Status Updates From Hole Studies

Excellent chapter on the lessons on community and solidarity that we have chosen to forget or at least let dissipate after the pandemic.

The title is revealed, unveiling a Huxley-ian construction of context to meet at this climax, creating a strong and well supported argument depicting the relationship between women and the health of society.

Despair sings into the flesh and literature practices a form love may yet take.

..how memory is a practice, a discipline that needs you.

How can I remember what I never knew?

*on the Iraq War

I wrote the novel in try and learn who I am when I read.

The novel moves quickly among settings and situations in an exaggerated echo of daily newspaper and its fundamental disorientation..

Alternative history: I have thought or said this myself. Yet what good is this? Instead I want a vision like Dimock's, in which there is a way to ”[live] the present moment within a frame of redemptive, universal history." Literature is an alternative present you practice now.

The dream of fiction imagines us into the endless present of despair.

.. a book is always in the present tense, until the book itself is lost to history.

Correspondence, I stress at the end, is a practice of attention.
I describe correspondence as intimate, as collectively made, as outside the forms of production.

..what literature can offer is practices of attention. Literature Keeps pushing beyond or through or dissolving the forms in which our attention and our language and our narratives and rhetorics take shape, and are disseminated, and establish themselves. So I guess that's what I want.

In what forms does friendship happen? There's an ethos and an eros to the question. Correspondence is writing: it's the work of literature but not a product of literature. It's not concerned with production - a text that's known only intimately... Its language and thinking, the process of corresponding, informs whatever work you're doing, whatever day you're in, whatever books we may later, read or write.

I guess the economy would suffer if we all stopped working whenever we needed to care for each other. But wouldn't we suffer less?

Our labor isn't ours; it bears within it others' work, others' time, their years of frustration, boredom, achievement. And our work radiates through the living hours of those we in no other way know. You may feel what I'm trying to mean.

A relationship has a structure that allows it to go on, emotions and responsibilities stable, expectations understood - a way to introduce each other, for example, to family, or to become for one another a family. There is a form, and the recognizability of the form defines this as a relationship. Otherwise what terms to use, what forms to try? How do I know who I could be for you?

You can describe these two ways to spend time (writing, working) to spend or sell time as if they made up one story, the story of your life. But in your life they have to happen at the same time. At that time you are due at the office. At that time someone is or may be dying.

These essays range so wide and yet are clearly planned tightly. Gorgeous!