when is a blog not a blog?
well when you don’t blog obvs.
ok ok. or when your blogging software doesn’t work.
one of my favourite writers in dutch, paulien cornelisse, dreamed she had a job as a shaman.
Ik had een baan als sjamaan, maar het was mij niet duidelijk of de mensen dachten dat ik écht sjamanistische krachten bezat, dat zij dachten dat ik dat zelf dacht, of dat niemand er ook maar iets van geloofde. Net als in het wakende leven liet ik het maar zo.
in other words, it was unclear to her whether people thought she really had shamanistic powers or if they thought that she believed that herself, or if no one believed any of it. so just like in her waking life, she left it at that.
a very small piece of shit
david foster wallace is dazzling of course, at least on the page, but it’s a performance, not so much writ large as gargantuan, and where his depression is a raped-by-psychic-Bedouins madness, my real heroine, or should i say kindred spirit, helen garner, just feels like a very small piece of shit and is surprised to learn that not everyone feels like that. but both writers can move me tears with their humanity. and so it was when i read that garner’s ambition was to write prose that doesn’t read like writing, the exact opposite of david foster wallace. if that had been his ambition he wouldn’t have found it necessary to kill himself.