Tuesday, August 20, 2019

a bit from my forthcoming CJ Degaris book which I am about to delete

I don't know if it's good or bad or it just is. This is how I write though, now - I work it out on the page.


The health-giving properties of sunlight were renowned and in a period when the 1918 influenza pandemic was wracking the world, the notion of sunlight as ‘nature’s disinfectant’ had taken hold. It was a stretch to imagine that drying fruit in the sun was somehow not only a hygienic process but also a process by which the health-giving properties of sunlight entered the food, but the association was in many ways enough. Under analysis ‘Sunraysia’ comes apart pretty quickly; it might even be some kind of knock at ‘Asia’ (but then, twenty years later no-one thought that about Fantasia).

I know this isn't particularly great writing. In many ways I'm getting worse... I am losing track of how to spell homonyms, for instance. I don't blame spellcheck so much as email, where you write stuff to people but it's really like you're thinking or saying it, so you're (well, I'm) 'hearing it in your [my] head'. 

I am sure the 'aysia' in 'Sunraysia' has fuck all to do with asia though. Once you express a thought bubble like that, you can dismiss it.* 

By the way: thought bubbles. Hmm.

* Update: Unless the past doesn't let you. A few months after writing the above I found a critique of the word 'Sunraysia' by DeGaris' enemies suggesting that it was unAustralian for sounding too much like the demonised 'Asia'! People are so creative. 

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