This is how it is: I circle and circle and circle, like the Labrador retriever I grew up with. I am not going to settle down until the conditions are right, and the orientation is correct. Star — so called for the obvious reason, a patch of white on her brow — rarely spun more than six revolutions. I’ve been circling for over a year.

But then, I’m a human being; even lying down is more complicated. Mere comfort isn’t the only consideration. Sometimes, the reason for my not saying anything amounts to no more than the difficulty of deciding where to say it. Here, at a blog? Or at Civil Pleasures, contrapositively out of time, bookishly permanent? Where to keep a diary? Where to talk about the movie that I saw last Friday (Wild Target) but still haven’t found the moment for commenting on? Circling like Star, I say nothing.

So I thought that I would at least acknowledge the circling.

From the very start of my Web site life, back in 2000, I’ve been perplexed by a division that gets absolutely no attention. Let’s say that I’ve jsut read a great book — Hans Keilson’s Comedy in a Minor Key, say. How to write about it? You can’t say anything about this book that will be truly interesting over the long term without talking about what happens at the end of the book. Why? Because, at least as I see it, Comedy in a Minor Key is a book about an Adam and Eve whose expulsion from paradise does not involve a physical dislocation. Nor do this Adam and Eve sin — on the contrary! But how to write about all of this without worrying about spoilers? I want to write something that will be interesting long after everyone has read it, has — as I believe will happen — been taught the book in high school. I’m not particularly interested in recommending it to people who haven’t heard of it: there’s no future in that. (Imagine writing a piece for readers who had never heard of Hamlet.) And, given my conviction that you get more out of a story if you know how it comes out, I am not sympathetic to readers who treasure what really does seem to me to be the meretriciousness of “surprise.” Comedy in a Minor Key was surprising for me only because the review in the Times was incompetent. I’d have enjoyed it more, on the first read, if I’d known where it was really going.

Circling, then, until I figure all of this this out. And circling about plenty else, too.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 5th, 2010 at 12:01 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.