Head filling, or amorphous ideas freely morph

So I'm well into my ECE research these days. I recently finished John Barth's excellent essay/nonfiction book called The Friday Book, as well as rereading some of my old timey favorites from Lost in the Funhouse and Labyrinths. I've also bookmarked a number of interesting looking articles from the library's databases (and downloaded the pdfs for casual reading). Oh and I'm picking through Barthelme's 40 Stories (and loving it.)

In short, I've been doing a frickin' lot of reading. To what end? Well, therein lies the story:

Originally, I went to residency all fired up on writing an ECE about Metafiction and authorial intrusion and the historiographic implecations of said tactics as exemplified via three stories: Lost in the Funhouse,(Barth) Theme of the Traiter and the Hero, (Borges) and The Story (Amy Bloom). Well the more I got to thinking about a thesis statement, the more bulletholes I found in the whole process....Yes, all of it works, and a good chunk of it can reflexively relate to the other stories, but 1. I couldn't think up an arguable position to justify what I wanted to talk about, and 2. there is actually four metric fucktons of critical essay data concerning the historiographical implecations of metafiction out there already....This cannot do. So,

After a brief meltdown, Sue and I got to talking and she made me do one of those mindmapping charts (of which I proclaimed I hated [until I tried doing it]), and I came up with some interesting thoughts. Namely, that I really need to actually spend my ECE talking about what Ben Marcus pulls off in the vein of metafictive authorial [albeit indirect] intrusion within The Age of Wire and String. And so, as gears change, I'm hoping that I'm onto something as I embark onto the beginning of rereading that wonderful wonderful oddity of a book.

In other news, I've recently picked up the following music:

• Buck Tick -- (for Sue actually) It's a gothy/Industrial J-Rock band that has moments of Rockabilly-ness interspersed between harpsichords and classic goth platform boots.
• Oasis - Be here now and Masterplan - I used to love Oasis; then I forgot about them for a while. Recently, I've been back into them a lot. The Song "The Masterplan" is one of my top ten favorite songs of all time.
• Emilie Autumn -- She's a sort of cross between Android Lust, The Dresden Dolls, and My Ruin. Lots of great harpsichord and string work in addition to gothy beats and occasional screaming.

I'll end with some pictures from Louisville....