Amazing journals by "trumpetvine" who not only journals daily but paints beautifully and blogs. I was about to get a real complex until I realized that her last blog entry was in 2008. OK, I might just cut myself a little slack...I’m facing that problem. During each day I’ll think of one scathingly brilliant thing to blog about. Before I have time to sit at my computer, though, life intervenes. Someone books a room at the Mercantile and I have to get the room ready because it’s Amy’s day off, I have to do another six loads of laundry, I have to zip into Memphis to pick up our beer order (they won’t come down our road). Or it’s time to make breakfast, or lunch, or dinner. Or whatever. The blog simply doesn’t happen.
Compound time constraints with the problem of writing envy. One of my friends on Bookmooch.com listed David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest as her all-time favorite book, which made me curious. Sleuthing through Amazon’s listings and reviews I came upon this paragraph:
Amid the screams of adulation for bandanna-clad wunderkind David Foster Wallace, you might hear a small peep. It is the cry for some restraint. On occasion the reader is left in the dust wondering where the story went, as the author, literary turbochargers on full-blast, suddenly accelerates into the wild-blue-footnoted yonder in pursuit of some obscure metafictional fancy. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Wallace's latest collection, is at least in part a response to the distress signal put out by the many readers who want to ride along with him, if he'd only slow down for a second.
And my only thought is “Holy Shit!”
How on earth can I keep up with THAT? I can’t even scrape the muddy boots of writing like that. And it’s only the description of DFW’s writing.
So I writhe in my vat of inferiority, and get no writing done. Instead I read still more books, and surround myself with glorious writing, and compose unposted blog entries in my head. Sigh…
