idées fixes

This blog was started as a meditation to Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and now I'm back, to meditating on Tropic of Cancer. This book and the stuff around it probably has something to do with it. I haven't read all of the Jeanette Winterson essay, although I have read the Kate Millett and I'm not in agreement. Although I thought Heroines was going to focus on this - on Tropic of Cancer, on Blue of Noon, on these texts I loved and hated at the same time, and it doesn't really. It tries to look at the idea of androgyny in literature, and madness in literature, and Deleuze's notion of "The Crack" working for Fitzgerald and Bataille and Miller but not for women writers of the same period. But now I want to essay on the book again. Where should I essay? I feel like I should start writing more formal  essays and pitching them places. I've started to do that, somewhat. Stuff maybe that will go into "Slapping Clark Gable." I wonder if this is an evolution - the desire now to write formal essays, after a few years being anarchic and thinking of a new subjectivized criticism - or a regression. I don't know. I do know that most of the time my attention is focused on not getting Jean Genet to eat the carpet. Yes, I know how that sounds.

Perhaps I should have a new blog for these new/old obsessions? I need to molt somehow and begin again. I feel like completely reinventing myself. I am reading the Caitlin Flanagan, which I also want to write an essay about "The Hysteria of Caitlin Flanagan," and it's making me wild and furious and scribbling mad notes about Monkey's notebook in Under the Shadow of My Roof (my Fritzl triptych weirdly circles around similar figures, Anne Frank, Patty Hearst, The Exorcist, but I have extremely different, ummm, treatments). I'm also hoping to get into the Acker archive at Duke and write an essay about that. And maybe an essay on "The Hour of the Star." I want to essay again. I want to write this mad, sick, weird, text, Shadow, that only Kate Durbin and my partner will like, but I love it, and I am super-inspired again. I think I might end this blog. Archive it. Once my author site goes up. I am on Twitter and I like that, the quick post. I don't know. These are all good things. I think as writers we have to reinvent ourselves and molt and self-incinerate and begin again - or otherwise - it's totally stultifying, deadening. For me, anyway. I almost have to become new people with different projects. Perhaps this is why we move so often.