About two years ago I picked up the Joyce Carol Oats novel Blonde at a used bookstore in Amsterdam. There was this great sales guy from Hoorn working there who'd worked as an botonist in Peru, or someplace, and was slowly writing a Ph.D, but that's another story.... (I'm always surprised, at my age, when anyone flirts with me, my head turning days having ended long ago....)
Of course Arther Miller plays a small role in the book, since he was Marylin's husband. She criticizes him for for slow writing. Apparently, he spent a lot of time on one project, eeking out a few sentences, or was it paragraphs, per day. So that means that in the spectrum from Joyce, extreme profluence, to Arther Miller, and then to me (Daniel Bartholemew might figure in there somewhere), I might not be doing too badly as a writer of minimal words, after all. :-)
Incidentally, I became so depressed reading Blonde, that I had to put it down in the end, and have yet to read the last 50-100 pages. Poor Norma Jean. Otherwise, brilliant book about the tragic life of a brilliant woman.
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