Finished re-reading Didion’s Play It As It Lays last night and have some time before I have to re-read Fight Club for my Intro to Lit course and I don’t have to read Kingston’s last essay from her book Woman Warrior until Weds night–see what I mean when I say the brain of school has me–anyway so I have some time to read the stack of books that have been building. Books I want to read. So I have Tracy Daugherty’s Hiding Man on my desk, his book on Donald Barthelme. Only had enough energy to read the introduction called “the Lost Teacher” but found a great quote on failure and since this is a blog on failed writing I thought I would post it here. The quote made me feel good about my own failures and my own idea to create this fail blog. And after a week of personal and professional failures the quote caught me off guard. Inspired me. To approach each new draft with a sense of failure. Daugherty quotes Batheleme:
“What an artist does is fail. The actualization fails to meet, equal, the intuition…there is no such thing as the successful artist.”
If you give up failing then you give up working, I think. Sometimes fails and wins must be the same, though, I think. I’m making my brain hurt with this one. Re books: Summertime, John Paul!
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