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Today I'm some combination of tired and sick my writing is subsequently lagging. I did pick up a copy of "The Lover" by Marguerite Duras from the sidewalk and finished it in a couple of hours. I love French literature. Is that too broad a statement? Let's say this: I've never read a French author I didn't like. I find it profoundly indulgent and effortless. It's so French that it makes me laugh at its Frenchness and also feel slightly inferior for not being French. I could read Anais Nin all day. Read Nin and smoke cigarettes exhaling hearts all day, but not in America because if you do that here you get lung cancer and die rather than a nice meal and a lover who shares your enjoyment of the post-coital cig and cognac.

Camus. Camus is great. Someone recently told me he addicted to speed. Anything that follows that sentence is not a conversation i'm trying to have here so I'll just move on. I'll read Madame Bovary for a craft of fiction class this fall. I read it when I was 16 or so and again in undergrad. The auctioning scene--I'm whining--bored me both times.

We were supposed to read Montaigne in school. I never did. I was either psychotically bored or depressed at the time and genius didn't seem to help the situation. So I never read Montaigne.

A well known French woman writer with a brilliant short story collection--some long title loaded with ennui and tough-mindedness--not very helpful hints. But every story was brilliant. The one that stuck out to me was about a woman veterinarian who is duped and raped in her own home. So she drugged the attackers with horse pills and grafted their balls to their throats. Then called the cops and sat calmly on her front porch waiting for them to take her away. It was one of the most kick ass stories I've ever read.

On that note, my boyfriend and I have recently been getting back into the Greek tragedies. The stories of Clytemnestra & Medea especially....my roommate is in Greece right now actually and all this is mostly rambling except to say that all these facts could tenuously make a game of connect the dots.

My list is over for now. I've got to get some writing done. It's raining which helps considerably.

Reviewing this post it's clear to me that I have indeed recently indulged in French literature.