Wednesday 7 March 2007

Today

Wrote 811 words, then got scared of the introduction and had to turn the computer off in case it bit me (or something). Made J read the introduction to check whether it was any good at all or whether (AS I RATHER SUSPECTED) I should junk the whole thing as hubristic nonsense. She says it is jolly good and only needs a bit of tweaking.

So it looks like I have to admit that I have, in fact, started my book, and am not just messing around with ideas on the screen. Eek. This makes me feel a bit hyperventilaty, and also (oddly) in great need of a green apple, so I am going to the supermarket. On my return, I will cook.

(Still reading Elden's spatial history book, which is now talking about Heidegger's love of the rural, and giving me fun ideas about junking the distinction between rural and urban space - or at least removing the conditions for 'rural nostalgia', something Heidegger totally has and so does Paul Virilio, which is a shame - he does this awesome analysis of the space/time of global sovereignty as mediated/produced by real-time technologies like email and telephony, but then his response to the problem does tend to be so we should all go BACK IN TIME and live in VILLAGES, which is perhaps not ideal for - among other people - the urban queer women among his readership.)

5 comments:

Az said...

villages! no! or maybe villages would be okay, but villages with lots and lots of other villages around them so that there would be no worries about small communities or isolation or rootedness. and email. and appliances run on sunbeams. etc.

i'm so glad you've started your book, though, that is extremely exciting.

Cathy Butler said...

811 is five more than the other day - you're clearly gathering an unstoppable momentum! ;-)

Ika said...

hello!! look!! comments!!

Villages that work like queer families = good (as in 'it takes a village to raise a child' sort of thing), but villages that work like ACTUAL VILLAGES = not so good (and I swear PV occasionally cites rising divorce and abortion rates as signs that everything has gone wrong in the modern world - his prose style is a bit obscure but I'm pretty sure that's true - so I think he means more like ACTUAL villages). Did you ever read The Women's Room? I was always really convinced by Val's Utopia in that, which was sort of interlinked villages all round an urban centre.

charlie, that is quite true. I am expecting to get up to 900 words a day by, um, the time I get home again... ;)

benjamin said...

I think PV is a conservative Catholic in much of his outlook, what with the going to church business and all...

Ika said...

benjamin - that's good to have confirmed (the back of Open Sky says 'at the age of 18 he became a Christian and a militant', but that was the only reference I had to his Christianity, though I think it did make me hyperalert to the anti-divorce, anti-abortion stuff).