Digressions, Detours, Wasted Time?

 I need to write one thing this day, and I need to do laundry and get a better grip on the email.

Those are the day's goals. These have been the detours.

DYING CITIES: ON THE LONE BOOK OF 'LOST' NOVELIST ELAINE PERRY

Perry is a wonderful stylist, a vivid writer whose prose unspools like a European art film inspired by American pulp fiction with a soundtrack by Tricky working with the Berliner Philharmoniker. The respected Poets & Writers journal called the book “tragic and haunting…exceptional (and) daring,” Another Present Era is also one of more ambitious novels of that decade. Perry writes in a maximalist style that hasn’t been in vogue in years. I enjoy texts that are overflowing with ideas on culture and sex, angst filled meditations and doomed people trying to escape the dark cloud that looms over their heads until their last breath. 

After reading Another Present Era, which by today’s standards would be labeled Afrofuturism (standing proudly next to Dhalgren and Kindred) I wanted more of Elaine Perry’s words, but there wasn’t any. “It was Perry’s only novel, which is a bit of a mystery, given her talent,” Bridgett Davis wrote in her note. Indeed, it was mysterious, but a few of my favorite creative visionaries created singular works of greatness (Ephraim Lewis/Skin, Charles Laughton/The Night of the Hunter) that will be remembered by a small group of people for years to come. 

“MY MIND HAD BEEN FIRED BY READING CHEAP DETECTIVE STORIES"

Another reminder of books I have not read: Sterne as influencer.

What kind of writer am I, are you? Forget That Stuff about Mounties, Hockey, and Corny Beer Commercials raises points that apply outside of Canada:

As the nation, so the novel, you would think. There’s no longer an essence or a trait that defines a Canadian novel. And yet some novels are regarded more Canadian than others, which are welcomed into the pantheon more like foreign guests. It is still possible to be told: When will you write a novel about Canada? Or: This novel is your most Canadian. Or even to be asked, point-blank: Do you consider yourself a Canadian? Painful questions for the author but honestly meant, asked by “real” Canadians. I’ve encountered all three during my tours. Not long ago, a few literary critics, anxious to defend the purity of Canada’s national literature, came out with their calipers to adjudge the Canadianness of foreign-born authors like me who had arrived recently in large numbers and wrote about elsewhere and were receiving attention in the metropolises. And had the temerity to win prizes as Canadian authors. However, the question I have posed—Am I a Canadian writer?—is not my plea for inclusion. I ask it of myself.

I think this paragraph needs thought over by Canadians, Americans, whoever is to be the writer:

For me to go on writing, it should not matter how I am viewed. I cannot pick up the pen or laptop, I cannot honestly call myself a writer of fiction, if I consciously strive to demonstrate in my writing my credentials as a Canadian or African, a Muslim, Hindu, or Sikh, or anything in particular. Others can use labels to describe writers such as I am for their own purposes, but I cannot work under the shadow of a label. It would make me want to scream for my freedom.  

The whole deserves reading from wherever you read this,

I now wait for the bus to take me back, to get back on track with the laundry. I have not yet written the post that needs to be written. Nor have I gotten to the law stuff on email. I will be back here at the Ball State Students Center again today.

 Ian Hunter has a new album out. To me, it sounds great for all I hear his age.