for many years, or since shortly after i wrote it, i have avoided reading my book obscenity, anarchy, reality. this is a bit unusual because (hate to admit it) i often read my own old stuff, sometimes proudly, sometimes sheepishly. anyway, i do and do not recognize the voice of that book as my own. really, i guess i'd say i wrote that book in lieu of a breakdown, or it was itself a breakdown and an attempted self-treatment. i think it was written to fend off suicide; but desperation is not the same as inspiration. no wonder i have trouble reading it. my brother adam had just died. my marriage was falling apart. i was trying to change everything. i had a year or two sober. i was working at the university of alabama, and what i did was lock myself in my office for two hours every afternoon; i knocked the thing off in five weeks, affirming all that is; even death, even betrayal, even addiction, etc. i gave myself permission to write any way i wanted, and i do feel that, despite all its drawbacks, it begins to mix autobiography and philosophy in ways i've been trying to do ever since.
it was definitely a rebellion of prose style as well, and in the same period i was producing very academic journal articles, albeit i hope with a bit of flair. ever since i first got to college, though, i had chafed at every constraint or arbitrary convention in academic writing, and i let myself just go for it. i wanted to write like it mattered, and i wanted to emulate my heroes who spoke so boldly and nothing like academics: emerson, kierkegaard, nietzsche. i had some moments and some good aphorisms (which no one really noticed), but also the philosophy was derivative, and my voice was not fully independent whatever i thought; i sort of sounded like an american bataille channeling nietzsche or some shit. in some ways i wasn't actually ready to write a book, even though maybe i'd written a couple before that. but it does have a nervy energy i couldn't reproduce now. i hadn't really developed my philosophical picture historically or conceptually, and a lot of it does strike me as derivative juvenilia. i was in my 30s, but for me anyway, philosophy has been a long thing to learn. other things too. i wanted to be a prodigy but it was already late for that, and actually i was a slow developer.
even as i wrote it i was in great conflict in my head about its 'immoralism' and through a later series of blows and overcompensations (oh, like the part where i was engaged to high-end call girl who was a genuine masochist, etc), i came out of the '90s as a screeching puritanical moralist in my own way. i'd just like to apologize to me-1994 for that.
oh a couple of decent lines:
"If the next century is also a century obsessed by language, I for one am going to catch up on some much-needed shuteye."
"We retreat to concepts because no one has ever been bitten by a concept."
"Living in the world is like being impaled on a huge spike."
[possibly i am reading the thing now because i hurt my back shoveling and am spending days sitting or lying with heating pad, etc.]
