9/9

Donoghue p120

“The sign is the unit of language, and its study is semiotics: the sentence is the unit of discourse and its study is semantics.”

three books one book aspects of book
the knowledge that what I have to do is in terms of pages — not books
pages as arrangements of words / ideas
shapes / meanings

I like the terms epireading and graphireading — epigraph
the voice that I don’t have — no interior monologue or dialogue although many of my best thoughts begin as internal imaginary dialogues

<12/17/89
the first line is not true — my mind constantly works in dialogue — i can’t get away from the voice into the texts which is one of the difficulties of writing>

finished Port of Adventure — thinking of possible arrangements and ‘voices’
Derrida’s use of inverted commas — in my writing as the rewriting progresses most of the nouns could take on the inverted commas — in my ‘writing’ as it ‘progresses’ — progresses is not a noun

words ‘words’
meanings ‘meanings’
noun / verb
subject / action

the musical voice
the artistic voice — there is a voice in a way
the task of taking apart writing as I do in a collage sense and then mixing the words —
I am thinking in terms of a vertical arrangement in which the different voices would be one over the other on the page — the voice of Burroughs that I’d like to get in — my own — something from pornography — the voice of sex — the murmur of the body <12/17 Simon> — perhaps sparse words of sex to underlie each page
the problem of the page itself — the individual voices that move through the book — page by page
the break in the flow — the turn of the page — the card
the problem of the open page spread — should there be one page or two — the crease or fold