Reading strong prose inspires me. 2666 makes me want to go to Mexico and solve terrible crimes, or to write a novel about a Mexican detective, or to at least publish a novel under the name Archimboldi. In the same way, I often find myself inspired to write while reading insipid prose. But even more than make me want to write, bad prose makes me think in a certain unfettered way.

Like making coffee or taking a long shower, mentally excoriating bad writing as I read it frees up parts of my mind normally reserved for creating anxiety. Newly unbidden, these anxiously creative parts think amok, farting forth strange ideas. (Demi-tangent: Steven Bach once told me that the most difficult narrative knots of screenplays often unravel in the shower. And what Steven said is true for all types of narrative writing, even if my screenplays will always be too long and too weird to produce.)

Sometimes, though, I can’t tell whether the prose I’m reading is bad or merely distinct, perhaps a little alien. I read a sentence, experiencing it as “bad,” enjoying its badness. Then I go back and see that it’s not bad in the way I thought it was. Maybe my reading was too literal, too schizoid, too connective, too green, too moon. Then I change my mind again. Reading this type of ambiguously “bad” prose, I become more and more reflective, until I lose the overall thread of what I was reading in the first place.

Take for instance this perfectly intelligible sentence from the article “U.S. Nuns Facing Vatican Scrutiny” in the New York Times:

Nuns were the often-unsung workers who helped build the Roman Catholic Church in this country, planting schools and hospitals and keeping parishes humming.

Nuns planting schools? It’s an image right out of the Codex Seriphinianus. For some reason, it struck me when I read it as overly cute, the wrong action. Planting a building, perhaps, makes a certain metaphorical sense. But would you say that you plant an institution, with staff and students and conflicting schedules and a night-janitor cleaning up a healthy smear of inexplicable bat guano in the computer lab? Given the calculus of schools, maybe they can be seeded or grown. But planting doesn’t do it for me.

Consider also the medieval/pastoral notion of a whole parish humming along together, literally. It’s a properly nun-like act, the organization of co-humming. Humming is harmonious, otherworldly, and communal in a chaste way. “Parish humming” conjures up an image of all of church-dense Brooklyn taking to the streets to join hands and hum a song by, I dunno, Journey or Beyoncé. (Probably Journey. Everybody sings that one fucking song, “Don’t Stop Believin’,” at karaoke.)

At the same time, we now have arboreal schools (or schoolchildren?), I suppose growing out of the tilled field of America (or knowledge?), and a bunch of parishioners (kept) humming, which humming doesn’t necessarily have squat to do with the arboreal school/kids. I find my orthography grows cluttered as I try to untangle the sentence’s metaphors. The images clash and, perhaps ecstatically, perhaps in a good way, kill each other off , as if in autumnal cannibalism.

By way of a sweeping conclusion, I should add that the nun-article is a good read for reasons other than the sentence about humming that tripped me up. Nuns apparently face a new inquisition from the Holy See, where lady-suits and reiki are still not cool. I know the Pope likes to preserve tradition and rigor, but nuns aren’t exactly the problem, are they?

Then again, perhaps the brides of Christ are tweeting and debating stocking-propriety on the boards of Nike Talk.

O modernity. You rock.