dear heidi, part 3

tangents:

• rampant speculation
  
• great monologue about actresses who play joan of arc
• are there people crazier than me? maybe.
• two quotes from the book i just read:
  1. “in accounting for our love of story-filled lives, escapism seems too brutal a word, suggesting that these stories have nothing to do with us, rather than that they reflect dormant fragments of ourselves. the drama that oedipus lived is not any less our own because we married well and live in a leafy suburb. the extremes of biological lives are fuller articulations of ourselves which the environment has curtailed. the life of nelson may be fascinating to someone who would not dare to row across the serpentine because, containing in a fully developed form so many of our half-formulated fantasies, it constitutes an exercise in self knowledge.”
  2. “…one may suggest a connection between attachment and the biographical impulse, that is, an impulse to know another fully. every attachment involes a more or less conscious process of biography [as one works out dates, characteristics, favoured wash cycles and snacks…], much as a true biography demands a more or less conscious emotional relationship between author and subject. what else could account for the gargantuan energy required to finish such a book?”
• “For me it was a lot like creating the Sims,” she explained…”