Elizabeth Ellen

Elizabeth Ellen writes about stalking Dave Eggers in an essay for Bookslut...So so completely brilliant. Really in keeping with what I've been thinking about lately, how I stalk writers, those who passionately love literature, literature as libidinal (thanks, Roz!), those who are fan/atics as opposed to just readers, myself included...how it becomes like a love affair for us. And then playing into that the intensity of encounter on the Internet, on forums, these connections, a community that is at least at first invisible...I love the reflexivity of the essay, how in some way it mirrors Eggers' own memoir, that pathos of it, the fantastic details...She threads throughout a friend telling her "You realize, of course, that you come off sounding completely insane in this essay.” Yes! Writing should be this insane. 

Viva the gift economy!

OK there's lots of books I need for the Semiotext(e) book but I am far too broke to buy them I have been getting them from the library! but every small press book I have to get through OHIO-Link and they only give me like three weeks and then they're overdue and I'm charged money and I have to barter like mad to get the money wiped off, as recently The Haunting of Sylvia Plath by Jacqueline Rose which I was charged a $125 replacement fee (I disputed, it is the best gift from my mother, her powers of brute rhetorical force in the face of JC Penney and Sears counterladies). Also I am teaching a short story workshop for the MFA at Chatham this is last minute replacement and there are some stories I want to read and OHIO Link doesn't even have them!

So I thought. Viva la gift economy. I have 2 extra copies of Jelinek's Wonderful Wonderful Times I can trade, or my own books. I also have a few copies of Fanny Howe's Radical Love and Dura by Myung Mi Kim, although those are Nightboat books, I dont' know if I'm supposed to exchange them, but oh well. Here are the books I'm looking for:

the GURLESQUE anthology
Diane Williams' Excitability*
Christine Schutt's Nightwork*
Debra di Blasi's The Jiri Chronicles
Renee Gladman's Juice*
Renee Gladman's Activist*
Renee Gladman's Newcomer Can't Swim
Dodie Bellamy's Academonia
Dodie Bellamy's Letters to Mina Harker
Tao Lin's Bed*
Ariana Reine's The Cow
Chris Kraus' Aliens and Anorexia*
Marguerite Duras' Ravishing of Lol Stein
Marguerite Duras' The Lover*
Marguerite Duras' Blue Eyes, Black Hair
Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer

*don't need now


I am ridiculous. I know.