Joyce Carol Oates

I recently came across this book in the biography section of my local bookstore, promptly purchasing it. Joyce Carol Oates is one the world’s most prolific and accomplished writers, having written works of fiction, poetry, plays, and numerous collections of nonfiction and essays, many of which deal with important humanitarian themes. She’s received many awards for her work, including “The National Humanities Medal,” awarded to her by President Obama in 2010.

The book pictured here is a collection of letters she’d written to her biographer from 1975 to 2006. Just like her fiction and essays, her letters are like works of literature, albeit casual and personal as well, including insights into her ideas about writing, thoughts about her published works and works in progress, impressions of other writers and their works, and a variety of other topics, some personal and some about the world at large.

Joyce continues to publish new works and is an active contributor on Twitter (x). I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with her several times on Twitter and discovering that she quoted a few of my own commentaries, which was a thrill for me.

I’m looking forward to reading her collection of letters. I have an interest in epistolary writing, which is a fancy term for letter writing. Epistolary works are sometimes fictional, other times actual correspondences. I’ve previously attempted epistolary writing in the form of fiction, and it worked out well at the time. I’m interested in pursuing this further, as it seems to fit my style of writing, or one of my styles.

Identity

“The Buddhist would say that almost all human beings have a phony sense of identity – a delusion, or a hallucination as to who they are. I am terribly interested in this problem of identity. I try to find out what people mean when they say the word ‘I.’ I think this is one of the most fascinating questions: ‘Who do you think you are?'”
~ Alan Watts

I = The current, ever-changing totality of my experiences, behaviors, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, flaws, strengths, relationships, goals, roles, statuses, etc. This is the widest scope of my personal identity, without any edits, sugarcoating, or the glue of meaning to connect the various pieces. In this sense, identity is a perpetually evolving narrative of who I’ve been and who I’ve become within the context of my changing experiences and circumstances—the cards I’ve been dealt in this lifetime.

Realistically, we rarely define our identities as all of the above, but rather carve out what works best for us in the world and within our chosen sense of self.

Society created identities always impinge upon our self-definitions, such as how others perceive us: what they most pay attention to, remember, or imagine about us; collective or group identities, which exclude the personal elements of individual identity—for example, Americans and Christians; employment related identities—titles, roles, and skillsets; consumer identities; medical patient identities, etc. This is not an exhaustive list, as there are many defining forms of identity, depending upon who is paying attention and what they choose to see or know about us, including their own fictive characterizations.

Often, how others identify us conflicts with our own carved out definition of self. I’ve personally struggled with this throughout much of my life, trying to replace the first impressions from others with how I choose to be known. This is rarely successful, as first or chosen impressions are very sticky and resistant to change. We can’t show others what they choose not to see.

Alan Watts indirectly posed the question, “Who do you think you are?” This is always a choice, depending upon what we choose to include, exclude, and display to the world. I don’t see this as a delusion, but as the necessity to identify ourselves against the background of a social world that is endlessly defining us—indifferently, antagonistically, or otherwise—for its own special interests.

Henry Miller’s Paris

“Paris is like a whore. From a distance she seems ravishing, you can’t wait until you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. You feel tricked.”
~ Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

Found this intriguing quote on social media, but with no context to it, which makes it difficult to understand what Henry Miller was thinking and feeling about Paris and why, especially since I’ve not read his work. Although, I’ve been told by a reader that Henry Miller was very passionate about Paris, noticing both the light and dark sides to it, which inspired his writing.

I suppose it is possible that his expectations or hopes for Paris were derailed by reality in some sense, leaving him with the impression of being lured into a place that produced the opposite side of his desired Paris, and dredging up the darkness or shadows within him. Kind of like a psychological bait and switch, where the imagined or advertised fantasy of a place is nothing like its reality, resulting in unintended consequences and entanglements. I can personally relate to this.

Note: Adding Henry Miller to my bucket list of authors to read!

Voyager

“More than 15 billion miles from Earth, Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory, an 8-track tape recorder, and code written in FORTRAN. It’s controlled using 50-year-old blueprints and takes 22 hours to receive a single command.”
~ Lisam Maia, NASA Explores The Universe (social media group)

Nowadays, phones and laptops with less than 4GB of memory cannot adequately handle their bloated operating systems and apps, and become almost completely useless without a constant WiFi signal or cellular data, unless you use them like an “old school” word processor or an electronic version of sticky notes.

Voyager 1 exited our solar system on 1977 technology with the power of a calculator or pocket watch, now having traveled 15.5 billion miles from Earth, at a speed of 38,027 mph, and still managing to communicate with us, without WiFi, cellular data, Bluetooth, and massive amounts of memory.

Relatively speaking, very little is required to launch a rocket towards eternity. Most likely, Voyager will continue its journey long after the earth, as we now know it, meets its end.