✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

The Sentence is a Lonely Place - Believer Magazine

thebeliever.net · 6,858 words · saved by 1 readers

Icame to language only late and only peculiarly. I grew up in a household where the only books were the telephone book and some coloring books. Magazines, though, were called books, but only one magazine ever came into the house, a now-long-gone photographic general-interest weekly commandingly named Look. Words in this household were not often brought into play. There were no discussions that I can remember, no occasions when language was called for at length or in bulk. Words seemed to be intruders, blown into the rooms from other­where through the speakers of the television set or the radio, and were easily, tinnily, ignorable as something alien, something not germane to the forlornities of life within the house, and readily shut off or shut out. Under our roof, there was more divulgence and expressiveness to be made out in the closing or opening of doors, in footfalls, in coughs and stomach growlings and other bodily ballyhoo, than in statements exchanged in occasional conversation

essays January 1st, 2009 | Issue fifty-nine The Sentence is a Lonely Place A LECTURE DELIVERED BY THE SHORT-STORY WRITER GARIELLE LUTZ TO THE STUDENTS OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY’S WRITING PROGRAM IN NEW YORK ON SEPTEMBER 25, 2008 DISCUSSED The Forlornities of Life, Overliteral Pronunciation, Books as Props, Books as Reliquaries, The Scrunch and Flump of Consonants, Barry Hannah, Gordon Lish, Abruptions, Narratives of Steep Verbal Topography,Sam Lipsyte, Consummated Language, Christine Schutt, Interior Vowels by Garielle Lutz Share Share via Facebook Share via Twitter Copy link to clipboard Share v

Explore this link on the map →

related reading