by Youngbear Roth

Created on: March 19, 2010   Last Updated: May 24, 2010

I have a passionate relationship with words; it is the relationship words create between one another – the glue between the words. For a professional writer, words and rules are not the main issue. The relationship is everything, and as a literary element, relationship is dynamic and slippery. This relationship in art affords the writer malleable space with which to paint mood, tone, voice, and style onto the written page, and beyond the edges of that page onto its reader.

Let's read three different treatments of the same subject by three authors. Each author, perceiving their subject through their own mind's eye, bears a serious relationship responsibility to break grammatical conventions:

"…Place de Clichy was a bedlam of traffic. The 'gendarmes', in their ominous capes and white forearm-gauntlets, stood in the midst of snarled Citroens like impatient matadors in a 'corrida' full of cows, screaming at jaywalkers, summoning on hesitant taxies, furious at the chaos that seemed to demean them in their power. I didn't like their hard, contemptuous jaws, the angry, chopping gestures of their arms, their air of self-righteousness goaded by incompetence towards violence. After London's mild and courteous bobbies, they were a shock, a shock reminding me that I was in a republic once again where the citizenry is assumed to be restive with egalitarianism, and the police are armed against them, and the streets are the ultimate arena for civic disagreement…."

-'Displaced Person' by John Clellon Holmes

"PARIS, FRANCE IS exciting and peaceful. …chickens do not get flustered running across the road, if they start to cross the road they keep on going which is what french people do too.

Anybody driving a car in Paris must know that. Anybody leaving the sidewalk to go on or walking anywhere goes on at a certain pace and that pace keeps up and nothing startles them nothing frightens them nothing makes them go faster or slower nothing not the most violent or unexpected noise makes them jump, or change their pace or their direction. If anybody jumps back or jumps at all in the streets of Paris you can be sure they are foreign not french. That is peaceful…" [The above quoted material is correct. More than any other author, Ms. Stein plays by her own rules.]

-'Paris France' by Gertrude Stein

"…Paris is a place where you can really walk around at night and find what you dont want, O Pascal.

Trying to make my way to the Opera a hundred

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