Baby it's Cold Outside

Loneliness, sadness, alienation, and liquor seem to be the accoutrements for the beauty of the written word. I had an American literature professor who once thumbed through the thick pages of an anthology, held it over his head, and dropped it onto a desk. He chewed on his unlit pipe as he said, "This whole damn book is soaked with alcohol. Pft, true prohibition and this thing would be a pamphlet." I find it easier to write, that the words come more fluidly and exact when I have a sense of loneliness. Liquor doesn't do the trick for me, hangovers leave only grocery lists to be written. A cloud like feeling, wet, sopping, like looking into a warm room through a window with a cold nose and fingers. It's not self-pity, but a sensation of alienation. A writer isn't living while they write, but sacrificing socialization to be an outsider, to be one who watches and does not participate. Not that writers are not within society, because you can only write what you know, but there's a separation that allows for examination.
There's a disconnect, a stripped copper wire in my brain, and I feel like a ghost. Some might call this depression, but I refuse and instead feel that it is a self-reflective state of mind. A murky puddle instead of one reflecting blue skies and clouds.

I've been reading Carson McCuller's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and I find it strange that I had never heard of it before. I study literature, and although I find it embarassing to be ignorant to a well known novel, finding a classic gem is rejuvenating. I just finished it this afternoon and I'm not quite sure what captured me so wonderfully. I have the deep heart tug that comes along with each book that secretly digs deep down to the bone and strikes the marrow like a pebble in a puddle. I read it slow and steady, savoring it like a last meal. Singer's part was confusing because he was just a mirror to the others, not a single person understood him. Is he neutrality? Is his muteness an examination of character, that with a voice there is no ear? Is he a literary tool?
Reading about the south made me want to reread Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. Penn Warren's work, his every word nearly drew a tear in my eye- it was so exact. When this book was published it must have been like the first time sound was added to film, or color t.v. Something is illuminated in the soul and the door to a new corridor of the mind is opened by a soft, warm breeze.


Time to go to work.

Listening to: Bing Crosby, Doris Day, Ray Charles, Alicia Keys, & Radiohead.