Malcom Gladwell and his excessive reading habits. That's really what Blink, and his previous work The Tipping Point are about. The man is clearly an avid reader and thinker, but a scientist he is not. While he does the amazing thing of channelling science into a story, he fails remarkably to back up what he says.

I had the fortune to read Blink first. Contained in the first chapter is a compelling story that contains a logical fallacy. While this story is not his argument, it's irksome to me as a reader to read something that is clearly incomplete or just untrue, and be expected to just go with it because it makes for a tight passage.

Don't get me wrong. There is a lot to think about in these books, and it takes a writer and thinker of immense talent to distill it into something so easily palatable. I just worry about what was lost to get it.

But it made me think critically, so what else can be asked of it?

I have a great desire to read Songs of Innocence and of Experience. This need to read something at this point is not unusual for me. I have always used reading as a way to track the narrative of my life. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that books has always been my key to understanding this world. My world at home, my family, my world outside and the worlds in my books; reading, and later writing, allowed me to believe that everyone lived this multi-planar existance. And that it was okay.

At this point, when I feel so trapped and even reading has lost it's relevance in my life, Blake seems like something I need.

Andrew, if you're reading this, I would like to go on a hunt for a copy of The Songs.

I just finished The Blithedale Romance and I'm full of mixed impressions. I have read enough Hawthorne to admire his ambition - the scope of the things he tries to say within what he says is 'only Romance.' Hawthorne's descriptions can also be incredibly vivid and insightful, especially with respect to the psychological (although this is more so in his Twice Told Tales). He brought to mind Poe's aesthetic and maybe, to a lessor extent, I hear an echo of Blake's concerns. (Which reminds me that I must read more of Blake's poetry - Kara you might like him.)

But mostly I read his books for his incredible self-conciousness as a writer. I see most clearly that his writing is about writing, and his imaginated stories are about imagination and stories. But beyond that his 'little' Romances have a definitely - though subtle - satirical end.

That said, he is a bit overblown and his descriptions, as often as not, seem irrelevant and boring. Neither a nod to realism nor an imaginary landscape. I'm starting to read Frye in hopes that he can shed some light on the conventions that Hawthorne seems caught in and responding against. So far so good - Frye is immensely interesting.

So far not so good? My essay is non-existant.

Why do some words just sound appealing? I have always enjoyed opera ... but after reading an article with a passing reference to Puccini I keep going back to it. Puccini. Puccini. I have developed a need to hear some Puccini.

I get frustrated with writing. But I get frustrated by not writing. There is something about it which lends me the semblance of peace ('semblance' because it doesn't last) and a perspective available only through the distance which writing can allow.

I must be meant to write - in a life that is busy with other labels and things to be accomplished - because all I am like a mad street person in her mishmashed collection of socialized humanity's scraps with my head down and my pockets full. I hoard my treasures and my thoughts; an no matter how open I may be I am closed to you too. Either way I gather as I go and my pockets keep over-flowing and I am in desperate fear of losing something that I may have forgotten.

Writing is wonderful because, "it is what it is." It gathers layers with time and nuances with each reading and reader. Yet it maintains it's integrity, all without changing at all. The immobility of a unique type of art. And yet it is incredibly accessible as these blogs, livejournals and online 'confessionals' - as I can't help see them as - demonstrate. And as good art exists bad writing definately does as well. This is mainly a segue into my observation about a certain someone's livejournal which is such a horror to read that I have become addicted. Mainly because the site incites an emotional response in me that I have been afraid I had lost - especially at this point in my life. I didn't really know people could be so blissfully unaware of their shallow cliched lives. Shouldn't you at least be aware of it all?

That said, I wish the man next to me in the CNH computer lab would stop scratching his arm pit through the front of his shirt in public. And then touch all the keys on his board.

I'm in the middle of writing up my analysis on Ondaatje's "Claude Glass" (and no where near started the analysis on "Birch Bark" and "Escarpment"). I am definately at that hair pulling and maddening stage, verging on the want to sleep or write, eat obsessively or drink more tea. Thus far I'm swilling back the tea and moving ahead fighting ahead. Taking an inch at a time as I can get it.

It is bad when you want to say, "to some degree his poem, his lines, his imagery is meaningless; he wrote it, kept it, wanted it because it sounds like it looks good." And he writes in opposites too much. Why all the night, light, death, sex, love, hate, memory, place, landscape, stage, Canada, Sri Lanka references? It's as though he fits almost exactly the paradigm of the immigrant's double self. I want to write that all his references to Canada (especially in, In the Skin of a Lion, Secular Love and The Cinnamon Peeler) and his later immersion in the Sri Lankan context (see Handwriting and Anil's Ghost) is almost boring. That it is predictable. That our conversation about it, and the people talking about it (those of the literary, academic and criticism elite - who I am not disparaging. I mean I hope to be one some day although I don't know how realistic a goal that is.) are old and predictable.

Why am I always reading about the same thing? Why am I always saying the same thing? When will I be well-read enough know enough to say something new? When will my words catch up to my head.

Stupid words.

My hunt ended with disappointment and hunger. My hunger for both the book I was looking for and the food that I went without on my all consuming hunt through Mills. Apparently the books that I am looking for, Secular Love and There's a Trick with a Knife I'm learning to do, are no longer in print. Mills, the Bookworm, Bryan Prince and so on, have all failed me. Apparently Amazon has used copies for sale but they are far out of my reach for even I can't rationalize spending 80.00 or 130.00 on a single book of poetry.

On the upside my article on the Page Program is apparently my "best article to date." Although I thought I was taking too much creative licence with a newspaper piece and the ending was crap it is my best piece. Sigh - I thought I had the format down. I wish I could just write the way I want. FINE. I am going to write in the way that I want...at least then I'll like it.

I'm setting up this blog in preparation for my year abroad. I wanted to call it 'My Year of Writing' (an idea from A.M.'s Year of Reading) but as writers out there know, I'm not sure if I will be able to share that process with those close to me, let alone the cyberspace voyeurs out there.

But this post, my first post, is just an experiment.