I think, "fail", is a very dangerous word.
Everything that is a failure is always a victory.
Unlike the other writers who've come here, I've not traveled very much.
This is my first time in a foreign country where I speak none of the language.
And where, I so don't understand the language, that it sounds like music to me.
I can't tell where one word...
And it doesn't stick in my brain very well.
In many ways - I've been here a week - I'm a failure at Italian.
It's very difficult and it's very, in many ways, humiliating to be in a country that
isn't mine and to be reduced, really, to the status of a baby.
People all around me are talking with great animation about things that I - it's not like
I don't totally understand - I don't understand at all what they're talking about.
In order to have the simplest interaction, I'm like, 'Hello!'
'Three agua.'
I mean, it's very humbling.
One feels like a failure.
Yes?
On the other hand, what I've noticed is it's also good in a very profound way.
What I've noticed here is how very kind and patient the Italians here are when someone...
I'm very conscious of the image of The Ugly American who comes in and, 'Where's the McDonald's
and why don't you all speak English?'
And all that kind of, right?
So I'm very...
I've got none of those feelings from the Italians and I've also noticed that I pay much more
attention to people's faces and emotional cues.
And that, much like a child, I am sensitive and attuned to things that, when I'm home
and immersed in English, I'm living only linguistically: 'Oh yeah, three waters.
Hey.'.
And it's all so fast.
So it's painful to be here, but it's also good.
In some ways, what I try to do with myself is just avoid the success or failure thing.
Because it really is much more...
There's so much about writing that is out of the writer's control.
Not the action of doing it, but whether it comes alive or not.
That if I begin thinking in terms of failure, what happens is I get really depressed and
the game is over, because I've already decided.
So, that's all I meant.
It's a very long criticism of a very innocuous question.
That the language of images, maybe not threatens, but completely changes actual lived life.
Consider that my grandparents, by the time they got married and kissed, I think they
had probably seen one hundred kisses.
They'd seen people kiss one hundred times.
My parents, who grew up with mainstream Hollywood cinema, had seen thousands of kisses by the
time they ever kissed.
Before I kissed anyone, I had seen tens of thousands of kisses, of people kissing.
I think, I know that the first time I kissed, much of my thought was, 'Am I doing it right?
Am I doing it according to how I'd seen it?'
It's beyond winning.
I don't believe it any longer really makes sense to talk about a battle.
The language in which we describe the battle will already be the language of images.
Yes?
I have started things for so many different reasons.
Images.
Characters.
A snatch of something I overheard somebody in a restaurant say.
Very few of the things I start, I finish.
And fewer still, of the things I finish, anyone else ever sees.
The things that other people see, that I feel are alive, almost always change sometime in
the doing of it.
They're never faithful to whatever the thing, that opening thing is, that gets you to go,
'Ah!
I'm going to write about it.'
At least for me.
I have no good answers.
What I have noticed, and this is really going to look like kissing ass, but I am now such
a fan of Italy in the World Cup.
Here's why, it's that, these phenomena feed on themselves.
I had watched soccer matches a couple times and I just don't understand.
But watching them?
I got to watch, I guess it wasn't even a very good game.
Italy versus Australia with Antonio and David.
And some of their relatives.
And David is throwing bottle caps and they're talking to each other.
And the energy in the room was such that, by the end, with the penalty kick, I still
don't understand.
Only the tiniest fragments.
I understand that not everybody can be as hurt - agh! - as they seem to be.
That some of that is so that the referees will call.
Little bit.
But watching it with people who care about it, it's like watching the Super Bowl in America
even if you don't care about football.
What I will say to you is that children now, in America, because mothers don't want their
children hurt, are playing much more World football than American football, that in a
generation, you wait.
Maybe not in my generation, but in the one following, World football, America will be
more into it than you wish they were.
Because they will cheat and pour all this money into it.
It's a prediction.
First thing I think of, as an American, is individual identity.
David.
What makes David, David?
What makes David different from all the other people as an individual?
I think the struggle for those of us in America, is to conceive of our identity as part of
something larger, something more meaningful than ourselves.
There's very little support for that in our culture, in our economy, in our politics.
But without it, the country splits apart, fragments, atomizes.
So this is, in America, a very loaded word.
One symptom of what you could call the American disease is that I don't know any writers who
think of themselves as like other writers.
Critics often group writers together more than writers do.
I would say that there's a group of American writers who tend to use more of the techniques
of the post-modernists and experimentation.
And then there's a group of traditional, sort of more "realistic" writers.
And that many of the writers I admire, I don't know whether I'm one of them, are interested
in using post-modern techniques, post-modern aesthetic.
But using that to discuss or represent very old, traditional, human verities that have
to do with spirituality and emotion and community and ideas that the avant-garde would consider
very old-fashion.
So that there's a kind of melding.
It's using post-modern formal techniques for very traditional ends.
If there's a group - and some of whom I think are here this week with me - if there is such
a group, that's the group I would want to belong to.
For more infomation >> Strikes and Gutters
For more infomation >> Пюре Халеда брокколи 90 г с 4 месяцев - Duration: 0:40. 
For more infomation >> Transforming Your Life through Self-Care: A Guide to Tapping Into Your Deep Beauty and Inner Worth. - Duration: 1:01. 
For more infomation >> Natural rhododendron forest - Duration: 10:40. 
No comments:
Post a Comment