12-21-2013, 04:13 PM
missed one:
We look to where she hung her plates; circles of her time in grime.
Should be either
We look to where she hung her plates, circles of her time in grime.
Or, perhaps more interestingly,
We look to where she hung her plates, at circles of her time in grime.
I'd wanted to focus a micro-edit on this one line and reserve a macro comment for later, but I find myself lost in the macro in a way that, on first read, I didn't seem to be--maybe blame the beers
Now that I've read it through a few more times, I think the Jesus nut is the last line of S1:
"Strange that wealth summed in a life could hide such human poverty."
Perhaps it's intentionally ambiguous, but I'd suggest you recast it w/out the ambiguity I'm about to articulate. I think if prefer a straightforward turn to a mystery, given that there's so much cryptic here already.
So, the line is
Strange that wealth summed in a life could hide such human poverty.
I can read it in many ways, but the extremes are (1) strange that lots of money could hide a paucity of positive/social human traits or (2) strange that genuine evidence of a well-lived life could mask economic despair.
To put a finer point on it, here are two minor rewrites, each of which resolves the ambiguity:
(1) Strange that the summed wealth of a life could hide such human poverty.
vs.
(2) Strange that the summed wealth of life could hide poverty.
Either revision impacts the opening line in dramatic, important fashion. With the first, she's causing more harm post-death; with the second, she's causing the narrator to reflect on the way a good person doesn't ever seem "poor."
Make sense? If not, I can make another go of explaining what I mean . . .
We look to where she hung her plates; circles of her time in grime.
Should be either
We look to where she hung her plates, circles of her time in grime.
Or, perhaps more interestingly,
We look to where she hung her plates, at circles of her time in grime.
I'd wanted to focus a micro-edit on this one line and reserve a macro comment for later, but I find myself lost in the macro in a way that, on first read, I didn't seem to be--maybe blame the beers
Now that I've read it through a few more times, I think the Jesus nut is the last line of S1:
"Strange that wealth summed in a life could hide such human poverty."
Perhaps it's intentionally ambiguous, but I'd suggest you recast it w/out the ambiguity I'm about to articulate. I think if prefer a straightforward turn to a mystery, given that there's so much cryptic here already.
So, the line is
Strange that wealth summed in a life could hide such human poverty.
I can read it in many ways, but the extremes are (1) strange that lots of money could hide a paucity of positive/social human traits or (2) strange that genuine evidence of a well-lived life could mask economic despair.
To put a finer point on it, here are two minor rewrites, each of which resolves the ambiguity:
(1) Strange that the summed wealth of a life could hide such human poverty.
vs.
(2) Strange that the summed wealth of life could hide poverty.
Either revision impacts the opening line in dramatic, important fashion. With the first, she's causing more harm post-death; with the second, she's causing the narrator to reflect on the way a good person doesn't ever seem "poor."
Make sense? If not, I can make another go of explaining what I mean . . .