My Attempt

I have often found myself wondering around on off topic thoughts while reading a book, and before I am aware of it I am already about two pages ahead and I have no idea what I have read. Un willingly I have to back, and while I do so I realize that absolutely every sentence in the book is key, every sentence has a purpose and if I skip it I lose the essence that the author wanted to cause on me. It is interesting, every sentence of books of 150 pages to 500 pages or more, has, obviously, a reason why they were placed there. What that agnorisis of mine has to do with Gary Lutz, The Sentence Is A Lonely Place is that he made me see another reason for not only the sentence but the words that every writer chooses for their sentences.

I never found myself on wondering off thoughts while reading this essay in the first place. I really, thoroughly enjoyed, indeed, every sentence of it. My respects to Lutz. This essay is by far, the most pleasant to read. As I read, he made me change the way I was reading. From the opening sentence the words caught my unconditional attention. All the way till the end I asked to myself repeatedly what was it that made this writing so good, why was I enjoying this much more than the Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow? I guess that the content of what was being written could be applied, or is forced to be applied while one is reading.

“I came to language only late and only peculiarly.” In this nine-word opening sentence there are about six things that I could talk about. I read it the first time and I was driven to highlight it and reread it again four times. He talks about language as if it were a person, or a place. He does this all along the essay, “-this inkling that a word is a solid, something firm and palpable.” He uses the word only twice, and for two very different adjectives: he uses late first, when I should, or could be better placed last, and peculiarly last. To describe how he came into language and maybe to explain why he used late first and not last curiously (this is my attempt to analyze his words choices). Why only late? Why only peculiarly? Why not late and peculiarly? The word only definitely adds style to the sentence, without it, it would be an ordinary sentence.

The Sentence Is A Lonely Place is an exemplary analytic essay. For next assigned essay I will use this as a rubric. Lutz’s structure goes like this:

The introduction is an anecdote of his early life, obviously using hyperbole and figurative language, “…the release of words were the least significant of the mouth’s activities-…” I don’t know how true is the description of how language came into his life but it is interesting.

Lutz then talks about language itself, the feeling of it, his point of view of words and how much they mean to him, the way other authors use it and the way he himself uses them. He says, “…the aim of the literary artist, I believe, is to initiate the process by which the words in a sentence no longer remain strangers to each other but begin to acknowledge one another’s existence…” He talks about his relationship with words and words relationship with another words as if he were talking about a couple that were dating! Even though he is talking about a potentially boring topic he manages to make it as thrilling as an action movie.

The body of the essay is his close reading on sentences from authors like, Christine Shutt, Gordon Lish, Diane Williams, Sam Lipsyte, among others. He does very deep analysis. I knew that the letters in the words that made up a sentence could have an effect on its meaning. But I was not aware that the sound and shape and even symbolic meaning of the letters had such an impact. Lutz’s analysis could be applied to his writing, “A book was, for me, an acquisitive thing, absorbing, accepting, taking invitation to practice hygiene over it- ….” Lutz uses the vowel a to start the three adjectives that he chose to describe what a book was for him. I believe that is called alliteration, but I’m not so good at analyzing so profoundly. Lutz does this from pages 6 to 12 of the 13-page-essay. And again, I am going to use it as a guide for my own close reading.

And finally he concludes with a sentence that wraps almost the whole essay, “Psychiatrists use the term weak central coherence to pinpoint the difficulty of certain autistic persons to get the big central picture, to see the forest instead of the trees.” He is calling himself a person that indeed, has a weak central coherence, because he sees the words, (even the letters) instead of the story.