one thing more - something i said in therapy today - that made her go aha - (interesting how they do repeat the last thing you said - just like in all the books - only there isn't a couch the way there always is in movies) - what author do you like - cees nooteboom - he's a dutch writer - very elegant - cerebral and not at all messy - touches all the deep strings in you - without ever getting messy and involved and emotional - and of course she pounced: not emotional? not messy? and in fact i was just thinking when reading poach's entry on babel tower, and also how almost all my girlfriends return again and again to the frederica books, because they dared to be the kind of book that would hurt like hell - that pertained to those particularly feminine anxieties - and some or all of the things that matter most to us - love and sexuality and words and passion and autonomy and intellect and one's own voice - and that's why i can't bring myself to read them and barely got through virgin in the garden, and probably why after a while gave up murdochs - because i don't want books with emotion and people - not openly so - i don't have that kind of courage - i want my authors to be nootebooms and calvinos - people who write tales and fables and not novels, who build forms and layers and not feelings except as implied through forms and supplied through recognition - remember dinesen in the the cardinal's last tale? "the human characters came on the sixth day only" which is why i can only really love byatt's tales and short stories. or what makes me devoted to possession is its manifest and deliberate literariness and the consequences of that - "we two remake our world by naming it..." and specifically the power of the poetry - sometimes the titles alone can do it - "ask to embla" - just the names ask and embla can make me tremble through association - but then of all poetry really - and again that is why i love nooteboom's characters, who, when they speak, speak in poetry - by which i mean they say things that are less conversation than lines sparing, intelligent, intensely conflated and condensed and hence riddle-like and therefore difficult and poetic and also so terribly elegant - isn't this why i'm mostly attracted to narrative and approaching the world through myth and structure and symbol?