knowledge is happiest in uncontrolled flotsam and jetsam.
spending whole days reading, researching, and writing.
dutch: a memoir of ronald reagan, edmund morris' vastly proper biographical novel, offers a gem per page. em's reagan acts the part of president and presides over the part of actor. the form of the sometimes fictional work (em creates a sort of boswell character for himself, called edmund morris) seems to me an idealization of the marriage of literary form and historical document. there are bits of imagined movie scripts, complete with lighting direction, in which a reagan moment is narrated. there are transcribed conversations. there are facsimile copies of rr handwriting from the archive. there are graceful metaphors through which morris talks about his biographical project. all of it functions like a sort of pastiche/bricolage. the perfect means to convey the ActorPresident.
my neighbors are sort of bothering me. in the daylight hours, their loud kids scream in the "front yard" (we have a patch of dirt out there, yo). after the sun goes down, their motorcycles scream around the house. it's kind of embarrasing, because ours is the only building on an otherwise calm block that produces so much racket. then again, i feel guilty, because i think i'm being a snob.
i can't keep my glasses clean.
it's wise, i think, to print out a large-font copy of the primary argument you're tying to make in whatever you're writing at the moment. you'll want to hang it on the wall. behind my monitor right now, i see the following: "my study addresses the phenomenon of texts that aggressively interrogate the traditions of western life-writing while they take their place within the biographical discourse; their work as self-conscious critiques from within behaves as a symptom of the discourse's unsettled relationship with both generic and ontological criteria." i guess that's why the writing's slow right now. kind of a clunker.
i'm teaching a section of my department's intro. to the novel this fall. narrowing my syllabus down to a digestible number of novels is difficult. evidence: i want to teach both moby dick and the poisonwood bible. something tells me that's not realistic, as i'll need to work in a few others over the semester.
now i'm tired.
Posted by dave at July 29, 2003 10:35 PM | TrackBack