some weeks have gone by and who knows what has happened. because it wasn’t written it will fade into fog and be blown away by the winds of time. 

i had my surgery. i am recovering well. my insides are no longer pressing at my skin, centimeters away from escape. now, perhaps an entire inch keeps them at bay. 

instead of writing these entries i was working on a new project, of which i have produced some 7500 words. however, i am now stuck once again, and so in order to prevent coagulation i will keep the blood spilling here. 

i have begun reading the journals of sylvia plath. i have never read a word of her prose or poetry before, but i am absolutely stunned by her journals. only 50 pages in and i have ordered ariel and a collection of her short stories. i already own the bell jar but have never opened it. 

why did i buy her journals, knowing nothing of her? i don’t know. i always enjoyed the journals of famous writers, especially those posthumous ones that they never expected anyone to read. so when i saw it randomly in a bookstore, i opened it, read the first few pages, and knew i must read it all. 

i am also reading the first volume of the journals of anais nin, and though she is a brilliant writer, there is a certain self-consciousness and ego that makes so much of it feel contrived. anais planned all along to publish her journals, and her friends would read them as she wrote them. this seems antithetical to the kind of pre-internet idea of journaling, which was more of an unfiltered conversation with oneself. 

i suppose i’ll have a better comparison when i’ve read more. 

i also read susan sontag’s on photography which was brilliant. 

and before that i read raymond federman’s double or nothing which was chaotic and fun and the most i’ve laughed at a book in a long while. 

and that, i believe, catches me up to before i stopped posting. i have only read 18 books this year. pathetic. if i’m not writing and i’m not reading then what the hell am i doing? the answer is, i am doing both, both are pretty much all i think about. but i start things and then leave them unfinished. i wonder, if i totaled up all the words ive read this year but left the book unfinished, how many ‘books’ i’d be at. i wonder how many tens of thousands of words ive written and then left to rot unfinished in my ‘in progress’ folder. too many.