3.11.05 harmless

Several people have asked what my next project is. When I shrug and say dunno they narrow their eyes in disbelief.

But it is true. I think that I should be able to just buckle down and do something new. In the past, nothing could have deterred me from at least conceiving an idea, even if only to discard it later. Now, for whatever reason, I feel like my brain is empty. I keep trying to start a much-delayed essay about the experience of moving to a new country but the sentences do not form.

Instead, I have continued to read, tearing through novels faster than I can replenish the supply and rummaging through our dusty stacks when I need a new fix. I can read three hundred pages a day without much trouble, and twice that on days without parties and excursions. It is such a terrific feeling to dissolve into a fictional world. Some of the books I've read aren't very good but others are so amazing it is almost painful to put them down.

The best quote of the week:

Sophisticated readers understand that writers work out their anger, their conflicts, their endless grief and rolling list of loss, through their stories. That however meanspirited or diabolical, it is only a story. That the darkness in the soul is shaped into type and lies there, brooding and inert, black on the page and active, dangerous, only in the reader's mind. Actually, harmless. I am not harmless.
-Amy Bloom, "The Story" from A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You

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