the post i have been avoiding ~

so, july 7 came and went and nary a book did drop from my labors. i didn't even bother trying on saturday. i was in the middle of attempting to resuscitate the sprawling draft in the prior week, but it seems all for naught. i'm reorganizing in my brain for another assault, but i don't know when i will have the energy to mount the parapets.

any other time in my life i could have finished. i have to give in to the fact that i simply have too much going on right now.

Jack is finished as of yesterday. Eleison will be finished wednesday (i need to work on that e'en now). then i have four more papers to write for the summer and classes will be over the first week of august. that in addition to working full time and suffering this murderous heat seems cause to not be as focused as i would like.

i don't want to just put In Pursuit of Said Conspiracy down because i get rusty quick on stuff (and i guess that's officially the title now, what do you think?) that, and my notes are such henscratch that i worry i won't be able to make heads or tails of them a month from now. i went to a lot of trouble on sunday to train my brain to understand hancock's handwriting (no easy feat, lemme tell you), and if i don't transcribe his notes now i will have a dickens of a time trying to understand them again later.

i'm going to take some pages from various writers i admire to reconceive the book in the image i began with, which was light, loose, and literary (and not so waylaid with facts and information). there's a distinction between details and minutiae and sometimes i forget to pay attention to it. so:

from Ondaatje: poetry. point of view. every person counts. every word counts.

from Fermine: brevity. simplicity. a narrative haiku.

from Lightman: contemplation. a sense of wonder at the human imagination.

from Hansen: mystery. awe. the supernatural.

from Barrico: intimacy.

from Crane: universality. what's sacred in the mundane.

tall order, of course. but i think i can find it if i stop looking so hard. this story is easy, after all. sure, it's full of complexities, but the basic arc is really really easy: there's a murder, then a trial, then a hanging. and all of these things are pretty much known before hand, so the story is about how it's told more than anything else ~ at least that seems like what is most important to me.

and anyway, that is the state of the onion (not a dry eye in the house).

: o p