As I've abandoned Goodreads and am somewhat uncomfortable pouring real thought into Letterboxd any more, I find myself aiming for somewhere to organize thought on the texts I'm interfacing with. I'm shit at reflective writing in notebooks, to any coherence. I've had a desire for a Place again, a blog, a practice blog, an insistence upon thought instead of the casual approach... needed now I think. New directions further apart from the rest. Toward the outside.
As such, let me explain the tags--"godhead" refers to reflective writing on text created by authors whom I ascribe an almost religious importance: Georges Bataille, Marguerite Duras, Bernard Noël, Maurice Blanchot, Antonin Artaud. This could expand, occasionally. Other post-war French poets feel as if they belong their often... Anne-Marie Albiach certainly, Jacques Dupin perhaps, Claude Royet-Journaud, always more, always more. The "project" as it stands, right now (in the sense that is shaping this desire to Pay Attention to my reading at least), is two-fold: the first part involves a systematic investigation of the work addressed by Leslie Hill across three books--Marguerite Duras (particularly from Moderato Cantabile on), Maurice Blanchot, and Samuel Beckett (particularly post-1965, toward my own taste). It will be noticed that two of those three authors have already found their place within the fountain of the godhead, which is what gave me the idea to pay more attention to Beckett (of course, the other connecting thread was Danielle Collobert's insistence on his work... particularly Ping). The second part is a systematic (re-)reading of Georges Bataille's Somme Atheologique, mapped out chronologically and across volumes thanks to the introductory matter put forth by Stuart Kendall in his various brilliant translations.
I'm inherently not an academic, and also inherently more rhizomatic than systematic in my exploratory tendencies, so as long as I've had this desire (for systematic interrogation of above text-bodies) I've flailed somewhat. I've been successful in reading virtually all of Duras's post-Moderato Cantabile work over the last few years, and enjoyed the work immensely, but my reading has been--at best--casual. I don't find this inherently problematic until I want to invoke what it is about her work that carries my obsession, or when I want to recall a particular politic she invokes... It's work that deserves more attention, to say the least. All of the work mentioned deserves my closer attention, as for what it's given me, it's the least I can do in return.
Aside from this, I've also missed a place to blog. After several attempts to set up a Wordpress blog that then ends up locking me out, after trying and failing to get re-energized by group blogs, I'm still after something else. So here we are.