Also I've come to see that since I've been writing the epic itself into the void (meaning that I still don't have much of a readership, and yet that fact hasn't kept me from working on it; 2009 saw a lot of progress on the work! And for that reason alone I should think of it as a very good year, even though the previous one had been much better for my bug business) I might as well do the same thing with this blog.
Therefore I'm pushing forward, starting off with a small excerpt from the notes. {publishing notes instead of text is much easier, since although I'd like to include the best pieces of RW itself, I do want to start sending them off to journals -- yes, really -- and I don't want to disqualify myself from that}
Still on the fence regarding whether to write and/or post the Notes in the first or third person. Overall I find it a little easier to write them in third; somehow simpler to write ridiculous things about myself that way...
The Beginning and The End.
In early December 2009, around the time he started this study guide, he started realizing that he had fallen in love with some pieces of his own work; in fact he’d been in love with them for a good deal before that. It’s probably not such a healthy thing. In any case, the start and the ending of RW are prime examples of places where he detected his own genius.
The first line of the entire work is
Won’t someone tell me, please, the narrative
which features several of the special and powerful elements of the work. It starts with a contraction, which is a particularly modern typographical construction, therefore sending a message about the author's attitude about sacrosanct flowery language. Maybe. It's also a way to throw extra emphasis onto whatever syllable follows. Also the line is a sly promise: the first line suggests that the rest of the poem will be this particular narrative asked for. And since no one else can tell the narrator the story, Dave has had to write it himself, which means he’s telling himself the story even though he’s asked someone to tell it to him. This offers a window into Dave’s yearning for either an answer or for someone else to talk with – someone who knows something he hasn’t found. This is baldly state with the use of “me,” though direct expression of the narrator’s presence is very limited in the work: there's no knowing just yet how many there are of them, but probably less than ten references.
