She gets up, wanders down the hallway, comes back toward me, I'd like to remember you, I hear, I'd like to dismember you. She sits back down, leans against me, her whole body trembling, I'm afraid, We're in prison here, We're going crazy, There are bad influences.
However, being conscientious about these things, and also always appreciative of recommendations, I'd left the photocopy on top of one of the more visible piles of paper in my bedroom, the better to serve as a constant reproach, and yesterday finally got round to reading it. I was very much a sceptic at first - I often find destructured, apparently (and/or actually) rambling, self-consciously experimental writing to be lazy and unsatisfying, and not worth the effort of the deciphering. Having read "Voice Crisis", some of that initial scepticism has dissipated; I appreciate the craft of it, and I think that it's effective and largely successful in its phenomenological representation of the world as given to a particular individual consciousness (one for which the differentiation between self and other is, to some extent, dissolved in a schizophrenic Septimus Smith kind of way). But while I can appreciate the writing on that level, I didn't really like the story, mainly, I think, because it doesn't particularly speak to me - my own world and internal narrative logic are very different from that of the piece's 'narrator', and while that's not always an insurmountable problem, in this case it is.
