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.
4 comments:
The the literary illuminatti say the same thing. They just have the luxury of saying it about new authors. Stick around long enough and you'll jump on the analysis of some new hot shot first.
it seems less a matter of saying it first than having it published and acknowledged first.
i think all writers at some point have that seemly childish need to be the centre of attention; to be the smartest, funnest, funniest kid on the playground.
i just wish it was stimply a matter of time, "sticking around long enough." Rather, I wish I knew, positively and irrefutably, that it was possible.
p.s. I am bored, extremely bored and tired, of this anxiousness that seems to characterize aspects of me.
I reread my graduation quote in the year book and cringed afterwards. That was the real reason I wanted to chuck it away...it is a concrete and published (widely disseminated amongst my past peers) part of my past full of ineloquent anxiety. Ick.
What was your quote? I, who is truly your friend and will not judge you, and require not an outside source to help me remember you, and have plenty of printed visual aids, don't have the year book. Little help?
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