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∙ 304 ∙ on Writing and its Discontents: restive resistance ■ Excerpts from Letters to Geoffrey Young November 14, 1984 Women want me. Straight men are willing to go gay for me. Cats and dogs lift hind legs when I pass. I mean, need I say mo’? Things here are massif (Fr., solid, Jacques), and I am writing a thang for the LA County [Thomas] Barrow show that seems to show me that I can write words I believe in, feel, and that challenge sense. It is almost one year to the day since I completed the Barrow notebook, almost 160 pp of hash and scratch and sense and (non)sense. I wanted then to push it into essay form, finish it and move ahead, like some trading capitalist. I came up against the wall, a lunk of a one, built block by block. I admonished myself, cajoled, tried to trick myself into continuing. STALL. HALT. Stop. Block. Depression, the inner voices shouting and putting my own silent screams in my ears.A year passes. During it, phrases recur under that code, TB, and I jot them in my working journal. I began again 1 Nov., and realized that once I finish a notebook I gotta let it sit. Now things are smooth. Summer before this one, Matisse and The Red Studio. This summer past a fat one of what may be fiction, coded N (the narrative), and is like the Artspace TLP stuff of some years back, business unfinished, potential, and haunting—the eternal recurrence of the same—but it tells me I have a few stories to tell, some work to work, a wall to build, stone by stone, out of the ruins, and so. . . . December 11, 1984 I have such trouble writing these days. Restive is the magic word—look it up, no: restive I come to the writing that makes me restive, and restiveness on writing and its discontents ∙ 305 finally makes me restless. I doubt I’d review anything unless it really stoked me, a Wind-and-Sea word I never got the drift (spindrift) of, there (so as not to end even on the prepositional apparent part of the voib). The Barrow, good as it is—I can see that, and say it, after a ridiculous number of years’ work on it. Yeah, ’77 on Gun Club, and then notes coded in the margins of that notebook, and then fortunate delays in the opening, and more time, more notes. Finally, set aside; then pulled out and rebegun about one year to the date it was shelved. Brooding, mooding it, all the time, more codes in the daily marges and lined littorals. I sometimes feel mine is a subjective state. Then I attend and see that several subjects orbit what appears to be an empty center but which in reality feels plugged, full, like the bung in Alas, poor Yorick (look it up, Hamlet). Here is what is amazing.The law of diminishing returns: within a month of worrying up stuff in notes I already have the basic shape the think thing will take, and yet I push on, provoking writing, if not nature, demanding more, the original, unique, the twist; then, next stage, I undo this, wanting to dramatize the daily, feel it vibrate; and I digress, do I! Other night [some friends came] over; Janet [Maher] says,There is so much writing. He could stop now, begin typing, and take the rest of his life finishing and publishing. That took me by surprise. She believed, she knew, that what I did down here, no matter how fragmentary, was writing; she believed value was in it, something, as you know, I have trouble believing; and she saw me finishing. I, on the other hand, am presently suspended, not knowing whether this pull and gravity I feel is in a forward direction or am I sliding backwards. Unstable, volatile, and that is fine, an anxiety in which one can dwell however reluctantly. Do I believe I will one day burst on the scene? No. But I will one day, soon, produce a couple of good books, and that will be that. All my life has seemed a preparation. For what? Years ago Pearl said, You burned up everything before it happened, Beats, Hippies, etc. And in that is a small truth: I read them all with disappointment, thinking that in us there was something better to be expressed and that they had not done it, not Mailer, and...

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