W. is bored of the music posts, and rather unpersuaded. 'It's just boring', he says, 'and I thought you weren't going to mention Blanchot'. Your line of flight, he says, has hit the wall. There's no escape from philosophy for me. 'Just stay in philosophy', he says. I tell him of books X and Y that I'm reading. 'Your problem is you still respect scholarship'. The books I'm reading are scholarly, it's true. 'I couldn't do anything like these books', I tell him. - 'You could if you had 20 years of funding at the CRNS'. Is he right?
'Isn't the trick to find what you and only you could write?' I say. - 'Oh yes, and what could you and only you write?' - 'That's what I'm trying to find out', I tell him. 'Well it's not music, is it?' - 'Why not?' - 'You don't know anything about music!' - 'or about philosophy'. W. likes to test me on Spinoza: 'What is a mode? What's a substance? What's an attribute?' I tell him the Ethics is too hard. I'd bought Negri's The Savage Anomaly to held me - but that was too hard, too. 'Start with the Routledge Guidebook'. Ok - I'll order that.
'But seriously', I tell him, 'music is wide open. There's a pluralism - new fields are opening up'. - 'But what you write on music is so boring'. - 'I've only been trying to write about music for a week - and besides, we're busy at work. Meetings and that. Developing synergies'. W. finds this amusing. 'Synergies - what are synergies?' - 'So I only have about an hour a day for work. It's a mad dash -'
Is this true? This is supposed to be Deleuze summer. 'It's so hard', I tell W., 'I don't think I'm up to it'. 'Go back to lyrical self-abuse', says W. 'I can't even do that. I've just got the proofs of the book, and I can't work up any hatred'. - 'What do you feel, then?' - 'Boredom'. - 'Write about that'.
W. is particularly unimpressed with the posts which go through Will Oldham's lyrics. 'They're so boring. It's like an exercise'. - 'They're just notes', I tell him, 'I trying to find a way to write about him'. - 'Why don't you just listen to the albums and write whatever comes to mind?'
W., meanwhile, is rereading the notes he took ten years ago. 'Better than anything I could do now', he says, sending me them. I agree: they are good. 'I had no friends, no girlfriend, barely any teaching, no television ... What's happened to me?' - He's started to melt, we agree, like the ice cap over Greenland. Soon there'll be nothing left.
Every summer, I begin work with great ambition. By the end of summer, it's all gone wrong. 'Do you remember your paper on Hinduism?', says W., 'it became a paper on the 'there is''. He finds this very funny. Funnier still that the music posts are going the same way. 'Music and the 'there is' - for god's sake'. Well, I haven't got any other ideas. And that idea isn't even my idea.
W. has sent his proofs off. The book will be out soon. Mine comes out in the fourth quarter of the year. 'I think I've made up for the first book', I tell him. W.'s book is immaculate. It's proofread so many times it glistens. I wanted to write the puff on the back, but his publishers said I wasn't famous enough. My puff would have been a lot better than the one I used, I said. W. agrees. But you're not famous, he points out.
The copy of my first book I'd lent someone is returned to me. 'It's terrible', I tell W., 'do you think they'll let me do another edition?' - W. finds this very amusing. 'How many copies do you think it's sold? - Have you reached double figures, do you think?'
The most difficult thing, I tell W., is to reset my defaults. 'I'm going to become a Deleuzian', I tell him, 'but it's very hard. It's very similar to Heidegger - it's impossible to write about him in terms other than his own'. I am reading 'Of the Refrain' from Thousand Plateaus again. 'It's just impossible', I tell W. Meanwhile there are synergies to develop. Meetings and meetings and meetings ...