6/17/08

So June is going quickly. I guess I knew that would happen, but still--I actually really hadn't expected it. It's because of all the work I'm doing--two and a half hours of class and then six hours of homework just takes up most of a day. I keep saying I'm looking forward to being able to read for myself again.

I think I need to stop worrying the problem of genre for a bit, until I've read more--it's an interesting question, and Rosalie Colie is really helpful on it, but it's not something I'm going to resolve by poking at it with a very long stick. I need to develop a very particular question and then chase that down through individual texts. Love has an interesting passage in which he presents the various ways that satire could be studied and says they all would be useful but he's not going to do them. The proof of the pudding is in the tasting, but I didn't get the sense that any of them would be all that revelatory. (That's a nonsense sentence--we don't know the results of the investigations; I can't claim that they're not interesting. I certainly don't know enough about the period to project results onto people I don't know and their exploration of a body of work I don't know. Anyway.)

I should read the poems of Marvell's disciples. Just to see what they're like. (That would be a good dissertation topic: the Sons of the Sons of Ben. Or better yet: the Daughters of the Sons of Ben, on mid-17th century female writers. I bet it's been done.)

Popular versions of my book:

Yeah Really? Sarcastic Literature Since Whenever

Anyway. At least the words keep coming out--that's the real benefit of this exercise. I'm becoming much more willing to type what I think. I think.

Jim Shapiro's class may have improved my writing, but it made me neurotic about it, as I tried to write in one-draft what should have taken three or four, at the least. A goal for future writing should be to be able to edit passages that are substantially fine in order to make them significantly better. I feel like that's a crucial test of something. Not quite sure what, but that's okay. I'll figure that out.

Also: I have to resist the urge to append a verdict to the end of these things, especially once I've started watching the clock in order to see how much time is remaining. I may decide that I need to start adding a random number of minutes in order to (a) stop my running out the clock and (b) get more writing done.

I'd worry about that a lot more if the 10 minutes worth of stuff I was producing weren't already lagging at the end often.