Rivka Galchen will be putting out a book in June called "Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch". An intriguing title, and possibly true for me. So, if I can, I'll look for it around then, as I'm suddenly taken this morning by the sound of her inner voice. So to speak. Reading her 'personal history' article in the New Yorker, 'plain spoken' seems to be the best way to describe it. Can 'plain spoken' keep the intrigue for a book length novel? Perhaps. She says she lived in Norman, Oklahoma from 1st through 12th grade and mentions friends from there as if she's still in touch with them. 

    So, I decided to try 'plain spoken' writing myself and this is it. The assumption is, perhaps living plainly will follow. That would be a relief, after a phase in my life that has been filled with an endless rehashing of my childhood memories. And I never could come to a definitive conclusion as to who was to blame and who was the savior. I decided yesterday to try on the theory that everybody and everything is to blame, and likewise the possible savior, and found I liked this approach. However much this seems to imply the existence of conspiracy theories however, is only due to lack of resources (time and money) to research further and further into the muck of generation and find out the real nitty gritty. Which I would then print in full and sell as my best selling memoirs.

   Actually, as I follow the threads back and back, I'm sure it all ends up at some plain speaking reason - or force. Perhaps godlike but we're in a godless age now. Trying to move back to the plain speaking age.

    Which is why theory was always tagging along with these excavations of memories: attachment theory, Maslow's Mountain, Deleuze and Guattari's paranoia and BwO, Lacan and desire, anarchist theory on non-hierarchy (my fav), feminism, anti-racism, white fragility, and others. Nothing too deep, at least as far as I could take them. All true and connected, like a spider web of answers that lead to more questions. Which might be fine if I were a publishing author but I'm not. Unless you count the blog I post this to, which gets 0 to 1 visits average a day. Mostly zero. So probably around .15 average a day visits. Which I'm sure are random and last not longer that a nine seconds.

 

    I think so far, what Ms. Galchen has going for her writing over mine is that, in her article about the non-neighborhood she lives in, in central Manhattan near the LIncoln Tunnel, she doesn't veer into the brutalist. Like I tend to do. Somehow she keeps the kid gloves on, a gentle voice, but yet again, avoiding the genteel- which would be condescending and without wonder. She is just there, observing the surroundings and leisurely discovering our place in it. I'm not sure I can keep up.