So forgive the set up: a summer evening with distant thunder, cool wet breeze sloshing in the windows, trees filing up the sky like a tattered scrim, and me at my computer. Almost too romantic to be endured. If there were a few fireflies (or better, a moon or the tracers of distant fireworks) the metaphor of my passion would be stapled to the genre FOREVER.
But that’s what I’ve got to work with. And in the little garret of my head the writer there has six worn notebooks open, each lit by the flickering light of one single, solitary, solemnizing candle. Around him the yellow pages glow dim as various phases of the moon, and at his back stained-glass windows are squared out and high up in the castle:
The notebook for “business.” In it is a description of the young hairy woman and a scratch-and-sniff spot with $1800 in new bills. Along the side are lists of objects found for cheap by the side of the road.
The notebook devoted to “sex and women.” In it he has a long digression on the admixture of excitement and loss that he feels when he wakes before his lover does. It is parsed out in the style of John Donne.
The notebook in which he writes about his children, how impatient his has been and how he drove his motorcycle (horse-powered, of course, to keep with our pre-post-modern writer-in-the-garret metaphor) over to his sons’ house and left there on the stoop two cans of their favorite soda because he felt like there was nothing else he could do (and the mourning dove cooed a haunting cry, cry, cry!)
The notebook where he writes about writing, teaching, and learning. He writes in this one with his left hand because suffering makes you honest (or so he says in the notebook, though it’s pretty much illegible and might just be talking about his desires).
The notebook where he writes the themes of his reading: how his joke about “printing a test page” made him think how academics spend time perfecting the printing of their ideas, not living them; how Dave Hickey makes him very uncomfortable because he admires and covets that mind and stance; how Benjamin Franklin has been worming his way into many conversations in the months; how his newly purchased book talks about how the humanities change when they go digital, an idea he never considered before;
The notebook where he talks about the English department his colleagues. This notebook is torn and mud-scuffed, and he throws it against the wall repeatedly before picking it up to scribble a line or two;
Then a wind comes up and snuffs out the candle with its long, invisible fingers. The man sits there for a moment, watching the lightning, then strikes a match and lights
The notebooks.
David
But that’s what I’ve got to work with. And in the little garret of my head the writer there has six worn notebooks open, each lit by the flickering light of one single, solitary, solemnizing candle. Around him the yellow pages glow dim as various phases of the moon, and at his back stained-glass windows are squared out and high up in the castle:
The notebook for “business.” In it is a description of the young hairy woman and a scratch-and-sniff spot with $1800 in new bills. Along the side are lists of objects found for cheap by the side of the road.
The notebook devoted to “sex and women.” In it he has a long digression on the admixture of excitement and loss that he feels when he wakes before his lover does. It is parsed out in the style of John Donne.
The notebook in which he writes about his children, how impatient his has been and how he drove his motorcycle (horse-powered, of course, to keep with our pre-post-modern writer-in-the-garret metaphor) over to his sons’ house and left there on the stoop two cans of their favorite soda because he felt like there was nothing else he could do (and the mourning dove cooed a haunting cry, cry, cry!)
The notebook where he writes about writing, teaching, and learning. He writes in this one with his left hand because suffering makes you honest (or so he says in the notebook, though it’s pretty much illegible and might just be talking about his desires).
The notebook where he writes the themes of his reading: how his joke about “printing a test page” made him think how academics spend time perfecting the printing of their ideas, not living them; how Dave Hickey makes him very uncomfortable because he admires and covets that mind and stance; how Benjamin Franklin has been worming his way into many conversations in the months; how his newly purchased book talks about how the humanities change when they go digital, an idea he never considered before;
The notebook where he talks about the English department his colleagues. This notebook is torn and mud-scuffed, and he throws it against the wall repeatedly before picking it up to scribble a line or two;
Then a wind comes up and snuffs out the candle with its long, invisible fingers. The man sits there for a moment, watching the lightning, then strikes a match and lights
The notebooks.
David
No comments:
Post a Comment