weary today. finally put up “julie” and the first responses were more encouraging than i had thought, so that was a relief—even as they sent my wheels a-spinnin’ over some definite issues with this draft. spinning, mind you, at 1:30 in the morning. because that is how i roll, nowadays: i am officially an insomniac.
so this day already surreal from lack of sleep, and as usual i am sitting at the crossroads of how to use these small precious slices of free time. the spinning brain wants to dig back into “julie”; the sensible brain knows that now is a rest period, i need to stick it in the metaphorical drawer for a few weeks, let the critiques pile up. i tried pressing on with the rework of talassio last night but my goodness, i was tired then, and i’m tired now.
the next idea was to simply call this day a wash—after all, “julie” is getting there now, and still in good time for the deadline that prompted it—and play hookey in some form. go to the bookstore, or the movies. yet my to-read pile has now occupied a full bookcase, and every movie i have seen lately leaves me deeply disappointed . . . it’s as if plot, cohesion, real cause-and-effect have simply been chucked out the window.
or perhaps it’s what auden described, many years ago:
Again, while it is a great blessing that a man no longer has to be rich in order to enjoy the masterpieces of the past, for paperbacks, first-rate color reproductions, and stereo-phonograph records have made them available to all but the very poor, this ease of access, if misused — and we do misuse it — can become a curse. We are all of us tempted to read more books, look at more pictures, listen to more music than we can possibly absorb, and the result of such gluttony is not a cultured mind but a consuming one; what it reads, looks at, listens to is immediately forgotten, leaving no more traces behind than yesterday’s newspaper.
truth.