7/18/08

I like reckoning with Olson's prose--it seems to me to be a comprehensible, reconcilable, and ultimately worthwhile activity and it makes me jealous that Evan and Greg and John get to engage with it as part of their academic work directly. At the same time, I don't want to become a modernist--there's no doubt there are things left to say there, but I'm not entirely convinced of the value of saying them. That's not quite honest or right--I just don't want to have to read all the boring bad and self-confident stuff that comes with it. I'm not as passionate about bad 20th century as I am about bad 16th century, if partially because what I'm interested in is the frisson of difference.

I like the puzzle of the bad that's far enough away from me that I have to really think it through , and I like the distinctive moments you can only get in the Renaissance because of the way words work. And the distinctive moments you can only get in the Renaissance because that's basically all you read, if you're me. Which I am.

This reminds me, that basically what I'm doing here is blogging. Is there much reason not to turn this into a real blog? I'd lose the benefits of the space to figure out my own head and to free write, but I'd start to write more seriously for an audience. I'm skeptical, though--I feel myself not convinced, so I know I'm not going to do it.

If I'm going to do blogging, I'm going to do it in a separate space--and I WILL not fall back into that trap of blogging about the Internet. It exchanges time for not-time in a way that won't ultimately be productive.

I wouldn't mind blogging about the Renaissance, if I didn't worry that it'd eat up my ideas--like Mr. Berman said that one should go to Japan for months and come back and never tell anyone, so that it has to come back as words. It's an odd thing to say to a student, and perhaps an odder thing to wish you had done. But I can see the appeal, especially because Japan was furtherer then.


These aren't ideas, really--this isn't writing practice so much as training my fingers to produce words as fast as I can think of them. That said, I think this will help me in my work as writer for CU--I need to be able to write faster. That job's almost over, and I haven't done nearly enough.

(My guilt comes back. My recent technique of listing everything I need to do in a given day to count it as a success is useful, but it doesn't work for longer than a day yet. I need practice with that, just like I need finger practice. That'd be an article I'd want to read--how to feel successful.)

Most of my fantasizing recently has been about having read more. How odd is that? I'm coming right along--I guess I need to figure out what's a reasonable amount to have accomplished and try to accomplish more than that--because I don't have goals, I don't have any sense of what I should be doing.

I know that James and I are doing a lot more than most people did last summer. I think that's a good thing--he pushes me to read more and think harder, and I need that.

OH--I should email my buddy. May as well keep building on this network...