Monday, April 28, 2008

Really

1. What does one have to do in order to become a competent observer?

2. What details should be noted, which passed over?

3. Does being too observant slow down the story with unnecessary detail? Does being too observant prevent the observer from acting, feeling, anticipating consequences.

4. Or defensiveness.

5. Does defensiveness come from a lack of trust in the ability to see the necessary details of a story?

6. Who is the observer in the particular story?

7. What is the nature of this individual's perceptions? Because that is the key to it, the eye of the detail the beholder beholds. What a person says or does describes the person as does what the person notices or does not notice.

8. There is no room for passivity in here, each must make choices--words to be used or not; details to be noticed or not.

9. Is the observer a samurai? As in:
A 13th Century Samurai prayer

I make the heavens and earth my parents
I have no home.
I make awareness my home
I have no life and death.
I make the tides of breathing my life and death
I have no divine power.
I make honesty my divine power
I have no means.

I make adaptability to all circumstances my principles
I have no tactics
I make my mind my friend
I have no enemy
I make carelessness my enemy
I have no armor
I make benevolence and righteousness my armor
I have no castle
I make immovable mind my castle
I have no sword
I make absence of self-interest my sword.

10. What would happen if you were to substitute all those I observations with The writer?

11. What effect will that have on chicklit?

12. Be serious, will you.

13. We lost seriousness genes in The Diaspora. Seriousness is so New York. You can visit New York and not be serious but you cannot live there and not be serious.

14. You have to be funny to consider L.A. in all seriousness.

2 comments:

R.L. Bourges said...

ouf. the Samurai prayer is ...awesome (no, I'm not channelling chicklit speak or - wait! - maybe I am. New genre: samurai chiklit? no, not chiclets could you be serious for a minute?)

Anonymous said...

I don't think I'm capable of being serious, especially not enough for New York. But L.A.? Perhaps I'm only half-way funny. No, seriously.