Might I become a barista in the near future? Might I actually have health insurance again??

Oh plus the Powell’s blog is doing this review-a-day thing, which is very cool and has stuff on it from NYRB, The National Book Critics Circle, Esquire, etc. And usually they’re great. But this one from The New Republic makes me frustrated and sad and I kind of feel shitty now for writing mostly about books here, because How Fiction Works is, ultimately, exactly what this stuff leads to.

Really, I have this blog because I am terribly compulsive and my notebook and my private journal are for some reason just not enough. And because I’m hoping it will give me some stability in an unstable time. And I love reading and using what I read to figure out myself and what’s around me: Why does this story piss me off; why do I love this author but not ones similar to him; why do I consider Dostoevsky to be both singularly pathetic as a man and frightening in his brilliance?

But do we need to deconstruct the “mechanics of fiction”? Do we need to trap, pin down, label and dissect every instance of an “unreliable narrator,” and the many subtypes thereof? And do we need to write dull, dispassionate reviews about the people who do these things?

The thing is we don’t. This from a girl whose favorite teacher encouraged her to get into lit crit. I never considered it a serious possibility. I love talking about this stuff, but in the context of life. Why would I want to tear Balzac to shreds and reconstruct him for display in some airless glass case — why can’t I just sit in a corner on a ladder for the last hour of my shift and read “The Unknown Masterpiece” and cry to myself and try to tell my friends about it later when we’re all drunk?

Maybe I’m wrong and there is no difference. I am trying to figure it out.