Dorothy Wordsworth was my friend

I've been alone in the house all week, walking around like an existential character in a screenplay about existentialism, making things harder than they have to be for some reason, doing everything twice that only needs to be done once or once when everything needs to be done at least twice.

Alone, I write nine-thousand words about a man who tries to write a novel on a typewriter-the so-called plot of the novel I'm working on-before I realize there's something wrong with it. And what's wrong with it is that I'm writing it first in longhand and then transfering whatever's good about the writing to my MacBookPro. There's no typewriter invovled.

Reading a book about Dorothy Wordsworth, sister to brother William Wordsworth and well-known Muse--(The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth by Frances Wilson, FSG, 2008) I learn from Dorothy that "composition, particularly revision, made William ill, although he did not at first associate his symptoms with writing." A page of two before, Dorothy describes the founders of Romanticism, the lit-movement she's so intimately linked to, as "a mischevious gang of disaffected Englishmen."

On a piece of scrap paper-the back of a bank statement-I've scribbled this by Rebecca West: "it is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of a skunk." I like this, it feels relevant to the present time, and it's clearly my handwriting. But I have no memory of making the notation or of ever having read anything by Rebecca West for that matter.

I check the liquor cabinet. I see I've had a few pops, though neither too few or too many.