more books (and reading)

Phillippe Aries: Western Attitudes toward Death

Thomas Lynch: The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade

Catherine Spooner: Contemporary Gothic and Fashioning Gothic Bodies

Geoffrey Galt Harpham: On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature

Kunstmuseum Bern: Six Feet Under: Autopsy of our Relation to the Dead

(i went to the library)

I have a meeting with Terri on Wednesday to talk serious about this thesis. I feel no closer to what it is I want or need to/should do with it - do it for. I need to present timelines, deadlines, outlines and models. I am reading Mourning Sex and underlining often. But still my 'response,' my reading, is emotive and receptive rather than critical/theoretical.
Indeed, why do I separate these out, divide in binarisms?

Wednesday (halloween) is my day to present and receive on the text I just 'completed' for Beth Nugent's writing class. it's all narrative - and personal - narcissistic confessional - moving inwards and outwards, backwards and forwards, structured around dates of journals / comments / poemish stuff. hyper colloquial, and here.

My intention in presenting it to the class is to question the efficacy of personal narrative (relating to trauma + loss) and whether showing rather than speaking about the relationships between desire and death, and timing and memory and the breakdown of language, functions as a part of said text's reading (whether this is obvious - or rather, if the unstated is received as a part of the text's 'statement' as much as what is said.)

(including experimentations in form / image as part of 'text'. etc)

This is what I like to do. I wonder if it would be 'possible' (in a theses sense) to spend the rest of this semester creating and editing these personal narrative texts and then use the next to theorize or expound or analyze those as if I were critiquing (my own work) as an example of the concepts I do wish to explore 'academically' but feel unable to do properly at the moment.

Shit, I dunno. I wish I were doing an MFA instead. I wish I knew what to show Terri on Thursday. And I still need a third reader.