In Other Words

The other day I had an interview at a publishing company to see if I could freelance for them. (It was a fun interview and they really wanted me on board but couldn’t figure out in what capacity: they don’t have an editorial dept.)

This company also has an impressive three-floor open-concept art gallery (oooh, I could have spent thousands if I had had the cash, and that would have been on only two pieces! Check out Brian Lorimer, pieces “Missing You” and “Forest in Yellow,” although I also love “Alone in a Big World” and several others. Heck, I love all of them) and an ad agency. While there, I picked up one of the ad agency’s rack cards.

Seemingly unrelated, but not

I also just finished reading a critic’s review of Audrey Niffenegger’s recent novel Her Fearful Symmetry, in which the critic actually, appallingly, used a certain dreaded term for the book. If ever my novel was described as such, I’d likely cry, for what does it mean anymore, given out so unthinkingly, so unoriginally?

The two together

One of the things that most perplexes and vexes me is the repetitive use of certain terms and images in order to set something apart from whatever is similar. This in itself is utterly oxymoronic (how can you be unique if you’re the same as everyone else?) but no one seems to notice, or at least they seem unable to do anything about it. Particularly guilty, in my mind, are copywriters for advertising companies, and book critics.

If one more ad or design agency is declared fresh and innovative, in the sense that they are unlike any other, while displaying splashy images of fruit and water or fruit in water, particularly apples and citrus, and if one more book is dubbed a veritable tour de force, I shall truly have no choice but to believe that there are regretably no more original thoughts in this world and that we are doomed, doomed, to read or look at nothing new. The fact that this problem is rampant in mostly the creative fields completely boggles my mind.

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