January 25, 2021

"Only that which bears the imprint of our choice, our taste, our uncertainty, our desire and our weakness can be beautiful." - Marcel Proust 

"If, as Proust suggests, we are obliged to create our own language, it is because there are dimensions to ourselves absent from clichés, which require us to flout etiquette in order to convey with greater accuracy the distinctive timbre of our thought." - Alain De Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life 

"While reasons for imagined Black English range from affinity to mockery to monetization, they generally follow the same pattern: By 'reshaping the meaning of the borrowed material into forms that advance their own interest,' borrowers make the material 'useless or irrelevant, or even antithetical, to the interests of the donor community.'" - Manuel Arturo Abreu, "Online Imagined Black English," Black Futures

"Now that white people have declared 'bae' over, black people can use it in peace." Robin Boylorn, The Guardian, January 14, 2015

Ironic that in a post where I want to think about what it means to write in my own voice, to come up with my own language, I end up mostly quoting other people. I have a couple friends -- one in college and one later on -- who like to bend language in everyday conversation. One uses vocabulary beyond her range -- words she's maybe only vaguely confident about what they mean -- and she's usually wrong, but it does lend her speech originality. And when she messes up it's funny. Similarly but different, my other friend makes portmanteaus, stretches sound, pronounces things badly on purpose. Is that what Marcel Proust is hoping for? In both cases, I got the sense that this creation of language was to stave off a boredom felt in their present company, or in their lives in general. To tinker rather than to express. But maybe it counts anyways. 

Since I started kicking this idea around in my head -- the idea about the created language -- I've been disappointed in books where the writer has not done that. (My book on screenwriting for my UCLA class comes to mind.) I remember reading the handouts Vic Bobb, one of my college professors, would give us. His writing would immediately make an impression. You could tell he deftly created his sentences with humor and ease and a slight nihilism. It felt like you were bumping around in his head for a page. 

I read The Swimmer by John Cheever the other day. Same thing. The sentences leap, without the use of slang or regional dialogue or any type of agrammatical flourish. "It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, 'I drank too much last night.'" 

More from The Swimmer: 

"The pool, fed by an artesian well with a high iron content, was a pale shade of green. It was a fine day. In the west there was a massive stand of cumulus cloud, so like a city seen from a distance--from the bow of an approaching ship--that it might have had a name. Libson. Hackensack. The sun was hot. Neddy Merril sat by the green water, one hand in it, one around a glass of gin. He was a slender man--he seemed to have the special slenderness of youth--and while he was far from young, he had slid down his banister that morning and given the bronze backside of Aphrodite on the hall table a smack, as he jogged toward the smell of coffee in his dining room. He might have been compared to a summer's day, particularly the last hours of one, and while he lacked a tennis racket or a sail bag, the impression was definitely one of youth, sport, and clement weather."