Friday, August 23, 2013

I am your writing self and I am watching you sit there.

Dave Eggers writes: 
"I am your shower curtain and I am watching you..." 
Whoops! Ha, no, wrong image--just something I ran across, researching sanitation. 
Here's Dave Eggers with the shower curtain he wrote for The Thing Quarterly.
Could I use this in the sanitation history book I'm working on?
By "working", I mean sitting here. Dave Eggers nails it:
This kind of life is at odds with the romantic notions I once had, and most people have, of the writing life. We imagine more movement, somehow. We imagine it on horseback. Camelback? We imagine convertibles, windswept cliffs, lighthouses. We don’t imagine - or I didn’t imagine - quite so much sitting. I know it makes me sound pretty naive, that I would expect to be writing while, say, skiing. But still. The utterly sedentary nature of this task gets to me every day.
I spend seven or eight hours… each time I try to write. Most of that time is spent stalling, which means that for every seven or eight hours I spend pretending to write - sitting in the writing position, looking at a screen - I get, on average, one hour of actual work done. It’s a terrible, unconscionable ratio.