L'espoir

Last Memorial Day weekend, I was - as many of you know - attacked inside a restaurant while thirty or forty onlookers did and said nothing. In restrospect, it has always seemed both inexcusable and entirely reasonable that no one tried to help me. And this reason lingered in one form or another - a serious concussion, an increased fear of the city, a distrust of even those whose actions have warranted otherwise. I wrote obliquely of it in The Library's Grain (see #32 and #33).

This year, what had begun that day (and what had begun far earlier) ended. In a moment both greater and smaller than any narrative I could tell here, I was lost, and I was found. Death and birth, departure and return - time stretched out to encompass them and then swelled, splintered. Where there had been a line, a set of prints recording what had been done and was yet to be done, there was a field, an ocean - and each wave the temporary summit of a time willed into being its own.

And still, I am a child beset by questions. I am, like all who I know and love, a question itself, and my life not more than the effort to understand and answer that question. But the answer to that question may be that it is for another to answer. Call that other what you will. Call him, as my teachers and colleagues do, the Other. Or call him, as I will do anon and after, God. And call to him. And let yourself be called.

Preacher, teacher: anything you have in mind

A long and rather meandering day. Cold, cold morning. An early trip to the gym, followed by an hour of French ("Un jus de fruit est quelque chose a` boire" - great, huh?). The teary-eyed ending of At Swim, Two Boys. And then, in the park later, over coffee, Bryan explains to me my "aura": "You give off this child-like vibe. It's the way you kind of look up at the sky for no reason, or you tilt your chair, or look like you're lost in a daydream or something." I'm surprised at his impression, but he doesn't stop there. "And I bet there's a certain kind of guy you attract. Maybe they're older, but they're drawn to that part of you. They want to take care of you." He's mischievous in his appraisal, but not necessarily incorrect. Still, I'm embarrassed. And resistant. How could my writing possibly come off as child-like? "It's not your writing they're attracted to. How many of them even read it?" He smiles, secure and satisfied. And I? I am, apparently, transparent.

But not always. In my box at school, I find my teaching evaluations - all of them excellent. And one in which a student has written: "Greg's teaching style has developed significantly over the semester. His unique way of approaching the texts was, to me at first, a bit irreverent, but I've found that over the course of the semester, it helped me see the texts in a new way. The class really helped deepen my understanding & appreciation for Shakespeare. Thanks." I can't determine who wrote it, though I know for certain who did not. "Irreverent" is a strange choice of word - and not one that I'd ever use to describe my handling of texts, least of all Shakespeare. A blindspot in my teaching style or an indication of the multiple ways a behavior or persona can be received?

And now it's evening. Stephen's time. My newly rearranged bedroom. And a kitchen overwhelmed by the trash of a spring cleaning. At night, I've been dreaming of abandoned animals, of gardens, of my classmates huddled and speaking in Eastern tongues. I've seen crosses stretching tall like streetlights in the darkness. And at 6:30 each morning I wake with a start, sometimes to the sound of thunder. In the cold, and with my cat Azazel huddled close to me for warmth, it's hard to believe it's May.

Aujourd'hui

Noon. My morning's been beset by snappings, poundings, drillings, and such, as Junior (the maintenance man) and a younger man (his son?) reframed the door to my apartment and then refitted it with locks. I stayed in my reading chair the while, drinking Chinese tea and reading: French vocabulary, At Swim, Two Birds, At Swim, Two Boys, and Coveny's The Image of Childhood. Relaxing, but not illuminating. The more recent At Swim, which so captured me at first, has petered off in its final hundred or so pages into a highly conventional (one might even say Hollywood) narrative, and its prose has slackened with it. Still, it's a pleasure, just not the literary pleasure it was to start.

Not much else to report. I've been thinking of travel, of bedrooms, and blogs, but nothing that I care to expand here at present. Otherwise, I'm poor (precisely because my spending indicates otherwise), and I'm slowly establishing something of a routine (though one interminably interrupted - the phone technicians yesterday, my door today, the dentist on Thursday). I rise early to daily morning thunderstorms, and spend an hour at the gym round the corner. I make plans for drinks in the evenings, and watch films or tv shows in French or French subtitles at night. With a slightly larger bank account, I might have the perfect early summer existence.

From the Book to Writing

Saturday evening. Books and tea. Backworld's Isles of the Blest on the stereo. It's been a long week of "teacher training," and not till tonight has time begun to thin itself out again, space to expand with possibility (and all of it unclaimed). A week without reading (or meaningful writing): uncomfortable and exhausting.

I've been re-reading Of Grammatology for a reading "couple" Jeehyun and I have formed. Her advisor told her it would be a waste of her time, and I'm slightly worried she'll have actually found it so. Reading it for the third or fourth time, I find it a slew of contradictory qualities: universal and esoteric, ahead-of-its-time and dated, eloquent and prolix. Its spirit, more than its argument (much of it now ubiquitous), most grabs me - and (dare I say this?) its prose, despite Spivak's occasional jumbling. Ian characterized the first section, "Writing Before the Letter," as a manifesto; I prefer to think of it as a challenge.

Derrida writes: "The idea of the book is the idea of a totality, finite or infinite, of the signifier; this totality of the signifier cannot be a totality, unless a totality constituted by the signified preexists it, supervises its inscriptions and its signs, and is independent of it in its ideality. The idea of the book, which always refers to a natural totality, is profoundly alien to the sense of writing. It is the encyclopedic protection of theology and of logocentrism against the disruption of writing, against its aphoristic energy, and, as I shall specify later, against difference in general. If I distinguish the text from the book, I shall say that the destruction of the book, as it is now under way in all domains, denudes the surface of the text. That necessary violence responds to a violence that was no less necessary."

The change that Derrida is (prematurely) announcing, is one of thinking, of theory, and of reading - but it is also one of material (cf. Paper Machines). "The destruction of the book" is thus not merely its deconstruction, but the shift from a form whose own materiality contains its totality to one that is increasingly open, not only to writing itself, but to the new modes of time and space (diachrony and synchrony) that writing qua writing uncovers. What will this new materiality look like? Much like what you're reading here. The form of the "blog" or the "web" is simultaneously "public" (that is, "published") and "private" (that is, "rough"). It is a form that, at least in theory (if not yet commonly in practice), does not cut by way of a temporal marker the work from its writing. The end of the book (as signalled by the internet) is the end of the end of writing.

This is fundamentally what The Libray's Grain was created to realize. Whether it does (or does yet) is perhaps not presently determinable. But it has, I believe, evolved over its year-long existence to better accomodate the textual principles the new form requires. In its first form, a blog titled Verneinung, which consisted of #1-#73 (though some of these have been revised, some deleted, and some completely re-written), the driving question was that of time, of how to escape the pull of linear narrative. It's answer (an answer that The Library's Grain has dramatically complicated, but essentially preserved) was: seriality.

Clearly, the Book has already written its own death (Joyce, Mallarme, etc.). What the new form must do is preserve this death as a form of birth, to give this "death" the time and space to grow into something other than life or its end. Thus Derrida's constant insistence that the opening will necessarily require the repetition of the closure. From my perspective, and for my own project, what exceeds the novel must nevertheless repeat the novel. It must, as the second anonymous comment to "It's in My Jeans" has reminded me, in a single gesture both welcome and frustrate "Encylopedia Brown," and everything proper to his name.

It's in my jeans

Sara and I stroll through the Equality Forum's sidewalk festival. Gays and lesbians everywhere. I'm surprised how few I recognize from my days as a barrista. Matt, in shades and a blue v-neck, his boyfriend Chris by his side. Patrick. Geoff. Jordan, in a brisk pace (he doesn't see me). Les. Jesse once more with the inevitable (and forgettable) boy in tow. "Let's go get food at Tangerine," he insists. I protest that we haven't the money. He points a finger at my jeans: "Oh, please. That pair of jeans cost you the price of five dinners there!" A sudden image: Myself in briefs in Tangerine, my jeans in hand and proffered to the waitress: "Take these and give me five martinis, three entres, and a table full of appetizers." Sara sees it too and smiles.

At home I'm restless, hungry. In Valerie's book, I find the following: "Gerty and Stephen use language as they use clothes, to conceal their physical desires and fears. Their self-consciously stylized thoughts serve to disguise their sexual urges and their bodily weaknesses, hiding them from themselves and in the process revealing them to those engaged in the voyeruristic act of reading." And later: "As characters, they are not 'self-authored' in any sense; lost in a world of signifiers, they are strangely isolated figures in the solid world they find so alien. Their private, derivative fictions are highly colored, intense, and sterile; indulgently self-referential, they lose all meaning when challenged by the mundaneness of everyday life." Yes, yes; you've caught me Val. And so, my question to you (or anyone who reads this): How does a Stephen blossom into Bloom?

"Sound effects and laughter / stupid ever-after / hoping it was cranked up / loud enough for you to hear"

Warm morning. Summer breeze through the open window behind my reading chair. It's damnedly difficult to concentrate. And it will only get worse. Last night: drinks with Jesse, his roommate Chris - a medieval historian, and Erica. Words? To Jesse: "I did not say you wouldn't get into graduate school; I said you wouldn't succeed in graduate school." Teasing, playful. Together at a bar, the lure of sex was everywhere. Jesse, shy but seeking. Myself, brazen but abstemious. To Erica: "Shall we go?" And we went. Later, alone in bed, I dream: Jesse, professorial, lecturing from the podium. And myself, as in a movie, with the music's crescendo: David Byrne's "The Great Intoxication."

"You find my words dark. Darkness is in our souls do you not think?"

The mapping project mentioned previously has begun, and you can follow its results in Of Maps and Such That Wander. The formatting's a hellishly monotonous process, and so, if I'm to do anything else with my time, what was meant to be a daily excursion will need occur less frequently. Still, it's fruitful, and already the novel's opening paragraphs are taking shape in my head.

In fact, I do little more since school has ended than work upon the novel. Every book I read is a compromise: chosen for the field (the exam that precedes the dissertation stage of my program) and that field itself formed to support the novel. Vicki has mentioned that this is - once upon a time - how criticism strove to function. Analytic and synthetic at once. But the days of Eliots are over, I'm afraid. If ever such days existed.

There's a risk in all of this, of course. Not of being a failed scholar, for scholarship comes easy to me. But of producing a failed novel - or, what is worse, a brilliant novel that no one cares to read. Last night, Jordan accused the prose of The Library's Grain of being "nonsensical." "Inaccessible" also (though the two are not compatible). I would have agreed to inscrutable, but not to the words he wielded.

If The Library's Grain is inscrutable, that is so because its substance is propadeutic. Not necessarily for me or for its readers, but for the novel itself as it grows. That being so, the site neverthelss follows a logic, and each of its postings is complete and largely self-sufficient. Though it lacks the clarity of a novel's space and time, it is not without grammar and syntax, nor without the form and matter of a medium - though that medium is not (and cannot be) novelistic.

The truth is, that unlike this blog, I care little whether The Library's Grain is read at all. For that too - the openness of a writing that is not the openness of a novel - belongs to The Library's substance. And as such belongs to me. Which is to say that The Library's Grain is not meant to be read as one habitually reads the texts one encounters. To read it is rather to become involved with it, to be read in it and by it, and so be made to appear in the reflection of its frame. One can read it, thus, accidentally, impressing oneself upon its pages without ever having opened to one's vision a word.

If I appear, in this post, to hold my work at a level that it has not yet proved it deserves, I do so of necessity. For the work is not yet a work, and to entreat it with less than an absolute insistence is to bequeath it in its very conception to those who are neither its readers nor writers. This I will never do. Writing, I have come to believe, is a loyalty to what has not yet arrived and to what has, thus, not yet proven its merit. And so I have come also to believe that we should know the world in writing, or know it not at all. Everything I choose to value - friendship, history, protest, desire - can only as writing take place.

The City of L'Estate

Summer has begun in earnest: not just the span, but also the midst. Yesterday found me shirtless, lifting boxes up and down stairs. And today, the stacatto of city blocks to the river, my arms and legs a set of pistons in the sun. I rise and do my French, write lines like: Une femme quitte la chambre and Monsieur Pacquet vient des grands magasins. The reading chair and reading; the writing chair and writing.

And today I start a new routine: I walk, each day, a city block. Sketchpad/notebook. Camera round neck or in hand. I am mapping the course of my novel. The first chapter, the first day, being the chapter (the day) of maps. And so I go to plan the route of Stephen and Square. The city itself is their unconscious that day, the names of stores and cracks in pavement prompting each and every mis-speak. If there's such a thing as mis-speak. A derive.

With this in place, at length, the novel's writing can begin in earnest.