September 4th, 2020

anatomical beat

For we are not alone, it seems…

* I would like to get back into a regular posting schedule. It's a strange thing, how posting here has shifted for me psychologically. When the flist was all friends, it was comfortable to share bits and parts of my life, photos, stories, frustrations and joys. Now, that can feel like oversharing or bragging or as though I'm simply posting private diary entries. So, I suppose the new quest is to make friends of the current flist! *waves*

* Still devouring books like a word fiend. Mostly from my growing and impressive cache of Joyce Carol Oates. Being able to buy lots on eBay has changed my book buying world. She's so prolific a writer and some of her stuff is hard to find, but not in eBay lots! This week I was able to score the novella "Rape, A Love Story" and it was stupendous! I do prefer her in short form, and luckily, for me, she has a lot of short form out there - short story collections and novellas! Her ability to find perspective in every angle of a single act is astonishing. Her desire to write "realistic allegory" gives rise to exploding a single act outwards until we see every bit and part of that bomb of an experience and how it decimates. Or how a pebble dropped in a pond ripples and ripples and ripples. Or the butterfly effect. She is a master of this. And perhaps that's why her longer work can be a challenge to read. In exploring every ripple, it's easy for the reader to skip forward trying to find the one ripple they are most intent on following out to its point of dissolution. Suffice it to say, I did read "We Were the Mulvaneys" this week, too, and it was simply too exhausting in the pain department to read it straight through. Plus, Joyce is known for prolix storytelling and although I tend toward loving that type of prose, it can get in the way of the story itself. I feel like a dragon, on my hoard.



* FINALLY, getting the hell out of here next week and heading to the ocean for a few days. We will be celebrating Kidling1's birthday and remembering my father who she shared her birthday with. We are bringing my mother, but it was a hurtful and dramatic invitation and decline and change of mind and damnit I'm exhausted. But it's Life and one must keep moving forward.

* Even though it's blazingly hot, I can smell Autumn up here on the mountain and I. Cannot. Wait.