Living with Titling My Third Entry "The Third Entry"

This is going to be a strange entry though maybe not so at all. Strange because I'm writing it in a notebook in a Borders (r) in Bloomington, Indiana. Strange because I live in Dyer, Indiana. (Please note that green, bolded, and italized Courior font means that there was a deviation from the original manuscript of this text, while the red Lucida Grande like you are reading right now will contains notes on the fonts used in this entry, usually parenthesed.) Strange because I don't know what an entry really is or should be. But I doubt I should be talking of revolutions.

I find that I get incredibly inspired to write when I'm surrounded by numerous books. This is what I want to do: write books. If I must write to the dancey Indian rhythms of Borders (r), whatever gets the job done.

Writing books: I used to fantasize about writing gigantic Moby-Dick sized books. I wanted to write a monster, but I think I've finally come to terms that writing such a thing would be a nightmare. I need to learn my style, my craft, and realize it may not be best for gargantuan books. Having been reading numerous short stories since I took Bob Lamb's short story class, I think it finally hit me that I am at least currently more apt to write to the short and sweet and occasionally finding my way to a convenient if not meaningful end. What to call these blurbs? Sometimes they are stories, sometimes who needs definitions?

My current readings are Bernard Malamud's The Fixer and Borges' collected fictions. Borges hardly wrote anything longer than twenty pages, most under ten. So I suppose it was a small epiphany that I don't need to write the 21st Century Moby-Dick. Let someone better qualified and more boring do so.

When I first arrived at Borders (r), I went straight to the Literature section and made a cursory list of books I'd like to read by the end of the year. Here it is:

A List of Book's I've not Read, but I should by the end of '07

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse by " "

Native Son by Richard Wright

Rabbit, Run by John Updike

Walden by H. David Thoreau

Zuckerman Unbound by Philip Roth

Everyman by " "

Despair by V. Nabokov

? by Dostoevsky

Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth

Notice that I started at the end of the alphabet and worked backwards, mainly concentrating on the middle, most easily visible shelves with apologies to Jack Kerouac and Alice Munroe. I've heard that left handed people often read magazines from back to front, but I hardly do anything left handed, except that.

I was about to make my way over to the cafe section when I stumbled upon a new David Markson novel titled The Last Novel. I read a few of his "novels" when I was a senior in high school. Much of the content consists of little facts about past writers, painters, musicians, etc. On page 7 I came across a poignant passage:

"It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing. Said Gertrude Stein.

"It is not amusing, it is not interesting, it is not good for one's mind.
"Said T. S. Eliot -- re Stein's prose."

It remains to be seen if I buy this book (I did.) or something else from the list, or something else, or nothing at all. Such a decision will be made long after this sentence is punctuated.