Sentences — December 8, 2008, 4:18 pm
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A friend of mine is a bartender, and I hadn’t seen him for a while, until last week. It’s fun to watch him bring over two decades of experience to bear on the opening of a bottle of beer or the making of a margarita. Traffic wears a groove into things, and repeated motion turns effort into function. Function, when effortless, which is to say when, through repetition, it becomes a pure expression of effort, can be beautiful. If you’ve ever watched a field being mowed by hand, with a scythe, you know what I mean.
We don’t have, I don’t think, many opportunities these days simply to watch simple things done well. Virtuosity is left to the virtuosi: Favre connecting, Bill T. Jones a-leaping, Perlman Baching—all impressive, but an impressiveness that leaches the layman of any sense of approachable, and therefore agreeable, mastery on a mortal scale.
Odd, then, that in reading the introduction last night to the 1983 edition of V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, I didn’t register a sense of the Olympian pressing down upon the quotidian. Odd, of course, given all we’ve lately (not to say long) heard about Naipaul’s self-regard. Naipaul discusses the writing of that novel in a very humble way, not falsely humble, but very much a matter of building a wall, finely and slowly. A process worth hearing about: a force becoming a form.
More from Wyatt Mason:
Sentences — May 1, 2009, 2:41 pm
Sentences — April 29, 2009, 4:12 pm
Ratio of the number of cicada eggs per square mile of southern New Jersey to the number of stars in the Milky Way:
Jeffrey Lockwood, University of Wyoming (Laramie)/American Museum of Natural History (N.Y.C.)
A Singaporean company unveiled Kissenger, a pair of plastic lips mounted on a large plastic egg, which transmits real-time interactive kisses to a distant lover. “I am not interested in the sexual uses for it,” said the device’s inventor. “We’ve taken several steps to minimize the creepiness.”
The practice of sexualized eyeball licking was causing conjunctivitis in Japanese sixth graders.
