i cheated most energetically on the sam beckett bio, but it's deirdre bair's and The Corporation's fault - i've been managing twenty minutes of reading before melting into bed each night, and it's just plain unsatisfying to take SB's life down a week at a time. he's sedentary, she's occasionally overzealous (still good, mind you), i'm lazy. i'll get to closing ceremonies when i'm back from california (toward which i'm hurtling).
on said cheating, possession was worth it. i'd feared it would be cheeky and self-satisfied a la the lecturer's tale or david lodge's o-so-hated nice work, but nay. like george eliot, byatt's quite handy with a number of styles'n'genres. i do appreciate those freakish writers who can cheat on prose with poetry, and vice versa.
Tonight, he began to think of words, words came from some well in him, lists of words that arranged themselves into poems, "The Death Mask," "The Fairfax Wall," "A Number of Cats." He could hear, or feel, or even almost see, the patterns made by a voice he didn't yet know, but which was his own. The poems were not careful observations, nor yet incantations, nor yet reflections on life and death, though they had elements of all these. He added another, "Cats' Cradle," as he saw he had things to say which he could say about the way shapes came and made themselves. Tomorrow he would buy a new notebook and write them down. Tonight he would write down enough, the mnemonics.unpretentious, just nice.
on laws and sausages, i'd actually tired of magazines by the time i got to the airport. a shame - flights and collages are my only real justifications for glossies - but unavoidable: i've been waist-deep in those little fuckers for two straight weeks. newspapers, too - i'm averaging about five a day. at least papers are related to the work and aren't the work itself.
the local smoking laws, part umpteen: as of wednesday, it's illegal to sell mail order cigarettes to new york residents. weird, for a second there i thought i could make decisions for myself.
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