colin lavery

11/13

gloomy weather (allergies plus depression) absolutely kicking my ass today. reading Drifts, by Kate Zambreno and i think i like it, though i wonder how little one can contribute to a work while still having it taken seriously. most seriousness comes through kafka and wittgenstein. holding it against zambreno though feels unfair, since she said she’s trying to write herself out of existence. 

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is everything else just window dressing? sontag, who also appears here, would maybe say yes, but that window dressing is the point. so what does the reader of Drifts come for, when the decoration is stripped away? are all the books about writing a novel really just about the limitation of the form, for the reader and writer alike? this one seems to be. 

11/14

revisiting some of the thoughts i had yesterday about zambreno. i wonder what % of thoughts i have that are creative and my own. most seem imported, not mine, from somebody i’ve read somewhere. so maybe she’s depicting that as a difficulty of her creative process. 

11/15

“the blue of a sunny november day” – kate zambreno

almost eerie to read that on a blue (sky/mood), sunny november day. she also does a good job of recreating the way you carry the authors, not just the physical books, along with you when you’re reading. the way she sees sebald in the random old man at the train station. makes me want to read walser, kafka’s diaries, sebald (? maybe, read a lukewarm review of his).

earlier, she wonders if language can capture how the internet makes the 21st century the era of layered time and space, a theme she revisits when she’s sitting in the park googling the park on her phone and suddenly she’s sharing the space with the bodies of centuries-old oppressed communities buried right underneath her. 

11/20

zambreno compares her bouts of inactivity to the existence of a dog or a cat. how often we want that, then despise ourselves when we do it. 

also was earlier thinking about the difficulty of “existing in the now”, in writing. maybe at times impossible because of how often we are effectively elsewhere, for one reason or another. when we are in the “now”, our presence there negates our ability to then record it. or assign it the significance of being worthy of recording.

11/22

finished the book. have been thinking about how it would be dishonest, however convenient, to start the review of the book with a preface of some sort. at least not in the spirit of the book i’m reviewing. since it’s concerned with trying to write the feeling of time passing, i want to write my review of a reflection of the time spent reading it. 

11/29

are we here when our mind is with the last book we read? are we present when, as zambreno does in the “novel”, we are engaging with a piece of art and all of our past relationships with other works are there with us in that new “present”? how much of our “real” lives and identities exist only through the literary exercises of reflection and interpretation?