No Rest for the Wicked

Fuck. It's coming on again....



Since I can already tell sleep will elude me for a while, I've been thinking more about a conversation I had with a friend on Saturday over bagels and coffee. We discussed making a "reader": much like a mixed tape... er, CD...you piece together the fragments and wholes of text that have fundamentally changed you, moved you, whatever. Though he imagined it through a thematic, I imagine mine as bits of paragraphs and lines, fragments of stories and characters that made things very, very quiet for the few seconds the words slipped in front of my eyes. My first thought was Keats' "To Autumn," since it is the reason (or, rather, my paper on it was the reason) I decided to become an English major. I remember that I could hear and feel it. Then there's the passage in Wright's Black Boy (whose work I otherwise despise) that made me run to the back room every time there was a lull at the coffee house where I worked in Portland. And Barthes. My beloved Barthes. Would I take from Lover's Discourse or Camera Lucida? Perhaps both, but set at different parts of the reader, so as not to overshadow the other by proximity. Then there's the passage on silence and the passage on desire in the Dhammapada. Perhaps I would set this up against Barthes as approximating the polarity of my emotional swings, and include Kaysen's line about quietness from Girl, Interrupted. I'd definitely include the passages on the ephemerality of the "real" in Eco's Foucault's Pendulum and Nabokov's Transparent Things as well as Louis Owens' meditation on imagination, genealogical haunting and family photos from I Hear the Train. If I do this, then I have to include Wendy Rose's poem describing how ghosts can scream at and rail against you when you try to talk to them. And then there's cummings' translation of a sliver of Electra, the glorious passage about Cosette and Marius from Les Miserables, and Whitman's "O You whom I often and silently come that I may be where you are...." And "Littlest Birds." That is a must.

This most self-indulgent project would include images and pieces of images, The hundreds of images I've snipped from various sources over the years need a home somewhere, no? But that's for another night.

Barthes. Baudrillard. Wright. Whitman. Kaysen. Voltaire. Eco. Hugo. cummings. Keats. Owens. Rose. Van Camp. Alcott. Dreiser. Holland. Kierkegaard. Alexander. Walker. Butler. Doyle. Anzaldua. Baldwin. Not sure where it stops or if it needs to.

Current mood: Cocteau Twins, Victorialand