The Body in Metamorphosis (2)

The days are getting shorter now, but my days just seem to be getting longer and by 9:30 at night it feels so late...

When I'm stressed out, I like to ride bikes. I rode my bike all over town today trying to clear my head so that I can write like Kafka, but it was distraction after distraction. I took breaks and tried to do other things, like mark assignments and wade through 74 pages of primary source material about Hitler, and still... I have no ideas. Well, my mind is swimming with the atrocities committed by the Third Reich, but there's no fucking way I'm going there...

Expletive, expletive.

At this point I think that I'm over-thinking things. The Body in Metamorphosis. Physical transformations. Temporary or permanent? Realist or with some element of the fantastic? Is it a condition that suddenly appears, or one that has always been there and suddenly disappears? Do I want it to be full of brilliant irony, or serious in a life-altering, bold, charismatic way? What the hell do I want to say here?

Oh, god. Do I have anything to say?

Lately I've been watching Californication, on Netflix. Does anyone watch this show? Major spoilers ahead. David Duchovny plays this writer called Hank Moody, whose amazing and ground-breaking last novel was written seven years ago and is subsequently turned into a terrible, Hollywood blockbuster film, and as the first season of the show begins, Hank just can't write. He's got nothing, no ideas, and he's on this ridiculous path of self-destruction to boot, and then his father dies and he sits down and starts to write again. And it's good, what he writes is good. And then the only copy of his manuscript is stolen by the 16-year-old daughter of the man who is about to marry the love of Hank's life, and she passes the novel off as her own and gets it published.

This is my nightmare. I'm going to struggle and toil over this 5-page short story for English 485A-whatever-other-letter-it-is and it's going to turn out to be the most important five pages of fiction since forever or at least since Great Expectations, and then it's going to be stolen by a no-talent hack with a drinking problem and my life is going to continue to be shit, because I'll have to do the assignment all over again.

(What is the reception history of Great Expectations? Was it important at the time? Should I have chosen a different example?)

To be continued...