Chocolit
Today was all about ice-cream. I was looking at the literati doing their thing all over the virgin examination stationery (and thinking up words like 'invirgination', the process of introducing something as virgin which had not been thought of as such before - like Virgin Airlines), when it hit me. It's all about ice-cream.
Ice cream is a fairly uniform and hence exploitable matrix. It has been known a long time that making a semi-solid aggregate of ice and cream, sometimes with sugar and other ingredients, gives you something really delicious. It is hard (though not impossible) to make a disgusting ice-cream flavour, although it is possible to make many indifferent ones.
And that is really what novels are about. All novels have some sort of plot, characters, character development. They generally have a start and an end, no matter how disjointed and non-sequential. It is possible to have novels that don't look like novels, but that's just a disguise. A good novel, like a good gelato, has a savour at first taste, a depth that hits you with the continuation of the experience, and an aftertaste which lingers even when the last drop has vanished. It leaves you longing for more, and if someone said, "That was the last one that company ever produced," you would mourn.
The same can be said of poetry or drama, except that drama is more like an ice-cream that forces you to take it at its pace (not so much a gelato, as a sherbet). Poetry of course varies. I suspect that poetry comes first, like a raw material of expressed imagination, extruded onto the page or into the listening air. Pictures are as much a raw material too. Graphic novels combine both.
Occasionally, you get a short story. Short stories are sometimes like potato chips, individually remarkable or unremarkable, but it's hard to stop at one. Some are like chocolates. You can stop, but you might keep eating them till you feel sick.
If literature be the food of love, we're in for a torrid autumn and a terrifying winter.
Ice cream is a fairly uniform and hence exploitable matrix. It has been known a long time that making a semi-solid aggregate of ice and cream, sometimes with sugar and other ingredients, gives you something really delicious. It is hard (though not impossible) to make a disgusting ice-cream flavour, although it is possible to make many indifferent ones.
And that is really what novels are about. All novels have some sort of plot, characters, character development. They generally have a start and an end, no matter how disjointed and non-sequential. It is possible to have novels that don't look like novels, but that's just a disguise. A good novel, like a good gelato, has a savour at first taste, a depth that hits you with the continuation of the experience, and an aftertaste which lingers even when the last drop has vanished. It leaves you longing for more, and if someone said, "That was the last one that company ever produced," you would mourn.
The same can be said of poetry or drama, except that drama is more like an ice-cream that forces you to take it at its pace (not so much a gelato, as a sherbet). Poetry of course varies. I suspect that poetry comes first, like a raw material of expressed imagination, extruded onto the page or into the listening air. Pictures are as much a raw material too. Graphic novels combine both.
Occasionally, you get a short story. Short stories are sometimes like potato chips, individually remarkable or unremarkable, but it's hard to stop at one. Some are like chocolates. You can stop, but you might keep eating them till you feel sick.
If literature be the food of love, we're in for a torrid autumn and a terrifying winter.
Labels: Desserts, Literature, Metaphor
etched with acid at 4:52:00 pm
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