You wake up in the morning and it's still there adding up the things you'll never be

[icequeenbee]

The feminine seems inherently linked to circularity (possibly as a result of the physical link between women and the menstrual cycle ?) but women are not the only writers who are obsessed with cyclical stylings, in terms of pop literature, Palahaniuk is a great example cause his repetition seems to be an inextricable part of his style. That said, women writers do seem hooked into this concept of repetition, of the daughter repeating the mistakes of her mother/grandmother/other female relative. There is a search for this connection with the past and the history, not just the explicit history but there also seems to be a simultaneous desire to demystify, that we must know the whys as well as the specific whats of our mother's pasts. To become a further part of that cycle, especially in characters with daughters. There is in a lot of the popular (I hesitate to use this term but it seems appropriate here) "chick lit" the figure of the mother withdrawing to her childhood home etc. once her children are grown and reidentifying herself outside of the family, becoming her own individual again and making anew the choice of how to live her life. This secondary coming-of-age novel deals with how women seem to lose themself in being part of someone else's life and not having their own life. Noting here that many of the authors of these types of novels tend to be women and not men, this sort of discovery would appear to be a purely feminine search in the novel. In the novels of the male mid-life crisis (which I would say are vastly outnumbered in recent years by the feminine narratives), there is less of this attempt to reconnect with the family and more of an individual experience of the world, a more naturalist and realist perspective. The male characters strive to attain an understanding of their own individuality through an abandonment of society and also of their family past. They do not seem to have the same symbols of physical and geographic connections with childhood in the way that women do. They need to separate from that what they are and how they became that. Their resurfacing into society is not really characterized by a return to conventionality (with an undertone of novelty(although newness may be a better term as novelty seems to imply a sort of frivolity) of having a fresh understanding of self) in the same manner that women's narratives do. Female narratives often have this hazy dreamlike feel to them where the smallest actions seem weighted by significance like a picture seen through rippled glass. There is this sense of escapism that is followed by the inevitable plunge back into the real world. An escape of responsibility and an escape from previous physical connections like husbands and children. Female authorship also seems important in the sense that there are very few male-authored novels that capture a female voice in a realistic sense. Likewise, women also seem inadequate to conveying the inner monologue of male characters in a convincing light. To me, this seems rooted in semiotics and the basic failure of language in communication between the genders. The inadequacies of language are frustrating in this respect and suggest that there is perhaps an entire dimension that we are unable to write about because we lack the vocabulary to do so. In this same way, often, it seems that men and women are unable to understand enough to write realistically about each other.

I think I will probably be writing my honors thesis proposal about the use of transit as a sympbol in modern and/or postmodern literature.

I'm trying to shake off some blues. Probably the gym will help. and finishing this book that I'm totally stuck on right now.