Episode 406: Permission To Write (Badly)

Forced myself to complete two poems in the afternoon before heading onto campus for the Ugly Cousins and musical production team meetings, as if I didn't get those done today, I wouldn't have time over the remaining couple of days to finish my 1500-word close reading of Blake and 1234.5-word story for Friday's seminar. I'm being a bit ambitious with the latter, as the book whose pattern I've chosen to recreate is Mark Z. Danielewski's House Of Leaves. Expect copious footnotes that narrate a story as disturbing as the main one. It's also a sneaky way of cutting the word count down to something manageable, since I'm really bad at writing longer fiction pieces, but splitting things between main story and footnotes gives around 600 words, which is definitely manageable. Am slightly more concerned about the Blake piece because I only have a faint idea of how to structure my close reading, although I think it's a reasonably clever idea. I find Duncan Wu's explanatory notes at the bottom very irritating, by the way. It's like being told what to think and then realising that you can't interpret for yourself anymore because you're relying on the glosses to explain things for you.