16 October 2002, 23:44

kai poth�� kai maomai.

back & forth

Every day and in every way I am becoming a more eccentric person. I am at the moment working on my whimsy and absurdity, which chiefly takes the form of striking little fantasies: Umberto Eco and Seumas Heaney (both of whom spoke in Harvard Square the other night) sumo wrestling for the audience, this morning's extended Parapluies de Cherbourg montage, which was surmounted by internal footage of the 77 bus proudly splitting the waters dressed as a enormous rectangulo-prismatic knarr, studded with hairy gay viking-men and -chicks, singing in French.

I have registered with NaNoWriMo, even though tersity, unreliability and incomprehensibility are my three greatest gifts, and I will probably only have time for writing when I am dead. Either I will write a great deal here because I am trying to escape The Novel, or else I will never ever post here because The Novel is shouting "Feed Me!". Or better yet, I will write entries here and then sneakily abduct paragraphs from these entries to pad The Novel.

The Work is going better than it was -- my queue is down to a manageable number (more than a mouthful is too much, girls!) and I am getting something like respect for my occasional flashes of brilliant competence. If only I could want to go there at nine in the morning -- it would free up the rest of my day spectacularly. This morning, try as I might, I couldn't do it. The rock of getting out of bed was just too heavy to lift; then, at ten-thirty, it suddenly didn't seem so colossal. Must be the way the light hits it.