Cobwebs

Hey Anna, the RR theory you mention makes sense the way you describe it. I like thinking about this sort of thing. The same theory could be applied to writers: all the different authors a writer has read interact through her as she is writing, making her work a composite of everything she has read (plus whatever she brings to her writing from her extra-literary life). So all books/writing are interdependent/intertextual, everything referring to everything else. Umberto Eco says something to the effect that Jorge Luis Borges and James Joyce created the real World Wide Web, Joyce with words, and Borges with ideas (if I remember Eco's quote correctly). As far as spiderwebs go, I'm reading Strunk and White's The Elements of Style (I'm sure you both bought this book at one point or another for one English class or another--and yes, I'm actually reading it, cover to cover (it's tiny), for my editing class), and it has inspired me to read White's Charlotte's Web. Oh, Wilbur.

By the way, who wrote The Origin of Islam? Sounds interesting. Let us know how it goes. I'm picking up the short stories of Borges again for inspiration -- my own first short story is due Monday in creative writing class (I haven't started). I've also become more interested in poetry: I'll find some good poems to post. Still reading Proust--his shorter stories, poems, and The Novel--flipping through some of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's short stories/novellas (No One Writes to the Colonel) and looking at Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading (and not getting anywhere in it, as usual). Also perusing Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. But my big find of recent days is Helen Keller's The World I Live In. This is from chapter 1--"The Seeing Hand":

I have just touched my dog. He was rolling in the grass, with pleasure in every muscle and limb. I wanted to catch a picture of him in my fingers, and I touched him as lightly as I would cobwebs; but lo, his fat body revolved, stiffened and solidified into an upright position, and his tongue gave my hand a lick! He pressed close to me, as if he were fain to crowd himself into my hand. He loved it with his tail, with his paw, with his tongue. If he could speak, I believe he would say with me that paradise is attained by touch; for in touch is all love and intelligence.