Fly Melon

How does environment affect writing style?  It may be my imagination, but I at least seem to notice a change in my thought patterns when I leave New York.  Over a period of few days, my mind sheds the residue of the city, my speech slows, and I have less to say.  I’m not bombarded with stimuli here. 

At my office job, with a hundred or so projects proceeding independently at different speeds, I had a few succinct things to say about many topics.  Couldn’t go deeply into any one thing, so that when I went to The New Yorker to explain my interest in grad school to Louis Menand, my explanation couldn’t go much further than: I like modernism.  I like writing about literature and the history of ideas.  In the coming months I’ll be returning to that deeper way of thinking, narrowing down my topics, and I’ll have more to say about the topics I choose. 

Brooklyn is made of concrete and plastic.  The air is full of particulates, black dust and exhaust, the ground is tamped down and every blade of grass seems like a perversity.  Here, in South Carolina, the plants seem swelled up with oxygen and clean water, the sky is enormous (“I would like to step out of my heart / and go walking beneath the enormous sky”), and there is less of a need to formulate responses.  There’s a sense of expansion, which is what I want and need. 

Reading: André Gide’s The Misanthrope caught my eye.  I also have Louis Menand’s Discovering Modernism and David Berman’s Actual Air, a gift given me by a friend just before I left town.

I’ve spent the day completing a close edit of a business school application essay.  The writing is so atrocious that, faced with certain sentences, I hardly know where to begin.  Subject-verb agreement?  Prepositions, what are they and what are they for?  Flawed logic?  Implied connections that should be stated directly, or vice versa? 

I’m accustomed to editing the work of intelligent writers with a grasp of basic grammar.  Editing has been like a conversation meant to test and flesh out ideas.  Not so now.  But I’ve enjoyed crafting explanations of syntactical choices that seem obvious to me, and it puts me in mind of an observation I’ve heard many times from friends who tutor and teach: you have to know something twice as well to teach it. 

This sort of editing will cease to be interesting, I predict, as soon as I learn these basic rules of writing twice as well.  Or, to put it more precisely, as soon as I can frame adequate comprehensible explanations for all the basics.  Then it’ll be drone work, and my increased efficiency may be outweighed by compensatory reading of the “good writing” I’ll need in order to stay sharp.    

*The short answer: yes.