Books and writing

Posted on June 30, 2013 by edmundberger

In a recent comment on my post “Fragments of Ektos/Modernism’s Delirium”, Steve/Noir-Realism wondered if I had a plans for a book tying together the many disparate strands that I’ve been putting up on my blog. Indeed, I originally conceived of this digital space as one for raw-notes for a such a project; however, there seems to be something awful, something daunting about the proposition of an idea of the book. I understand what my topic and aspirations would be, but structure, tone, speed all seem to evade my grasp. Every time I think I’ve hit the formula in my mind, it slips away, finding its only representation in the ever-increasing volume of notebooks that are rapidly filling every open space of this house. That said, I’m going to again embark on this process – one cannot confront these things but charging head-on into them, experiencing the journey in all of its unpredictability and wildness. I’ll thus be using this space as both one of reflection on the writing process, but also one that allows me to sift through my thoughts and organize them – hopefully gaining good feedback and criticism along the way. Also, if any folks out there in the cyberspace would have any interest in reading and providing feedback on chapter drafts as I finish them, let me know!

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7 Responses to Books and writing

  1. dmfant says:
    July 1, 2013 at 2:59 pm

    sounds like my stillborn dissertation, that said I’m a much more able reader/editor than a writer so if I can lend a hand than let me know.

    Reply
    • edmundberger says:
      July 1, 2013 at 7:01 pm

      Excellent, that would be great! Stillborn, perfect description…

      Reply
      • dmfant says:
        July 2, 2013 at 1:00 am

        very good and sadly yes like a patch-worked critter you might find in a specimen jar in the lab on the Island of Dr. Moreau, tried to be clever and have the text perform with/in the reader what the I was also trying to describe but it never really came together, ah the heady pipe-dream days of interdisciplinarity…

  3. Clifford Duffy says:
    July 2, 2013 at 9:49 pm

    I have been reading your blog, a bit here and there, from time to time for about a month. You are a very graceful writer and it’s a pleasure read what you say. I am a poet from Canada with oodles of what I term fiction blogs. You can see them in my blogger profile. It’s not word press. I have especially enjoyed your comments about Felix Guattari and old professor Deleuze. As for writing books, it’s a strange business, and I have not written the sort of book you are thinking about. I have written poetry books, and been a performance artist. However, we are in the midst of a great change over of forms of publishing at this time, and perhaps one cannot ‘translate’ the one to the other. I find that I write quite differently on blogs than I do elsewhere. It stands to reason doesn’t it? And one can ask, and should, what is writing anyhow? I did a ph.d thesis about Paradise Lost and The Waste Land and joined the two of them together in a disjunctive bridge persuading my readers that a schizoanalytic approach would yield a different and better understanding of those poems. What I wrote was very small compared the gigantic area of study both of those works encompass.If I learned anything about this business of writing and creating over the last years of time it was that expression is always more and less (and not or), at the same time than one thinks. It escapes us, and we don’t know what our work is, nor where it lies, nor its use . One often hears it said the creator or writer cannot be the ‘purser’ or the decider of the value of a work. I believe this is so, at least if one he thinks in these sort of tidy economic pastiches. However, however, one goes on, and works and does and does. And then, o well, I think my thought just ran out of steam. But perhaps a comment in a blog has a kinship to a gloss in an old manuscript and from there who knows what pursuits will come of it?

    Reply
    • edmundberger says:
      July 8, 2013 at 8:29 pm

      Hi Clifford, sorry for the belated response, and thank you for your kind words! I’m going to check out your poetry writings later this evening… “If I learned anything about this business of writing and creating over the last years of time it was that expression is always more and less (and not or), at the same time than one thinks. It escapes us, and we don’t know what our work is, nor where it lies, nor its use.” This is a perfect description of the process: the best nuggets are always those off the cuff, written as the flows of thought emerge from the mind. This is a problem when writing academically inclined stuff (even if the writing is coming from outside the academic realm), or writing about any form of politics. Blogging, in a lot of ways, allows this to be circumvented, but when projected into book format, these is that which escapes – the poetry of it. What I’m trying to set out to write will be condensed, not fully comprehensive, but I aim to do it in the form of two parts: part one being a cursory exploration of the historical circumstances that generated what Deleuze called the Control Society, while I hope that part two will be more in a free-form, expressive mode. Its a unpredictable project, so who knows what will happen!

      Reply

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