Virginia Woolf: Long sentences, long words, flowing and wandering topic
Everyday I tread on these poor soles, wore thin and stained by a life in the dirt. White hi-top Chuck Taylors are more than simply a shoe, they're my shoe. They're the only shoe I have worn since I was sixteen because they serve as a canvas for both my wandering mind and restless hands when they hold a sharpie, but also a canvas of the world they tread picking up the grime and wear of the world in which I ramble. Even after they have become decrepit and decaying they still hang from my ceiling not only proud veterans of countless days and nights under foot, but also a record of my life.
What is this, a shoe signed by every member Bomb the Music Industry! out of sympathy for me puking outside of their show. Next to that a shoe with a hole worn in the bottom which allowed a rusty nail to penetrate through my foot and forced me into a doctors office. Or this shoe which has the art work of the LSD addled mind of a cute little blonde.
It has been said that you can not know someone until you walk a mile in their shoes, well if this is true then can I know my past self by walking through memory lane around these Converse corpses. These shoes which lose all whiteness are left as dirty dingy sacrifices to a lifestyle which I have chosen. These poor and pure soles decay so my own may go on, for it is the very act of walking which allows me to escape the segments of this world which bother me so.
I really liked "these poor souls decay so my own may go on..." Not only did I like the sentiment behind it, but it had a slight lyrical sense in it.
ReplyDeleteYou definitely pinpointed the ramblingness of Woolf very well, except I was able to follow your train of thought with a little less strain. Which I don't know if that's a good thing or not, actually, but I liked it. I liked your post.
Though I liked the post, I can't see good old Woolf writing about Chuck Taylors. I imagine she would write about penny loafers or something... but I digress. I think you did a good job of starting with something small and making it something bigger, which was actually a really cool analogy. I've never thought about shoes in the sense that they decay and wear down so that we do not. What a neat thought. You portrayed her rambling well, as Mish said. Good job!
ReplyDeleteThis is like an essay Virginia Woolf would write if she actually BOUGHT something at shoe stores instead of just going in them so she could make fun of the midgets trying things on!
ReplyDeleteAnyway, a nice essay; short and sweet. I think you were able to get in some nice details in a very casual way, for example, just briefly mentioning the blonde on LSD you flirted with. You give the reader a really good sense of you the author in only three paragraphs.
Dave,
ReplyDeleteThere's an image in this that should be the center of an essay, and it's the shoes hanging from your ceiling.
I want you to drop the Woolf and rewrite this thing in your own language, slowing down to give us more about the novelty of the image, and the story behind every pair. This can be a page, and it will be published in Rascal Magazine.
Do not introduce a blonde on LSD without a little bit more description. It's like Chekhov said. If a gun appears in the first act, it'd better go off in the fifth. Well, there's some stuff--all of your shoe images--that feel like guns that need to go off. That is, we should hear more about them.
Start with the second sentence you've written here, drop any possibly pompous Woolfian metaphors, and give me 300 hard words.
DW