Come on in, it's Kool inside

The music is clearer, richer. The bass is more pronounced. The speakers are placed from left to right, and of course, there are more of them. There is a small walk to the bed; there's a little cost to not having the volume just right, or the wrong song in your playlist. Its wider, and somehow more cramped here. The walls seem to be collapsing into each other; there's this restless feeling of energy, of having to do something that makes me roll off the bed every five minutes; a force that drives, and somehow also enervates. Everything ends up in this eventual state of flux, where I can pick up books and read them for a good 20 minutes, maybe even half an hour. Then the bed that slopes upward in the middle becomes more pronounced. And my head starts sloping back more, even though I know it can't be possible. And in this half-sapped, half frenzied state I go to sleep again. If the music is still on, it seems like its coming from a long distance. Anyway, its too late to turn of...

One short sentence followed by several others sometimes gets irritating. It breaks the flow of your reading and it makes paragraphs feel hollow. But Oates' did it exceptionally well in Beasts. The beginning of the book was strewn with short sentences that never allowed any rhythm or flow to emerge. What it did do was make me sit up and take notice of each sentence in a way that other books rarely do. What I thought was a lack of artistic flair turned out to be a precursor to a wonderfully crafted sequence which makes the short sentences worthwhile. Plums deify. Stephen King says that makes perfect (grammatical) sense, and that short sentences should suit authors who're not as much in control of their sentences as they'd like to be. But I think he's missing the kind of usage that Oates has, the kind that sometimes brings flair simply by delaying it.

When I read Jeffrey Archer, I decided I didn't enjoy his books because his writing style wasn't good enough. Which is why I took a slightly better liking to Forsythe. It makes me wonder though. What right do I have to not read authors who do not "write exceptionally well"? Or at least far above average? I don't think I'm so affected that I read them for the mere fact that they're written well; I know I enjoy good writing, possibly more than a good story. Probably more than a good story. Read sometimes for the story, Bobby, and sometimes for the language. In that book, The Lord of the Flies had both. I hope there's many many more of those books to explore.

Suffocation seems to be the only word that fits. I heard Ted Hughes say to Sylvia Plath to write about "anything . . you know your subject, you're just skirting around it" and it was obvious he knew nothing of suffocation. I feel like I have something inside me that suffocates and chokes on the lack of colour I provide to it. It seems cruel to murder again and again but murder is what worked for her. She's as crazy as any other poet and yes, she's very stylized, but she knew what it meant to not have the words you have come outside where you know they belong.I read Daddy again and its impact is still incredible. Its a rollicking, speeding train of anger and metaphors, reaching its terrifying climax like Blaine The Mono reaching Topika. Blaine The Mono, the insane train which flew worlds in seconds and crashed its passengers on a fight about a riddle. Blaine is a pain and that's the truth. Daddy builds to its climax like that, only it is more menacing, and far...