Rhizome

I've been stuck in a list mode the past few days. Why do I feel compelled to keep lists? It really makes no sense. It's my New Year's intention (resolution sounds so daunting and intimidating!) to make better use of this blog as a means of writing. The list of writers I want to write about coelesce into a sort of loose constellation. I don't know why these writers are grouped together in my mind. They constitute what the theorists Deleuze and Guattari might call a "minor" tradition.

Recently I looked at a book by Harold Blooom about 100 literary geniuses. He organized them according to categories generated by the Kabballah. I don't know much about this Jewish mystic tradition, but it seemed an interesting way to organize the writers he discusses in a novel way--not just chronological. Because there is something that links these writers in ways that cuts across and through diachronic history. If I were to write such a book, how might I organize it? Something to think about further . . . .

My current list, my counter-canon, my "minor" tradition:
Zhuangzi
Montaigne
Diderot
Holderlin
Percy Shelley
Emily Bronte
Melville
Dickinson
Proust
Kafka
LeGuin
Rushdie

Main theorists I think in terms of these days:
Adorno
Benjamin
Deleuze
Derrida
Wittgenstein

Whenever I come across a book I turn to the index to see of there's any reference to any of these writers. I am searching for something . . . . Some way of putting together these writers that will make why they seem to go together for me make sense. I suppose ultimately I have to make the stitches myself. Why these particular writers hold together for me.

I've been doing lots of reading lately, and I want to try to put something down based on it before it just evaporates into the nether regions.

Keep writing!