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.
