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I've been thinking about words a lot lately; must be all the reading on writing I've been doing. :) I was thinking about how words look, how sometimes its not the meaning that's important, but the flow, the imagery. Like poetry, I suppose. A lot of the poetry I wrote in school was about imagery, about how the words looked on the page, and the mood I could evoke. It made for some appallingly bad poetry, as I recall. ;) Not that I can go back and find out, since I destroyed that particular notebook back in university. :P
But I still enjoy the way words look, the way they sound. I remember I used to write random snippets of songs in my school diary, not because they had any specific meaning to me, but because I loved the way they looked. Icehouse, especially, was a favourite:
"A winter palace, from the Arabian Nights.
Wild waves on an ocean, gems from a golden age."
The song really doesn't make a lot of sense, doesn't really have a story behind it, but it's still a favourite song, almost twenty years on, because it has such lovely strings of words. It's one of the reasons I love Crowded House/Neil Finn and My Friend the Chocolate Cake/David Bridie so much, because love words too, and string them together not just to tell a story, but also because they sound good, woven into the music like threads in a tapestry. Indigo Girls, too, have that same feel - they tell stories, in the time-honoured folk tradition, but they also love language. "Ghost" especially, combnes the two in an amazing way.
"...and the mississippi's mighty, but it starts in Minnesota at a place where you could walk across with five steps down and I guess that's how you started, like a pinprick to my heart but at this point you rush right through me and I start to drown..."
One of the bits I remember well enough to sing in the shower. ;)
In a way, computers have taken that away; it used to be that when I wrote in longhand, I would enjoy just shaping the words, the way my handwriting interpreted them. You don't get that with text; the font is mutable, but it's still someone else's style, not your own. I always used to think it was sad, how most of the girls in my classes at high school had almost identical handwriting, the legacy of attending the same schools together since kindergarten. Mine's such a jumble, with going to so many primary schools, but I like to think it has character. And when I have the exact right pen and ink, and I'm concentrating on what I'm doing, writing for me is a bit like calligraphy. Actually, it's more like Japanese calligraphy, where not only the way you form the character, but the meaning(s) of the character itself, become essential to the exercise. That's why I used to write down songlines, and why I still like to write some things longhand. "Hole In The River" was one of those - it had to be written entirely in longhand before I could type it.
Still, there's a kind of beauty to text, too. It has a simplicity, a kind of functionality to it. There's less room for confusion, because the words are clear and clean. Or they would be, if it wasn't for the incessant typos. ;)
I also like the way you can play with words, turn conventions on their heads. U2 does it a lot in their songs - "I was drowning my sorrows, and my sorrows they learned to swim." Little verbal jokes, teasers; I wonder if anyone will catch the one I planted in chapter 5 of "Suffer the Children"?
But I still enjoy the way words look, the way they sound. I remember I used to write random snippets of songs in my school diary, not because they had any specific meaning to me, but because I loved the way they looked. Icehouse, especially, was a favourite:
"A winter palace, from the Arabian Nights.
Wild waves on an ocean, gems from a golden age."
The song really doesn't make a lot of sense, doesn't really have a story behind it, but it's still a favourite song, almost twenty years on, because it has such lovely strings of words. It's one of the reasons I love Crowded House/Neil Finn and My Friend the Chocolate Cake/David Bridie so much, because love words too, and string them together not just to tell a story, but also because they sound good, woven into the music like threads in a tapestry. Indigo Girls, too, have that same feel - they tell stories, in the time-honoured folk tradition, but they also love language. "Ghost" especially, combnes the two in an amazing way.
"...and the mississippi's mighty, but it starts in Minnesota at a place where you could walk across with five steps down and I guess that's how you started, like a pinprick to my heart but at this point you rush right through me and I start to drown..."
One of the bits I remember well enough to sing in the shower. ;)
In a way, computers have taken that away; it used to be that when I wrote in longhand, I would enjoy just shaping the words, the way my handwriting interpreted them. You don't get that with text; the font is mutable, but it's still someone else's style, not your own. I always used to think it was sad, how most of the girls in my classes at high school had almost identical handwriting, the legacy of attending the same schools together since kindergarten. Mine's such a jumble, with going to so many primary schools, but I like to think it has character. And when I have the exact right pen and ink, and I'm concentrating on what I'm doing, writing for me is a bit like calligraphy. Actually, it's more like Japanese calligraphy, where not only the way you form the character, but the meaning(s) of the character itself, become essential to the exercise. That's why I used to write down songlines, and why I still like to write some things longhand. "Hole In The River" was one of those - it had to be written entirely in longhand before I could type it.
Still, there's a kind of beauty to text, too. It has a simplicity, a kind of functionality to it. There's less room for confusion, because the words are clear and clean. Or they would be, if it wasn't for the incessant typos. ;)
I also like the way you can play with words, turn conventions on their heads. U2 does it a lot in their songs - "I was drowning my sorrows, and my sorrows they learned to swim." Little verbal jokes, teasers; I wonder if anyone will catch the one I planted in chapter 5 of "Suffer the Children"?
