barthelme and failure

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.”