Category Archives: Writing On Writing

A Reading of E Unibus Pluram by David Foster Wallace

The language is dense and careful, as well as being wonderful writing. So you might want to read along:E unibus pluram: television and U.S. fiction.

Lacan in Woolf: To the Lighthouse and the Beauty of Diegesis

It’s one of those famous literary works you’re supposed to have read, may have taken a run at, and then ran away screaming. Virginia Woolf’s ‘To The Lighthouse’ is cited as one of the great works of modernist writing of the 20th Century. I will unashamedly admit to having skimmed it 20 years ago and Continue Reading

Desire Desires Desire: Why Erotica and Porn are Different

This essay sets out to look at the ambivalence many women have to porn and why this has had an impact on reader expectations of erotica. The porn vs erotica war has been going on for years. It is often represented as a battle between the forces of repression and those of emancipation. I think Continue Reading

Writing in my part of the World

It occurs to me that I haven’t been a very good ambassador for fiction writing happening in my part of the world. One of the major hurdles with this is that a lot of Vietnamese writing translated into English is actually Viet Kieu writing (written by members of the Vietnamese diaspora).  The same is true Continue Reading

Writing At the Edge of the Real

No matter how often I revisit Lacan’s concept of The Real – its impossibility, its muteness – I always come back to Robert Graves’ poem, “The Cool Web.” The Real is where the signifieds live, in all their raw nowness, their newness, their unremitting foreverness.  And a lot of what I’ve read tells me that, Continue Reading

Writing the Erotic Phenomenologically

One of the biggest problems with being a writer is language. Yes, it happens to be the tool we work with, too, but never the less, there is an aspect to language that gets in the way, especially when it comes to the description of bodily and emotional experience. Language isn’t just a tool for Continue Reading

A Writer’s Job: A Public Response to Michele Filgate’s “Literary Self-Loathing”

I’ve tried to put it out of my mind and move on, but seven hours later, I’m still livid over both the tone and the content of Michele Filgate’s “Literary Self-Loathing” article over at Salon.com. Yes, I left a comment, but that didn’t seem to bank down the embers of my ire. Please take a Continue Reading

Using the Embodied Language of the Other: Traces of Intimacy

So, I have found this wonderful, fertile piece of ephemera – this document that represents a relationship between Dr. Pierre Janet and his patient, Madeleine. It purports to be a careful and detailed study of one woman’s mental infirmity, scientific, objective, clinical. And indeed, the structure of the two volumes follow the characteristics of case-studies Continue Reading

Pierre’s Notes on Madeleine’s Medical and Psychological History

  I’ve done a little translating, relying on my rickety French and Google translate to produce a smoother version of a portion of Dr. Janet’s notes, to see what nuances I could detect reading between the lines.  Here it is, for your reading pleasure This family had four children. Madeleine’s sisters were intelligent and morally Continue Reading

Conference Paper Proposal: Spoonful of Sugar: In Defense of the Aroused Reader

Žižek interprets the film Titanic’s narrative strategy as one that uses the emotional power of an ill-fated romance to prime the viewer to receive the hidden ideological message [ref]Fiennes, S. (2012). A Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. UK: Zeitgeist Films.[/ref] Other critics have underscored his point, arguing that the ideological subtexts in many works of genre Continue Reading