Flourish
December 2005
vol. 1, no. 10
In
1972, the cult author Harry Crews wrote a novel titled The
Car. It is about a young man who announces that he
will eat a Ford Maverick in full view at a downtown hotel.
About a decade later, Natalie Goldberg, in Writing
Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within , mentions
that she once heard about a man who ate a car. Not all at
once, but slowly, over a year's time.
I
suppose that my first response, on reading such anecdotes,
should be to roll my eyes. How far-fetched! But I keep on
wondering if maybe somebody did do it. Or at least started
to, maybe on one of the, you know, tiny European models.
Or perhaps I just wish it was true because it sounds so
much like writing a book.
At
every stage you wonder, but do I have to eat that? Well,
how am I going to eat that? I said I was going to eat the
whole thing: was I insane? But I really don't feel like
eating the radio today. I don't think I can face the steering
wheel. I thought I was done with the tires, but I forgot
about the spare. Wow, is it already May? I only have a month
to get through the carburetor.
Sound
familiar? Eating a whole car is damn hard. So is writing
a book. Be nice to yourself.
The
Horror, The Horror
“I'm
going to say this officially, so you can use it. I don't
care. After that article in Lingua Franca where I was unmasked,
I don't care. Do you know that I have not seen a lot of
the films that I write about? For example in [my book] Enjoy
Your Symptom , there is a long chapter on Rossellini.
I haven't seen the films. I tried to, but they are so boring.
They're so boring! …
“Now,
I will reveal something to you (My God! Let's go to the
end in this Lingua Franca territory!): often I don't have
time to read the books about which I write. I will not tell
you which ones. More and more (My God! This is a horrible
thing to say!) I rely on summaries like Cliffs Notes. One
English version of Cliffs Notes (it has a different name
over there) is for me the ultimate sublime; it's the Cliffs
Notes version of the Bible. At the end of the book, you
get a description of the characters, and it says, ‘God,
an old, omnipotent but jealous gentleman; Christ, a young
gentleman.' It's wonderful! So my idea is that the ultimate
dream would be to write a Cliffs Notes summary of a non-existent
story. You go directly to the Cliffs Notes, and if reactions
to the Cliffs Notes volume are good, then you write the
work.”
Slavoj
Žižek in Critical
Intellectuals on Writing , ed. Gary A. Olson and Lynn
Worsham. NY: SUNY Press, 2003
Tipping
Point
Do
you find it hard to remember when grant proposals, fellowship
applications, conference abstracts, or edited volume papers
are due? Try using an online reminder service. I use the
free service Memo to
Me but there are others, including schedulers in Microsoft
Outlook. With Memo to Me, you just register, enter the information
about the application, put in the due date, and include
the times when reminders should be emailed to you in the
weeks before hand. It may take you about an hour to set
up all the grants you are interested in, but you can set
them on yearly rotation and not worry about them again.
News
from the Editor
Unfortunately,
there are no Cliffs Notes for what I write about; so I'm
off to chew through a few volumes. Happy holiday eating
to you, too!
