B O N D P H O N E.
Words and pictures by Chris Lamb.

"Twenty lines, genius or not" - a throat-clearing exercise, so to speak. Harry Mathews deliberately misunderstood the line from Stendhal to create a means of getting the little fears of writing out of the way so that the actual work may come through. Done early enough, it deals with the anxieties of the act - the agoraphobia of an empty page, the numbness that overtakes ideas somewhere between brain and hands, the ghosts of all those previous defeats - while they're still waking up, to quiet and comfortable with sleep still in their eyes to be any real threat. Done later in the day it's a beat to hit, almost a signature. For obvious reasons, I'm trying to do these as early as possible.

Speaking of Mathews, and of fear, there's another idea of his I want to look at lifting: the scheduling of particularly unwanted emotions. If I know that with my writing and my work comes an amount of fear and self-doubt, why not get them out of the way? The only real trouble that I can see comes in turning it off at the end of the allotted time. I trust myself to get over myself before too long, with the feeling that I'm being ridiculous overtaking any fear and pushing me to work. But having lived with me for so long, I'm afraid I only trust myself so much.

posted by chris  # 10:16 AM