Thanks, Isabel Allende! I've decided to try out a little something for a book of great beauty, the Botany Story, which is to switch between first and third person (but still always following the same character, the botany professor). I don't know how well it will work, as I'm obsessed with my narrator, but the problem is is that he strays away from plot often, and I need a little bit more control over it. Also, I think he sounds too much like me, and perhaps if I stay a little bit away from him, that will happen too. So we'll see. We're all post-post-post-post modern here, so anything's possible structure-wise, so I might as well experiment. It's a big intense book after all, and I won't be able to work on it all spring (snif) because I'll be working on the translation of Benedetti's book for my Honors project.

Speaking of Isabel Allende, I've totally forgotten to post up what I *did* get to read after I left Paris. While I only got fifty more pages into Middlemarch, I was able to finish House of Spirits by Isabel Allende. Just yesterday, I finished reading Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, in the original French, yay! I'm going to be reading a book of shorts by that guy who just won the Nobel Prize this week, although I doubt I'll get through the whole book. Anyways, we'll see about that too.

Myself, I need to work on being back in the States again. I'm finally home, but I'm afraid that I've been gone so long, that that might not really be the name of this place anymore. I'm going to do some work today at Java Zone after lunch, and I'm letting myself work on whatever fiction I need. Because I need it to feel more in place, I guess.

Oh, God, Mika. I know for a fact that my taste in music is terrible, but I don't care. I love Mika.

Spiral, etc

Spiral submissions coming up--due in like a week. I've agreed to edit Alyssa's submissions, in return for her editing mine, even though, I'll still do it if she doesn't have the time to look at mine. I'm hoping I'll be finish part I of the novella, but I have a back-up submission if I'm not able to finish it (but I really, really, really want to !).

Writing's not going as quickly as I wish, considering the little amount of work I have presently in comparison to what I was working on before. But I can't write when I'm exhausted, and since I got back from the States, I can only write so much per sitting. Hopefully, some time today at Starbucks will change that. (Yes, there are Starbucks in Paris!)

I'm cleaning my place currently. That helps me think.

New projects:
-Putting together a story for a friend. Inter-war era Paris, perhaps New York too. Very glamorous happenings, despite economic depression in the states.
-Want to put SOAP in the 50s. Totally. Screenplay it up.
-Considering asking Harris Lapiroff if I can put one of his poems to a comic strip. His poems have a very youthful feel to them, which can be good or bad sometimes, but I think that as he gets older this youthful feel will be more and more appropriate--perhaps due to its feeling of nostalgia, or something. Here's the poem he wrote up that I like:

How I Long to be Found in a Time Beyond Love

November when air is warm with climate change,
I pray for nuclear winter, another ice age,
a snow that falls soft and lovely and enduring.

You and I wandering the streets of Albany
and out to the beach, flakes of aftermath
dropping one by one by one onto our limbs
weighing down until we move no longer but only
sleep compressed under thousands of pounds of powder,
found millennia later by excavators
with tinted goggles and laser drills.

Our pictures on the news,
us kept below zero in a block of ice
preserving our perfect bodies.

An archeologist leading a tour points and says
see their strange clothes, the way they wear their hair
see the way their eyes light up at one another
and the way their fingers twine.

Something I could totally never put together myself, but that I nevertheless enjoy. Am also reading a totally shallow book called Cliente in French by Josiane Balasko. It's about an escort boy and this older lady. Figured if I'm going to be reading in French, especially before a superserious private reading in January, I should read something superly awesome. Therefore the purchase as well of some French slam-poetry and Persepolis (ohgodIlovethisbook). I've read everything by Marjane Satrapi, but only in translation. I'm so excited to read her in the original! Oh...and I bought something by the Marquis de Sade.

Elisa