reading the waves

Books like Virginia Woolf’s The Waves require a different kind of reading. You have to resist the urge to continually interpret what you’re reading and just let the text talk to you — take it in and see what forms in your mind. 

words @

Places I write:

• This blog - What I write here is very free, informal, experimental. 
• Medium - These are more like proper essays or articles, that I write for an audience. 
• Substack - Here I write about English, literature and literary theory.
• Patreon - This is something new, where I'm going to try to write fiction.

200

Sometimes I feel like what I write has to be profound to matter, but then I was thinking about the value of writing about everyday life and concerns. In 200 years’ time, people are going to be interested in what life was like in 2026, and what seems ordinary and everyday now will then be more interesting than most other kinds of writing. The example of Anne Frank comes to mind. She just wanted to write her own thoughts and reflections relative to the difficult experience she was going through. When she did that, she surely wouldn’t have thought that anyone else would read what she wrote. At most she may have shared some of what she wrote with people she was close to. But look what happened. Her work is timeless, immortal, treasured by millions. 

tfw

when you tune out and realize that you've been listening to an ad for 5 minutes and your song hasn't come on yet

possession

E: do you ever feel it's not coming from you at all?

W: yes, it's as if I just chanced to be in the right place and it chose me. Is that strange?

E: no. I feel that too....when my writing is at its best. 

Sometimes it's not as if you're writing something or you're creating something....it's as if this thing has to be written and it's using you for that purpose. at the same time, you know you're writing it. 

page and screen

I enjoyed the TV show, The Man in the High Castle, so much that I got the book by Philip K Dick. It's a good example of the principle that, to faithfully adapt a book for the screen, you have to change the story in fundamental ways. 

The basic idea is the same. The axis, not the allies, won the second world war, so America is governed by the Reich and the Japanese. There is a subversive text or set of texts that show a world where the allies won. In the TV show, the subversive texts are films, but in the book, it's a book. 

It makes a lot of sense when you think about it. In a TV series - a text on a screen - the subversive text is a film - a text on a screen - but in the book, it's a book. In a funny way, it's not even a change. It's a direct adaptation. It's faithful to the spirit of the book, not the letter of the book. 

taper news

Officially I'm down to 3 x 2 mg of Valium a week, but for the last 7 weeks, my weekly total has been less than 3. There's a certain logic about the mechanics of tapering that presents itself. My plan flowed from the realization that I could break the tablets into quarters. Now I get through most days on a quarter of a 2 mg tablet = .5 mg. 

Breaking the tablet into 4 quarters isn't an exact science, but it doesn't really matter. Because I can't break the quarters into eighths, not that there would be any point to doing so, I can only reduce to 0, from this point. I'm getting there. There have been a couple of days when I forgot to take the quarter but then remembered later. Also, how much is .5 mg going to affect me? Even when I take a whole 2 mg, which I sometimes do, I don't really feel any effect anymore. 

The big thing is sleep. I used to need at least 2 x 2 mg to sleep and that has been steadily reducing until now I take .5 x 2 mg and I don't really need it. I can sleep without it, and soon I will.