The life and opinions of Master Kidderminster, Gentlemen
I have been feeling inept over the last few days and weeks. My hair is unkempt and I look like I take less care of myself than many a student. Over the last few days too I have been thinking over the opportunity of stopping work for a while to write. This is what I have wanted for years and I have been offered it. I should be jumping at the chance, but instead I hesitate. Read the rest of this entry »
I got depressed at around three o’clock today when M____ went to work because I hadn’t done anything this morning or afternoon and didn’t know what I could get down to, and indeed I didn’t get down to very much at all. I read a little of Exit into History by Eva Hoffman, one of the many books on Eastern Europe that I had bought over a year ago for research into Darina’s part in the novel, something which had been born back then as a novel in and of itself sometime around new year 2005 from M_____’s experiences as an au pair and which I had vacilated over but couldn’t get shot of. After that I cooked a pasta sauce listening to Robert Openheimer, American Prometheus, the audiobook I have managed to stick out the longest. Read the rest of this entry »
Today may be a significant day. I have been getting increasingly recently by the rut I have been stuck in for years. I had a go at my psychiatrist last time I was there, on Tuesday, telling him I was just barely keeping above water, and that it was not ok, not in any way tolerable to keep on like that. I became quite animated, finally telling him exactly as I saw it, just as I had in my head numerous times before seeing him. It is intolerable that nothing comes to anything. That I am constantly looping around and around on one project after another, not completing anything. I can’t stand it and, as I told him, it leaves me with no quality of life at all outside of work, which has been going quite well, certainly in relation to my social life and the restless chaos of my free time. Read the rest of this entry »
Crux: Comment made by Doctor Huffenbinder that homeopathy is common sense.
Background: An increasing awareness that I find it difficult to be in a room with a lot of people, and that sat in such an environment I become increasingly twitchy and eventually, after sitting silently for a period of time, explode in a rant.
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I found this just now trying to find the last few lines of a poem I began writing a few days ago. An attempt at free verse, essentially, at telling a story in this form as much with the intention of finishing something by not getting bogged down in extraneous detail as anything else. Like much apprentice work, this is truly cringe-inducing, but it is a snapshot of a time, and a desperation. A desperation of not being able to write, and a desperation at not being able to live.
This was addressed to a woman at work who showed me some affection. Someone who had lent me an ear when I needed it and made me feel human. It had been intoxicating. This poem was written before we had an affair. I remember nothing about writing it but it is probably as close to automatic writing as I get, and so it is as true as it is poetically shoddy. It is also incomplete, of course. The central metaphor is robbed from a very famous poem I have read a couple of times but could not track down, a poem which features a man rowing to meet his lover and scratch against her window.
The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford. A biggie. Weighing in at 680 pages this is the kind of book that a colleague of mine, a former raver and current father of a nine month old who once felt the need to kick his brain into gear after a good few years’ overindulgence in drugs and did so by reading the myths and legends of various cultures, would breeze through. I continue of course, to be embarrassed by my own inability to read not only such books as this, but also the majority of books that I buy, those slender volumes that many people would breeze through in a sitting or two but which take the wind out of my mind all the same like a few flights of stairs does to a fat man with a few bags of shopping. Read the rest of this entry »