description epitome of incomprehensibility I was thinking about how to do this, specifically in writing. The interesting point for me is precision. A question: When you describe a place, do you have to have been there? If it's not a real place, the answer's easier. No, since you can't be there. Or in thought, maybe, you should already be there. I don't go by "write what you know" but "write what you can imagine." If it's a real place, that's harder. You need to gauge the amount of precision you'll need. A clear and unusual detail can be salient. Like salt. Emphasizing flavour. But you could also totally invent it, especially if it's something temporary, seasonal, like a flower. Ah. But then research creeps in. Someone could say, "Those flowers don't grow in X climate," and maybe they don't. Maybe you'll feel silly even if only 3 out of 1,002 people notice. Once I wrote a careless reference to "U of Kingston." This story being in a fairly realistic mode, it was pointed out to me that there is no University of Kingston (the Ontario Kingston, that is) but that I could change it to Queens. Which I did. I think. And even if it is a real place, you can't describe everything about it because you'd get too close to real life, and it wouldn't be fiction anymore. You'd be trespassing on people's property, maybe, by wantonly describing it. Or so I thought as I was out walking this evening. Levels of precision as: world, continent, nation, state/province, city/town, part of town, street, and building. Once you get to building, the buildings people live in aren't marked on most maps. The streets into them are private streets. I walked past houses and imagined knowing everybody. How much more could I write about, that way! How much more would I know! But I can't know everybody. Here's a description. I jogged through the gate's opening onto field. As the ground changed from concrete to grass under my feet, I figured it might be soggy at first, then get drier as I went up the hill. But I hadn't figured on it getting wetter before the ground got higher. As I approached, my shoes squished hidden mud and the hill blocked out the lights from the airport. All at once I was running in the dark, a wall of dark looming in front of me, broken only far above my head by blue-grey sky. Then I was going uphill, no more squashing, and my breath came harder as the lights appeared. And then the hill was conquered. Not so hard. I looked at the trucks running in the parking lot below me. Little lights, many of them, needing many support staff. It wouldn't be bad to get a job as support staff. Not at an airport, though. I can't drive trucks. So. It helps to actually do things, not that the above was any literary masterpiece. The place was Westwood Hill, next to the skating arena behind the park that borders the streets Thorncrest, Westwood, and Pine Beach, in the North (or Surrey) area of Dorval. It overlooks part of the Dorval Airport, officially the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Airport. But you didn't really need to know all that. It wasn't interesting. How to keep things interesting without losing precision. How much precision do you need. Question mark question mark. She liked George Eliot's description. She did too. They did. But I found it dull when I tried to read her. I like Gertrude Stein's description, which is why I'm pretending to write like her, and Salman Rushdie's, because he describes things that are moving (in motion) which keeps it active. Also I could kill him and get a million dollars. That is not a death threat. I'd rather go back in time and have sex with Franz Kafka. ...See, if these were people whose names weren't known, I couldn't speculate on doing 'em or doing 'em in. It would be rude or litigious, like litmus. But, Ayatollah, I made you a sandwich. Pay up. That was fifty cents. Oh. You're dead? Why is everyone dying on me? Did I have a topic here? I think I did. Can I ask the squeegee board for a thesis statement, Ayatollah? Ouija, you say? What is that, yes god? Surely that's a pagan word. A plangent world. A pleasant street with all the houses on it. I want to describe like me and like Joyce and like Joy is So Exhausting. (And Kafka and Breton and a less wordy Aragon and Mina Loy and Woolf and L. M. Montgomery but not so flowery and J. G. Ballard if he made more sense because I'm trying to read his book as if car parks really do have faces but I'm too literal. This really is exhausting.) 140420 ... e_o_i Speaking of Ballard, my brother has to read his book Crash (CEGEP spring terms, by the way, end in May, in between university terms in April and grade school terms in June). I reported the hearsay I'd heard of it: "It's not supposed to be difficult, as in avant-garde, but it is supposed to be gruesome and sexually perverse." My brother just shrugged, taking this as neither good nor bad. I had to get it from the university library (alumni borrowing privileges, hell yeah) since neither of the local libraries had it and at the CEGEP library it was out. I flipped through the first few pages: to my annoyance it had, as far as I could tell, exactly the same plot and characters as The Atrocity Exhibit. It just made more sense. That isn't fair, is it? An author published two versions of his work, a scattered version and a coherent version? ...Not like me trying to publish a revised version of a poem at all, is it? Oh no. Poetry is easy. Comedy is hard. 140428 ... e_o_i The heat felt like a desert. Not a desert, she realized later, rather a rainforest: the afternoon was very humid. She walked across the street before the walking light came on and turned left, towards Parc metro. She glanced at the other side of the street: McDonalds, a mosque, a grocery store. A poster on the first advertised her guilty pleasure there: the Egg McMuffin. You could tweet about that, she thought, #GuiltyMcPleasure, but would that be product placement or parody? Why did brands act like people on Twitter? Brands turned into birds as she swished past the wind in the doors of the metro station, noting the pigeons that nodded regally like pheasants. 140604 what's it to you? who go blather from