Who else but an artist would see The Taming of the Shrew?  Who else but a stupid stuttering artist would write such a thing?


For whatever reason I find these entries taken over by sketches of a dialog between a writer and his therapist.  Philip Roth hit on the formula, originally, in Portnoy's Complaint, after a good steeping in therapy.  I suppose it's kind of an underlying template behind much of the writing attempt through history, its history...  And here in the safe confines with the therapist, the writer finds a dialog and thus feels the need to capture the verbal quality of it, which might not seem immediately to be the best way to write, something the reader must understand about it.  Hopefully the writer reaches a sort of hypnotic mode in which the voice can come out.  Maybe similar to how Huck Finn's voice came out, or how Kerouac opened up, or Melville, with poetic spontaneous (though carefully woodshedded) prose.

To the reader I must apologize over the personal nature.  This writer finds this format a good a sketchpad as any, readily accessible out on the roads of life.  I've long had the sense that it eases one's aches and pains to write, that one needs to get stuff written down, that it helps to have a record to look back at.  And we all can sense that the process involves with grappling with personal stuff, not in a way to be obsessive, but as a way to cure and work on things and move on as best one can.

Did one fall into various traps because of the overly literary mode of the brain, which then necessitates further entrapment in the convoluted mind?  Shakespeare sketches out Hamlet, a person who thinks too much, who is permeable to all sorts of information, but who maybe is not so good on action?  Or, looking at it another way, maybe the thoughts of a depressive like Lincoln are in a long run more justly conceived and accurate, whatever that might mean...

One takes his pains to the office and sits in the chair and tries to talk, to speak of things, wondering why things are so.  What causes?  What underlying habit of looking at things is worth realizing as a pattern, so that he can maybe change or control, or draw some courage and benefit from?   It's a cloudy process, into which light sometimes shines, and sometimes like the sun.

We are all innocent creatures, to the large part (I mean, putting aside all of history and current killings and wars and such), not to be blamed so much for the patterns we fall into, because they come about. Each individual carries standards of how to be treated, and one individual wanted things differently than the way your intuition or foolish head presented them.  Maybe to that individual, your way of proceeding in matters revealed certain flaws or shortcomings, and a storm blows up, hard to control.