Eating My Own Teeth

"Why Don't You Dance," as a thing.

 Writing.  Or what passes for it---a few lines added each day to a new story I don't care about yet, a muddled chunk of words meant to be sculpted into a poem.  Today, though, I began a revision of a story from my thesis, then titled "Demon Language."  Character = emotionally dead, or so it seems on the surface, and by the end there should be some recognition of emotion, or coming to terms with a thing, without melodrama or obviousness---subtlety being key in a story like this---but really, as I look at this character & read his reports of what's happening, it looks all 2-D and arbitrary.  Maybe because I've been reading Atwood's Moral Disorder, and throughout each story there's this sense of history, all this biography each character has, woven effortlessly into scene and summary (God, summary---a tool I don't yet know how to use, I'm too stuck in  present space).  Of course Tig and Nell had a cat that yowled all night and ate the produce.  Of course Nell used to have a rented apartment with a dismal green-satin bedspread.  The stories read as if Atwood isn't inventing her characters; rather, it's as if she's only recording their obvious histories and attributes. 

To be fair, I conceived the demon story as a story of absence--no drawn-out sappy bits about the marriage and the death.  Putting to use my lessons from Carver and Hemingway, building a subtext--that was the intention, anyway.  Coming back to the story after several months of off-time, it just looks like a flat square of ice---no icebergian depth hiding underneath.  That's the challenge, though, right?  Anybody can write a pretty sentence.  Making it mean something, something real and bone-gnawing, that's what makes a writer.  What I mean is, I fucking hate when things aren't easy.  Writing included.

Other BsAs info:  Anyone visiting San Telmo should try the pizza at Sr. Telmo restaurant on Defensa.  Amazing pizza (had the "Arse"---fucked-up name, I know---which was pancetta, mozzarella, parsley and sun-dried tomato) and plenty of beers, including Antares (a 660 ml of Pale Ale for $22 pesos) and several breweries I hadn't heard of, like Sixtofer and Sheken, out of Patagonia in southern Argentina.  I have not tried these yet, but I will soon.