AUtobiogRAphicaL

[I hope to write on prosaical prose, on sound — same thing my Owl article's about. I'm helplessly obsessed by it, & reading GH properly just aggravated that. it's very hard to explain. I SEE sound. when sentences are 'imperfect' in rhythm or musical quality I want to cut or change words to set them right by an idiosyncratic, Hill-derived standard. it's worst when I'm the writer: I can't stand clusters of like stress or like sound. when words end & begin with the same sound I have to change one, & when there're too many unstresses or stresses crowded together I have to cut something. at the same time I love sound correspondence done judiciously, with propriety, & constantly revise my own prose in conforming to that numinous ideal. (some imagined but really afflicting decorum of evenness whereby a phrase like 'Parting of the Sensory' isn't permissible because 'ing of the' are 3 unstresses bunched in row; I want to make it 'Parting Sensory'.) reading Hill both inculcated & elicited a factitious concept of aural taste, from which I now cannot free myself. (I'm rankling at all the 'f's in that sentence, but I won't amend it.) whence my obsession with 'kalefield', his word, which I've realised interests me so because it can't be pronounced as you hear it, silently, in yr head. the diphthongs always become triphthongs when yr tongue goes for its 'l'. 'ay-ul', not this pure 'ale' sound (the closest to which I can get is enouncing 'kel'). ah christ, also love the way that 'ing k' rocks together, the tiny movement yr tongue makes when switching to plosive from velar nasal. SO YOU SEE I'm a freak. I never tried to tell anyone that freaky information before; it's pretty well impossible adequately to describe. let it suffice I'm so psychologically involved with language I fear my life is less lived than it's written.]