I wasted a good portion of this afternoon playing video games. After driving here from New York and three hours of German I was exhausted, and I haven't been able to get myself to work more than that. I just played video games for three hours, because I got caught up in it. It's amazing how that works, isn't it?
I'm kinda having a struggle, though, because I feel like I need to stop procrastinating in this way--it's very counterproductive, particularly in a week like this one--and yet I do think it's my body telling me to be careful about what it is that I'm doing and what my working pattern is. That sounds vaguely like an excuse, too, though. I need to get my keys as soon as I can and start moving, because I have a lot to do. I'm terrified, honestly--I know I''m going to get it done, but I know it's going to be absolutely awful.
Which I suppose means that I need to just do it. Perhaps tomorrow I can pack up loose things or make a checklist or something--I need to be organized and ready to go when it comes time to get my stuff over there.
Words are flowing more easily--I do like that about this practice--I can get words out my head much more easily, I think, than I could before. Although, actually, now that I think about it, I could do this relatively easily before, too. It's the writing when the words aren't coming that I don't like. The trick to this, I guess, is to type when the words are coming and not worry about when they aren't. (I've noticed that typing this way I insert little phrases like "I guess" in order to give myself time to think as I go along. I've noticed that I can only think about four or five words ahead, except to the extent that I chunk phrases into smaller units, for then I can think ahead counting that as only one. But, it makes me more likely to engage in typos (and, it seems, the further I try to think ahead, the odder my diction becomes. That's really interesting, and an odd thing to know about myself.)
I'm getting less impressed with Fish's reader response thing--it seems like he's just going to show that all texts have contradictions that if you skew correctly make them seem to be riven. It's almost a protodeconstructionist move. I mean, I'm very compelled by bits of his evidence, but I don't think he's right about what he does with it--I think it's too manifestly a Genius Author theory, in that it requires Bacon/Herbert/Donne to have precisely one big idea about hw they wanted their texts to work, and that one idea a weird one, that folks ahve missed for a long time. I wonder if I'd be more comfortable taking it as a statement about one way in which texts like these work to protect themselves from meaning in a way that's utimately boring, futile, or unsatisfying--if that is, one of the dangers an author faces is saying what it is he means, so that everyone realizes that that ain't much.
one of the dangers that an author faces is saying what he means, because the text is a poor simulacrum of the meant thing, and enabling the comparison is counterproductive.
one of the dangers that an author faces is saying what she means, because meaning is the most boring thing that language does, and perhaps some authors are particularly boring therewithin.
one of the dangers that an author faces is saying what she means, because what if her readers would rather she mean something else?
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