TALES OF AN ORANGEPEELER an archive of pleasures, wounds, sublimations & other curiosities :: profile 10.13.09 Prince, Metz, Barthes (see "An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative") etc = headsplittingly abstract. I can't imagine writing such essays, although I acknowledge the usefulness and necessity of their ideas. I am a writer first, a researcher lately. That is, I respond to images, events and memories by setting sentence after sentence, and somehow those sentences make sense consecutively and within a sequence of varying length, and, in making sense, the sum of these sentences made some sense of the world. I'd rather write like Angela Carter of the sly, witty, trenchant essays; A Field Guide to Getting Lost's Rebecca Solnit; Joan Didion, attentive to every sentence; Susan Sontag, of course, for her rigorous, high modernist vision; or Judith Butler of Precarious Life. Is it possible to write an academic essay that doesn't taste so dry in the mouth?
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