And it has also become much less optional to me. t can usefully anchor whatever comes next.
And then, if that sort of detail will just let itself be yoked perfectly to the second level, where I already know I want the pylons to be angels... Emergent book!
But before I got distracted I was talking scenery. Truck stop by a lake in a wide circle of blue hills. Silence. A silence very welcome after hours of bus and days of Athens. When I start thinking about it there's a lot of foreground sound in a silence like that, but the backgroud is bigger. And fresh cold air.
Kindle is siezing up. Will post beforeit reb
Today we caugt the bus to Thessaloniki, which is why we were all hungry and tired and jittery this evening, which advanced some of the soap opera's subplots. Filler, I say! I'm watching it for the scenery, apparently they're shooting on location but it's so underutilised...
On a plain with hills and mountains all around. We've been driving for an hour, out of Athens. Crop fields now; before that suburban industrial, before that conifers. Reading about Corinth, but my mind is off in the Farer worlds, and the great grey plain on which a hill-sized stone bowl is endlessly turning, grinding out the words of the treaty by which humans may come to that place and leave again unpursued by its inhabitants...
Earlier there was snow on mountaintops to the left. These low hills are scrub textured by stone, or stone spotted by scrub. Still windmills on the skyline. The road rises past a cliff on the left incised with vertical lines. While I wrote that (I'm copying from my journal now) a lake opened to our right, and the cliffs became orange - weathered white - and craggy. Lake shores below are fans of stone, knobbled - I want to say cracked, but not leaving any pattern of fissures, no gaps.
Another cutting.
What I'm used to identifying as swamp grass grows on limestone, on the big cliffs now to the right. Dark big shrubs here and there, something low and pale green and sprawling, and the grasses, are what grow on the whole hill-face.
Now to my left, mist at their bases making them pale as an empty horizon, are snowy mountains again. Snow broken by black stone. And now again we come into expanses of worked land hedged by water-channels head-high with dead-looking grass. Some fields bright green, others dry.
Green direction signs. A deer warning. And frozen turbines at awkward angles on nearer and much further hills: the flat opens in a curve on the right.
Not entirely unlike the falling angel statue from Athens, but standing watch here - only the hubs which make the turbines' heads grow too small at distance, so the ones furthest, on hills whose dark skylines stand on mist, I can't see as living.
A hill closes in on the right, blocking that vista. Thick scrub, limestone only here and there, but I can see it's beneath everything. Why you could besiege Athens from as far off as the Black Sea: grain supply.
The sun blazes in a faint cloud, and tall trees stand here and there in the scrub now. This sun seems more overwhelming than the Dogsbody Sol I say hello to sometimes. He's in a blaze of work, maybe. Our road turns, and the shadows of my head and the bus' windows slide left to right out of existence.
High face of stone to the left, orange brown mark - like muddy water, or the stain on a bandage.
In all this, what took me longest to write was positional. On the left. On the right. Where things are is trickier than what they are. Interesting too the difference between a simile that I created because I liked it and which grew stronger with thinking on it - the angels - and one I felt on the tip of my tongue, that colour on those stones reminds me of something, what? In fiction I naturally write the former, 'words can do this, therefore let it be done', creating from the language backwards. I have the sense from what I've read of him that this is what Peter S. Beagle does, much better than I do, which is both what I like about him and what I get tired of after a while in him. Sometimes I want a sentence that sounds less as though it has been crafted for sound. On my long plane flight home from the states I read a bit of a Delaney essay where he talks about his suspicion with talking about writing plot and writing character. Those are things he finds to be emergent properties of the kind of writing he does, which is to imagine a scene in as much detail as possible and then see what happens. I tried that. The snippet I wrote in precise physical terms (does she glance at the six woman in the bar as she stands swinging on the door in the crampt space at the bottom of the narrow stairwell waiting for her friends to descend? No, she can't, they're in the wrong corner, not visible unless she enters the room) and in similarly precise mental terms (which she doesn't because...) is vivid to me like memory, now, and I have much more detailed writing-process information about it than I normally would. I can answer more questions about why it is the way it is. And it has also become much less optional to me. t can usefully anchor whatever comes next.
And then, if that sort of detail will just let itself be yoked perfectly to the second level, where I already know I want the pylons to be angels... Emergent book!
But before I got distracted I was talking scenery. Truck stop by a lake in a wide circle of blue hills. Silence. A silence very welcome after hours of bus and days of Athens. When I start thinking about it there's a lot of foreground sound in a silence like that, but the backgroud is bigger. And fresh cold air.
Kindle is siezing up. Will post beforeit reb
