Ftrain, by Paul Ford

Bike! Came back. But no helmet so I took it on the train. [Wife] was getting her eyelashes extended (her friend is going to cosmetology school and so needed a guinea pig) so I was home alone.

When my wife came home it was 2:30AM and I was asleep but she woke me up. Her eyelashes were glamorous. And now I am wide awake. So I will log the calories from dinner, before, and then read, I suppose. But first. I keep slightly shooting over the range of calories. Slightly. But also losing weight. Is this about weight loss or limits or nutrition? I am reading about Oprah and the construction of self in the age of the recovery movement, as observed via the lens of feminist scholarship. It is tricky business. Why does Oprah neglect Alice Waters's narrative of decolonialization in order to focus on a spiritual and postfeminist, postracist ideology of self? So many words flagged by the spellchecker. But while I mock gently there is a wonderful observation that the book club is an exercise in what Wayne Booth calls ethical criticism, whereby the reader allows the selves of the characters to be projected upon him or herself, and the author of this book on recovery points out (along with the Alice Waters point) that this is in marked contrast to any reading that would explore political or social issues of the novel; that it's about the individual experience instead of the collective one. And that Oprah rejects any broader readings, in fact.

That made me think about this, uh, text, the one I'm writing. It is personal out of necessity because it is about the consumption of food and gluttony and what aspects of the personality one derives from same. And much of the story there is automatically cast into terms of the recovery movement; and frankly I have tremendous anxiety here, so much anxiety from so many people: I know that at some level because I did not follow someone else's rules that I am doing it wrong; that people will read this and say "yes but he missed a step" or "calories are a lie" or "bicycle riding doesn't exercise the upper body."

And I want to say to them: that is what I do. I make myself observable in order that you might see something more important than me in the intersection between ourselves, and thus become aware of something larger than both of us. I am a fool to make you smarter. But they will be so busy criticizing, so busy wondering why I did not consult them. People are conditioned to want absolute, finished product, not work-in-progress. In business you listen to the customer but in prose it is supposed to be the auteur at work. On the web, customer service is the narrative norm. Not only am I to create a form, but I must help you use the same form. I am obligated to community. I suppose it is a blessing, like living in a small town is a blessing.

Bad news tonight.