The typist

I have begun to mentally piece together a new story. I had a nasty setback when I inadvertently heard short fiction being read on public radio last night. That awful combination of earnestness and nonchalance, the predictable tricks of observation, introspection, supposition and specification are lethal to my ambitions. The attenuated lives of inexpressive people. Of course, fiction should never be read aloud. Performance is an entirely separate skill whose merits are judged independent of the text and in preference to it, like color before form. Unless the thing is in some arcane argot, like Joyce's dialect in Ulysses- where essential clues to the meaning can be revealed by the informed speaker- I prefer to create my own internal reader.
What a strange mechanism it is- to silently reproduce the words one reads as though they are being heard!
Actual recitation is so tethered to the page that you become intensely aware of the ad hoc manner in which the cadences are formed- some by the difficulty of layering multiple clauses so as to leave open room for each of them, or some cadences by the intricacy of the language, alliteration or perverse antiphony. You can sense the ardent beginning and the flattening of the voice as it approaches an elegiac end in the reader's voice. You are always startled at the level to which the dialogue will be embodied and you wonder at the decision that leads to that particular level of commitment.
I still make the notes that will lead to writing another piece, but I am waiting for the circumstance, and the period details that will ignite the scene. To inspire me I have begun reading Katherine Anne Porter's essays, John Barth's essays and Mary McCarthy's essays. My friend David pointed out the general area where Mary McCarthy grew up which is just down the road from me and not very far from where Kurt Cobain killed himself, and my dear friend Rick's ashes were splooged into Lake Washington after his terrifyingly sudden, characteristically tidy death.
The story crucially involves a lady typist. Hazel, who types what the narrator cannot. I thought it might also involve numismatics and picked up a copy of History and its Images by Francis Haskell, which has quite inadvertently hypnotized me with its brilliance.
I might take the Christmas money my parents have sent and get Word installed on my Mac. Because to type the damned thing on a manual would be awful.