Here be a funny excerpt from a book I finished reading a couple weeks ago, The Book of Dahlia, by Elisa Albert, in which the narrator contemplates her career:
Fine. So what sort of occupation wouldn’t make her want to fucking kill herself every single godforsaken day? Law school sounded like a freaking curse; the words together (LAW-SCHOOL) like some sort of prison sentence handed down in a language she didn’t speak, for a crime she didn’t commit, by a totalitarian, undemocratic judge in a third world country…
She had no creative talent to speak of, though she had made a mean mix-tape in her day and certainly counted herself a reasonable connoisseur of culture (witness the umpteenth, slightly ironic League of Their Own screening, the bimonthly live music attendance, the requisite, half-read McSweeney’s stacked on the floor by the untouched GRE study guides and untouched health insurance forms, indie theater movie stubs littering the bottom of her bag). She had attempted a spec script or two before she’d moved back to L.A. (because how could she not? She of the ecstatic, repeated viewings of every cheesy movie on cable during any given month’s cycle), but they were derivative, unimpressive. One was Sex and the City. The other: Scrubs. Which she had never watched. But Dahlia’s mean streak amounted to narratively unaccountable jabs everywhere: at materialism, at stupidity, douchebag rabbis, dating websites. “Some fun moments, but way to hostile for episodic television!” said the only TV lit agent she could get to read the thing…
“Narratively unaccountable jabs everywhere.” That’s special. This seems like a way to describe my previous blog (I had an active LiveJournal, and that’s the last time we’re going to talk about it), and it reminds me of a time not so long ago when I started to hate and fear the internet in earnest.
I decided that it would be interesting (and funny!) to try being “narratively accountable” here, especially since I don’t know how to write, am not well-read, and haven’t taken an English class since high school (that’s 1997).
I’m going to decide on a narrative for this blog, and this will help guide me in writing without feeling overwhelmed– without feeling like the entire content of the e-intersphere is trying to push its way into my skull through my eyes and supplant my neural networks with lolcats. However, this will be a secret narrative structure, that may not ever be apparent to people who read this (if there are any), and its only purpose will be to guide me.
And that makes me feel a lot less scared of my blog.
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