Come quickly! I'm tasting stars!

And, I would add, sparkly, at times.  At least I mean it to be, I pledge that it will be so this upcoming year, my head already full of New Year's foolish resolutions.  My usual resolution follows the line by John Maynard Keynes,  "My only regret in life is that I did not drink more Champagne."  In fact, am doing my best to get a head start on this resolution by drinking pro secco, not being on a champagne budget.  However it's a fine one, extra dry.  Just the way I like it.  And it is still rather like drinking stars, as Dom Perignon was said to have called out upon tasting champagne. 




 "Come quickly!  I'm tasting stars!"   


Whatever else 2011 will be, it will be a year to re-group, re-think, re-invent.  My most important goals - to have one book accepted for publication, my strange and lonely art forger book, and to finish the other, my strange and lonely book about a purse obsessed woman.  I picked up a book of Deleuze essays and found small signs.  Do you know what I mean by small signs?  Just some tiny clue that I'm not mad, or that I'm on the right path.  For the current book,


"Style in a great writer, is always a style of life too, not anything at 


all personal, but inventing a possibility of life, a way of existing."  




Actually, it works perfectly for both.  My art forger book, Hive, is all about the possibility of a woman art forger existing, possibilities.  And maybe the second book, though completely unrelated in topic or design or even in language and style, is a continuation of the first.  Of course it is.  The Grand Obscurity of the Soul is about inventing a way of existing in a particular set of circumstances.  A way of life.  So.  There.  And thank you Gilles Deleuze for telling me I'm not entirely crazy.


Okay, and here is a short list of books that I've read, been reading, that maybe fall into the 'weird' category.  This is my other goal for this year, to continue to seek out those books that are weird.  Which I mean in the most flattering sense of the word.  A word whose origin can be traced to a connection with destiny.  The Possessed, by Elif Batuman.  How Should a Person Be?, by Sheila Heti.  Steppenwolf, by Hesse.  O Fallen Angel, by Kate Zambreno.  The Paper Garden by Molly Peacock.  The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender.  Some of these books are not weird weird.  Maybe just weird to me because I came upon them just when I needed them.  The ending of The Particular Sadness still haunts me.  Mainly I'm interested in the blurring of writer and narrator and story in many of these books.  How we enter the stories of others. How we appear and disappear. How difficult it is to live with the unbearable, with the frailty of life, just that sometimes.  In short, I felt in reading these books, all so different really, a connection with destiny.  Though for me always, the weirdest most gorgeous book will always be The Stream of Life.


I mean, in Hive, I wrote for 5 or so years, or 10 depending on where you want to start counting, about a woman art forger, about what is real and what is fake, and yes, how the hell to be, to be real and not fake, even though we commit mad acts of fakery every single day, or at least most of us do.  I do.  I try not to.  Also about fragility.  From the introduction to my Deleuze essays, regarding the frail health of artists, "This frailty, however, does not simply stem from their illnesses or neuroses, says Deleuze, but from having seen or felt something in life that is too great for them, something unbearable, "that has put on them the quiet mark of death." "  The frailty of my art forger, of all my current characters, this is central to the writing.  My frailty is central to the writing.  God I am frail, a frail writer.


Okay, and lastly a photograph of a teapot.  Puzzle pieces.  The blurriness of life.  A whole other side of things.  My daily escape into colour and light, if all goes well, it is daily.  It does not always go well.  However, today it did, indeed.