Thoughts from Culhwch

Today is a U2 day. One of those days where U2 just seems like the right thing to listen to. I thouht I could listen to Coldplay… but I needed something a little different.

At work we are getting ready for the onslaught of the first year students. They’ll be in tomorrow, and the insanity will ensue. I think that’s the point where everything just goes wild, where students start crawling out of every open ventilation shaft like some sort of horror flick where spiders spew from everywhere. Ok… so maybe I shouldn’t compare students to spiders or some sort of infestation. Still, from the way it sounds things will start getting pretty crazy. I guess that’s ok though, it’s what I signed up for, and besides I work better with a little bit pressure, right?

In other news its really hot. Really hot. Here’s to hoping it will cool off tomorrow. Tonight I feel like writing. I think I’ll get going on my Great American Novel. It’s funny everybody keeps trying to write it, but has anyone ever really succeeded? I mean if everybody feels compelled to try to write it why haven’t we seen it yet? Perhaps it has to do with the multiplicity of possible concepts for such a creation -not least of the problems the impossibility of defining “American.” In the context it seems to be both mythical and yet experienced. The Great American Novel has to reside it many places at once. It has to speak to a common sense of who we are as a people, of where we are and what it means to be American. On the other hand it must also  refer to something which is unseen, unheard, unexperienced. I guess the real question is, is that fabricated from the author’s imagination, or is it a vision of the future, somehow prophetic in the way it calls people back to a founding vision which must actually precede all sense of peoplehood and reside further back and further forward, linking the present to a past and a future which transcends the boundaries established by the commonality which would make it American. To be less enigmatic, might the Great American Novel be less American and more religious? Might it call a people toward Godliness?

~david