Love, Liza

When I was a junior in college (Eell, actually I was a third semester Sophomore--it was the fall semester, I was six credits behind.), I took a one credit weekend course whose main draw was cave paintings. The gentleman was Clayton Eshleman, an autodidact who'd spent seven years translating Cesar Vallejo and another 17 decoding hieroglyphics in caves in the south of France. Anyway, the assignment to complete the course was to saturate ourselves in something for four weeks. Knee deep in Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae, I chose "decadence", examining the poetry of Rimbaud, Swinburne, and the works of the Marquis de Sade and Oscar Wilde.

I had been doing this type of thing for years (mostly with movie stars), but taking a course put a definition on that idea for me, and taught me how to saturate myself in a more constructive manner than I already had been doing. I still think about that course everytime I'm immerse myself in something new, which, for the first time in a couple of years, I've been able to do.

Remember when I said that I couldn't spend much more time trying to find stuff to back up my book with? Well, I was part right. However, I've read two books pertaining to the subject matter I've been investigating about in the past week--John Boardman's The Oxford History of Greece & the Hellenistic World, and Carl Jung's Four Archetypes, which I got for $5 at the Strand. So what I'm saying here is that it's okay to immerse myself in projects, but it doesn't need to be my whole life. I need to think about other things, too.

In other news, hopefully I'll be taking a screeenwriting workshop with Gordy Hoffman (Philip's brother) in Rochester September 30th. Because I was paying PayPal, I had to transfer the registry fee into my savings account--otherwise it would've overdrawn. I'm keeping my fingers crossed, and hopefully everything will be okay. If it all pans out, I'll be workshopping The United States of Love.