No, that title isn't a typo--it's just me being smart-assy with syntax.
Many moons ago, in an undergraduate English course, I was required to read Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room and I didn't understand most of it. I got that the novel was the mapping of a mind at work, a shifting between past and present, between memory and reality, but it didn't add up for me--too fragmentary, perhaps, or just too non-linear. (By contrast, I loved Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman, read for the same course and perhaps just as non-linear.)
So why is it now, 17 years later, that I fancy myself ready for To the Lighthouse? Maybe having two English degrees and not just one has made me more fragmentary. More likely, I've just read and lived more and am more open to non-linear texts now. Our lives are non-linear texts, too, much as we think we impose linear designs on them. And don't get me started on memory.
Anyway, I have that to read, and I also want to delve into Stephen Dunn's new/selected poetry volume from the 90s. Dunn has long seemed like my kind of poet, but I know precious little of his work. I've taught "At Every Gas Station There are Mechanics" before and gotten good reactions to it. He works the white-male apologia angle well, and I have to say that's an angle I used to come from, back in the good old days when I wrote poetry. Who knows, maybe a spark will be struck.
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