Don't mind me, I'm just working. It's Fri, so student progress (lack of) reports duly submitted, and EVERYONE has "out of office" on today. So, back to the other work, the paper without a thesis and I don't even want one hahaha (maybe that's how I go rogue, I go to islands and give papers with no theses about islands).
For the record of the Antelope Wife/Woman trail of revisions, my beloved papargraph does not survive any revision, it exists only once.
In that, I sorta see a pattern developing. It's not a thesis, it's too nonlinear for that. It's an all-over feel of time passing through the character bodies linked to gender. Woman get less romantic and men get more fragile - for lack of a better way to put it yet. In this particular trail, the revisions get rid of the suicides, everyone lives. But. The woman is more interested in law school than either dude, the suicidal one stays alive but drunk forever, and the baker goes from stolid chocolate to anxiety jelly-filled.
And then there is Shadow Tag. No sign of any of it being published in short form anywhere, and it was never revised. It has no dedication, no lube at all, just straight to fucked. Both lead characters die by drowning, the worst way in Erdrich's cosmology - there is never rest for the drowned. But the cosmology itself is broken, there only in pieces, both characters are Native but belong to no community but themselves like curated content. They drink too much, but that isn't what kills them - they can't let each other go. It's a divorce that can never get done rather than a marriage actually. One tries to save the other, but with drowning that just hardly ever turns out well. They both go under. And the final voice belongs to the daughter, who is angry at both her parents but her mom more.
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| for dad, but he jumped anyway |
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| for mom, who tried to save him |
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| maybe I am trying to be trusted with this narrative |
