vainglorious

i am the most boring blogger of all time. crucially even in my denunciation i must assign myself some sort of superlative as i am VAINGLORIOUS. i am in a mood lately that is small and mean as opposed to expansive. a pile of books yesterday i gathered up in my arms - 29 books - the library aides react in horror i hate that when people who work at libraries are put out by people who want to take out books, yes, honey, MASSES of books, yes, my religion although i have been an ex-communicant as of late. so then i left the three heaping grocery bags of books in the backseat of the car - like groceries i am meant to eat them or they will spoil - and drove to the public library and shiftily got a paperback romance novel and sat in my bedroom with the airconditioning and read that. and then today i am supposed to syllabi - a verb - and instead i am sifting through this pile of rubble this used to be the most joyful activity for me, the pile of books, ever since i was a little girl, how memoiristic of me, EVER SINCE I WAS A LITTLE GIRL she writes i was a slut for books every summer before we went away to the log cabin i would take out books, i would stroll the aisles of the adult section and my mother's rule that whatever i could take out in my arms i could take with me, and it would be a funny image, the tiny girl with the pile of towering books as tall as her you can not see her face, i remember the hurt and the pressure in my arms. i was not reading rilke for fuck's sake i was not sontag that is what i get from reading her journals, this is why i'm small and mean lately - i am not sontag, i didn't read rilke at 13 - i read delicious outdated serials about nurses who go to africa and books about baseball for a time and books about religion for a time and books like gone with the wind and wuthering heights and books like the virgin suicides and then i would get to the camp, as we called it, and i devoured them all, and then i would grab my grandmother and my mother's romances and i would sit in the toilet, and read these neat little dyad-romances.

but today with books the reason i am small and mean and not expansive is everything is a reminder of what i do not write. i *might* be teaching a creative nonfiction workshop again and so i am reading the essays, lyric and am reminded i do not write like that, i cannot figure out how to write small contained pieces, and even in the draft i just turned in there is nothing nothing LYRIC about it and this makes me feel small and sad. and am looking through books of laura mullen and wayne koestenbaum and wondering whether i should find a subject and write a book on that subject. and then looking through lispector's cronicas again and wondering if perhaps i should write a book of cronicas. and then i look at rachel blau duplessis' pink guitar and think - ahh this is similar to my thesis, but so much better. DO YOU SEE WHERE I"M GOING WITH THIS? books are so often my bandage and my balm and my mirror and lately they have been the enemy. i am anorexic. i cannot eat the books. they are not edible to me. it is all terribly oedipal. i think. i think it's oedipal. ahhh.

rules of writing
do not write about not being able to write
do not write about not being able to read unless you are esther greenwood

there are just too many choices.