Thursday, April 1, 2010

GOOD AND BAD HABITS

I was originally going to use the title section for aphorisms-- a vastly underrated form of literary communication. The aphormisms would be fairly off the wall and generally not have anything to do with the content, thus reinforcing the meaninglessness of it all. It didn't work. I found myself thinking too hard and too long for an appropriately meaningless aphorism and it started to feel like thinking for meaning. So now, as you can see, they are limp and meaningless but do not threaten the architecture of the whole. Speaking of the whole, I detect a note of seriousness creeping in. I noticed that during my morning meditation I was thinking of what I was going to write in LA. What I write in LA should be meaningless and unplanned. My God, this is man's search for meaning. What this proves to me, assuming my logic is logical, which it probably is not, is that content is secondary to the emotions that put it forth. I can write about nothing as seriously as Tolstoy wrote about War and Peace. If we had a content-o-meter, I am convinced we would finish neck and neck. If we had a read-o-bility meter, my neck wouldn't even get in the picture, but that's another story. As I stare back here from the heights of Olympus, I wonder if I have kept true to my word of keeping LA pure. The editing process is a mixed bag. It shows me where I've been, helps me eliminte shreds of substance that may have crept in but it also adds to the seriousness and self-consciousness of the effort. It's like putting a bell on your rope when you jump rope.You are still jumping rope as often as you ever were and people are watching you as often as they ever did. But there is this bell that you have no idea what to do with. Why is it here? Does it detract from the jumping effort? Should I remove it? Is Istanbul Constantinople. Answer: It doesn't matter what I say, text or edits, as long as I say it entertainingly and if you edit nothing, you can't get something, even if, as I believe, when you either multiply or add two negative numbers you get a positive result. But is it positive in terms of reading pleasure or content? Who cares? Are we having fun yet?

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