A Final Paper, or, A Generic Experiment [version 2]

Spent a day trapped in my own head, relieved by one brief phone conversation, and no writing. It is extraordinarily difficult to care about tactics in academic writing, when one is so utterly self-centered. I’m in some kind of waiting room, metaphorically speaking, and only a very narrow slice of the rest of the world exists to me. Audience, what audience? The writer is alive and kicking (and crying, and going for walks at 3 am, and at 6 am, and spending whole days getting nothing accomplished, and playing with hot wax, and setting up a printer, and getting to the grocery store ten minutes before it closes, and fooling around with the Tarot, and rearranging the furniture, and ignoring that pile of papers and those browning grapes). The readers might as well be dead.