... despite the best of intentions the familiar malaise descended - as the absence of Blog posts attests.
I've been reading 'Towards a Minor Literature' and picking up (and putting down) various short stories. Kafka's novels beckon, too.
I've started in on 'Human, Too Human' & find all sorts of new thoughts triggered by Deleuze's text.
One shelf is stacked with a month's - a year's - five year's worth of reading.
Meanwhile the essays and personal statements and tests accumulate in plastic files.
I write comments in the margin.
Energy is sapped. The momentum goes. A slow drip.
Listlessness. Self-loathing. September of the Soul.
It'll pass.
3 comments:
Sorry to hear that old chap. I too have been feeling a little blue -- and somehow I'm finding the constant media insistence on global "turmoil"/"crisis" etc. rather distracting -- hard to settle to anything for long. A low-level anxiety, I suppose. Still, it's October now so perhaps we can both bounce back.
Yr ole chum
Walrus
PS I know that feeling of having a shelfload of books begging for more attention than you can give -- one such is John Livingston Lowes's ROAD TO XANADU -- which I tracked down after rdg about it in Duncan's essay on Jack Spicer -- it seems to be a key text for the Berkeley Renaissance crowd.
"What John Livingston Lowes taught us," says Duncan, "was that no poem was an isolated or insulated product but drew upon and led in return to all that the poet or the reader of the poem had known, even what he subconsciously rememberd, what he knew not he knew, from the world of Mind and Imagination at work in all he had experienced."
Great stuff...
W
Me again.
Yes - I think the banking bizniz is pretty distracting (to put it mildly). It occurred to me - given Deleuze is occupying my head at the moment - that the entire banking system embodies exactly the kinds of flows and ruptures his work focuses upon. And that the public outcry at lack of regulation etc. reveals an inherent 'metaphysic' - as if the movement of money should have any higher Truth or Reason. When, very clearly, we have a massive system of desires working beyond any moral absolutes. We've lived with this in the abstract and only now experienced the reality.
I suppose I should go and re-read the more daunting chapters of Anti-Oedipus on Capitalism's schizo processes.
My dad's hesitant recovery is also nagging away in the back of my mind.
As for 'Xanadu' I've had a copy for years and dived into it and resurfaced at intervals. And of course Duncan would love it (great quote by the way). Usually it sends me back to Coleridge himself who was one of my earliest obsessions - oddly enough less for the actual poems than the Notebooks. These I coveted in the college library. I chanced on a volume (II) a few years ago and have a paperback Selected but look forward to the day when the Complete Notebooks are issued at an affordable price. (These and a Collected Christopher Smart are volumes dreams are made of).
It goes without saying, Coleridge would have been the ideal Blogger ...
Thanks for the pep talk!
The C
That's a spot-on analysis of capital -- a broiling cauldron of desires without conscience or code. It's actually very radical, unstable stuff, so it's odd to find the more reactionary end of the political spectrum defending it.
As usual, you're ahead of me on XANADU!
Hope all goes well with your father & it's good to know you're still out there . . .
Walrus
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