Monday, May 31, 2010
serial affairs
Wandering through a beautiful array of books in a nearby store (not Moe’s) on a perfect spring afternoon, I purchased—well, [insert extended narrative of literary prattle proving allegorical the passage of his days] imagine writing 700+ pages (small font) on how all Literature tends toward The Seven Basic Plots: overcoming the monster, rags to riches. the quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy, and rebirth.
Or this: Imagining Virginia Woolf. In short, textual intimacy (according to author Maria DiBattista) is given a liminal “figment of the author” by two entwining inwordly, one representing “the” author (writing), one making it in reading, together “to produce that beguiling phantom—the literary personality.” That might seem obvious, but it’s not Lit. Theory 101 vistas of Reader Response Criticism, where there is The Author (inevitably misread). It’s the condition of writing, I should guess. Being “Virginia Woolf” (born Adeline Virginia Stephen) evidently became too much; so, she filled her coat pockets with rocks and walked into the River Ouse.
I shall see: I brought Maria home with me. (I have this thing with women and Literature, you see. [Insert 700+ page roman à clef.]) I was once in love with a girl-woman (undergraduate days) who looked like Virginia Woolf, such that I can’t now read a sentence of Woolf’s without feeling I’m witnessing a private letter.
Wandering...Moral philosopher Susan Wolf (I have an even “worse” thing for women philosophers) has just published Meaning in Life: and Why It Matters. We don’t just act out of either self interest or concern for others (or some mix of the two). Often “[r]ather, we act out of love for objects [other persons, I should imagine—”objects” in the psychoanalytic, phenomenological, liminal sense] that we rightly perceive as worthy of love.”
Wondering.... Jacques Derrida (married to a psychoanalyst—which inspires the hell out of me) writes a book to Hélène Cixous, H. C. for Life, That Is to Say, then dies. Cixous afterward writes a book to dead Jacques, Insister of Jacques Derrida. I wonder about the effect of reading the two books relative to each other (Jacques thereby read as writing from beyond the grave—having in the writing already known he was dying of pancreatic cancer). Oddly, Cixous looks like de Beauvoir. Now, there’s a relationship!—i.e., Simone and Jean-Paul.
“I’m drawn into the book of you.”
“O, move me, that’s so trite.”
“Well, things become clichés for good reason.”
“I never said your life wasn’t justifiable.”
So, you love me all the same.
