Caroline Paul's writing-as-toilet-cleaning analogy has struck quite a chord, based on responses to my post of a few days ago. Therein I reported on a meeting of this "Borstian" group at the S.F. Writers Grotto, in which Caroline urged us all to stop thinking about why we're procrastinating on our writing and just get down on our knees and do it. "Sometimes you just have to approach writing as a chore that has to be done," she said (approximately). "Like cleaning the toilet." Many readers have since shared with me their own excretory metaphors for the literary process, most of them either equating writer's block with digestive irregularity or bad first drafts with odoriferous ordure. (Come to think of it, it was at that very same meeting that Elizabeth Bernstein described her recent victories over procrastination as "as if I'd taken creative Metamucil.")

What is this association of literary production with physical ejecta? I've never heard artists and musicians so routinely compare their work to colonic function. I don't mean calling their bad work "shit." Everybody does that. I mean these elaborate recasting of one process as the other. Is it because we sit and strain? Is it because of the way verbal material seems to build up within us and then come surging out? Or are we writers revealing some deeper sense of self-disgust?

Any insights will be appreciated. But right now it's enough to chase me back to my Sisyphus metaphor. At least he worked with his hands....