Annie Dillard Sure Can Write (OT)

Annie Dillard Sure Can Write (OT)

Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning; in medias res, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. They know the neighborhood, they can read and write English, they are old hands at the commonplace mysteries, and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just converged with their bodies, just flown down from a trance, to lodge in an eerily familiar life already well underway.

That's a tiny well-crystallized sample lump of prose by Annie Dillard, author of the celebrated Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (which Eudora Welty said is "a form of meditation, written with headlong urgency, about seeing)." It's from her memoir An American Childhood . She tosses off such gorgeously crafted observations seemingly with little effort. Her writing is a tangible pleasure.

The other book I'm reading might be of interest to some TOP readers. It's by Greg Milner and is titled Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music . Granted, I'm a longtime stereophile and a sometimes bordering-on-obsessive reader of audio and music magazines, but this cultural and technical history of recorded sound is a real eye-opener. For instance, do you know why Thomas Edison qualifies as the first audiophile, or that Betamax vs. VHS was far from the first format war?

Here's a small sample:

...The World War II generation were audiophiles who longed for hi-fi; their boomer offspring were not and did not. In the new pop world, what mattered was sound that hit you like a train, as opposed to sound that mimicked a train about to hit you.

Really a fun book and one I'm enjoying immensely. I wouldn't have believed that a book on this subject could be a page-turner. Highly recommended if you like recordings.

As an aside, I noticed in looking her up that Annie Dillard has a book called The Writing Life . In case she says in it how to write like she does, that's next on my list.

Mike

(Thanks to S., who loves A.D.)

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