My internet has gone sketchy. Posts may be sporadic at best for the next week or so.
Anyway.
One of my favorite literary anecdotes involves the obsessive nature of revision, something I have been deep in the midst of lately.
Flaubert once explained his process while working on Madame Bovary. He said that he would wake and go to his study where he would spend the entire morning meticulously placing a single comma. Then he would break for lunch. Then he would return to his study and spend the rest of the day taking that comma out.
Oh, Flaubert, how true is your hyperbole. In the past few weeks I have been rearranging commas like crazy. Sleeping like a vampire. Drinking more coffee than humanly possible. Maybe I’ve transformed? Maybe I’ve seriously become a vampire? I couldn’t know for sure: I haven’t been tested.
ps - click here if you would like to hear Zadie Smith read Frank O’Hara’s poem “Animals”
