Sentiment and sentimentality

Speaking of joy and other romantic, heavy-handed, sentimental terms, coming at tropes, clichés, and stereotypes from a slant can make them less sentimental, less heavy-handed. It can render familiar things anew and revitalize the sentiment for which cliché itself is often shorthand. Defamiliarize and revitalize: that’s what I want to do with posts here. I want to get to a granular level of joy. I don’t want to describe joy. I want to enact it. I won’t say it was a beautiful spring morning. I’ll tell you what I did and thought and maybe you’ll discuss those things with me and we can joy together.

The title of this post is the name of a creative writing class I took with Leni Zumas. If you haven’t read her work, she is an expert at defamiliarization. The title story in Farewell Navigator starts, “We live with the lights off in a rot-walled house.” I plan to read her newest novel, Red Clocks, as soon as it comes out and would love to discuss it. Just let me know if anyone would be into reading it together bookclub-like.

Image credit: Jerome Robbins Dance Division "Photograph of Litz dancing The Glyph at Black Mountain College" The New York Public Library Digital Collections.