The limit

I know that I have reached my limit when I begin dreaming up projects, particularly when I am reading. I spent a good part of last night reading Paradise Lost thinking about an idea for a website called "Learninglists." See, in another class (ie not the Milton one), we are reading bits from Deleuze's Cinema I and II. Deleuze has interesting things to say about Westerns, particularly how they take place in a milieu and how they involve binomials: structures of anticipating the other and so on. I've also been quite obsessed with Joss Wheedon's amazing (now defunct, damn you Fox!) TV show, Firefly which has much to do with Westerns. So, I have the thought: I would like to learn about Westerns. But how? You see reading a book about it would be fine, but books are often argumentative (presenting a certain position in relation to other positions) rather than pedagogical (presenting how one arrives at certain positions and why). I want a list of 5-10 excellent Westerns that exhibit some kind of formal or thematic development and ruminate on them. Where does one find such a list? Enter my idea. A website with various "tutorials" or "learning exercises" in form of lists of whatever (books, movies, and so on) with accompanying commentary, pointing out key features, posing questions and so on.

I also find that when I have hit my intake threshold for information, I begin to daydream about writing. Of course, I often find when I read new theory (Deleuze) I work through it by imagining it in terms of characters and stories (this probably makes me a better creative writer than critic). In any case, I have often thought that since I cannot complete my "Cora" novel, also known as "Hudson" I should just start scanning every scrap of paper that has gone into making it over the last 5-6 years and just put on-line. I don't know what good this would do other than constitute an archive of failure. I also think about my "zeppelin" story that I have been ruminating over for a few years now. Unfortunatley, the more pressing task at hand is to interpolate Bleak House, read Paradise Lost and Mille Plateaux, and not lose my mind...