Notes

On writing and towards a manifesto:

Writing may not need to “do anything,” but life is always leaking what is put into it. Forget physics and cosmology and everything an indeterminably chaotic and open universe has going for itself, life is an ultramarathoner who can’t afford to stop at the restroom. It must run through it. Run too and keep abreast or eat dust.

If you think you can ignore the elderly crossing the street while helping her you won’t be surprised to think twice of your own action. That is a call to action, as is everything you do. Action begets action, but first you must act for it all to become real. Think of Between the Acts, the plenitude of surprise and talk begat by the airplane—and the cows! Do not belittle or submerge the cow, but imagine you are more than cattle!

The canon is not only a body of works widely accepted as central and required reading, it is also the chorus of real people who would take insult the same way your tastes would be dismissed prejudicially on the basis of, let’s say, “otherliness.” The canonical works are fathers to your own work, and the determiners of the canon are step-fathers (if you insist the true fathers are the works themselves) to you. But the author is an inclusive germ and an asexual, so please always remember your mother: yourself, and feel free to call Mr. Bloom Harry.

It is not that the eight-hundred page epic novel is not readable in today’s times, as Cormac McCarthy upholds, but rather those that are written are not good enough to be read. Do not blame the times, live up to it; our past is more empty than our present. Do not lose faith.

If you are discouraged to write then encourage yourself, and regain heart from the view ripped from your chest—see the material that must be grafted if not back to yourself, then to another, thousands others. Nature is a fight against all but nature is what you got, so be economic and order yourself. Be not only a dynamite but also a forcefield.


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Also, here is an introduction to a review I'm writing of Tabucchi's It's Getting Later All the Time. Is anyone interested in reading the work based on what I've reported so far?

“Life goes on,” as it is said, and likewise Antonio Tabucchi’s It’s Getting Later All the Time seems to just go on, but sweetly, in melancholy, and ultimately in cold professionalism. There are three primary images as motifs at play throughout the novel: the hole, the window, and the thread, each symbol expressing two archetypical meanings where each correlates most to either male or female genders. The emotive power and narrative arc, insofar as there is one, derives from the development of these three symbols, not so much the characters, which isn’t to say that there are no characters in the story or that it is absent of any narrative at all. The novel is simply constructed differently from the average novel. For one thing, it is epistolary. Secondly, there are eighteen different letters, each corresponding to a different narrator, and so it is not even a standard epistolary novel, though one could argue that it is identical to them in regards to the closing response “circular letter,” that a correspondence actually is still maintained. But only in that regards. Lastly, it potentially, depending on the reader’s will to see, or even form, patterns, lacks plot linearity, at least until the very last letter imposes itself simultaneously as both a response, or a return, and a termination. The mark of a master that is the ability to ingeniously make form serve content would not be missed in this work if only it were picked up and read through.

Love between two people is often described as rapturous, but it is also rupturing, essentially tearing away the lovers from the context of their old ways of life to install them into a world unto their own. This new world is one highly profused with the imagination and memory, as each lover fantasizes together the optimal way of exercising their joint potentials and turning their promised dreams into reality. Perhaps the most popular condition for a mature and lasting relationship is trust, which in essence is the capacity to honor promises, hopes, and expectations. It is, in other words, a perpetual transaction, a correspondence, and the epistolary correspondence is the most common and concise metaphor for this type of love. There is the purpose of writing the letter and the hope and expectation of it being pitched and returned. But life is not so structured nor facile; it is not a language game. Life, in fact, is a field of chance occurrences “wed to death” that may be cut short at any moment, and under such circumstances, despite the aid of science and statistics, one’s day as a life is always getting later all the time.

Interest will first catch halfway through the first paragraph when, after a casual expositional introducing first sentences, the “rugged and essential” island being written from turns out to be one the unnamed narrator “come[s] to think [it] dpesn’t exist, and [he] found it only because [he] imagined it” (3). The rest of the novel rifts across time, the world, and the human and nonhuman voices that people it, and emotions ranging from disengenuine appraisal to forlorn nostalgia to triumph then back around to bureaucratic indifference in response, tragically always, to dealings of dejected hearts, even in matrimony. It is a work of brilliant jazz.


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and a cool cover of Chris Brown's Look At Me Now: