7/2/08

Ten minutes. Here goes.

I can't forget to make a sandwich before I go. I wikipedia'd Fulke Greville and found that it didn't make much sense of the verse. That's disappointing but perhaps unsurprising, considering that he did have a few more important other jobs.

What text was there--he's a mixture of Machiavelli and Sophocles, apparently--did surprise me. It's from the 1911 encyclopedia, though, so it's not surprising that it's out of date. It's amazing how much our concept of literary history has changed over the last hundred years. I suppose that makes it inevitable that it will change again over the next hundred and that our preferences will in turn assist the preferences of hte next generation.

Fulke Greville is a good case, though, of poets not being confined to a decade. Certainly texts released in a given decade have a given character, but that has to be looked at from book to book, not poet to poet. The sort of literary history that's necessary needs to be done longitudinally over the course of one writer's life and... horizontally across a writer's contemporaries. I wish I could remember which was synchronic and which was diachronic. That'd be useful.

I'm really intrigued by Evan's readings on the sociology of the modernists. I want to know more about how he's going about it and what's at stake--I'd love to be able to do a sociology of the early moderns. I just don't think it's possible. For me. To do it.

I wonder if this discipline of writing has been useful to me. I think it has, but in what form? Do I write better now? I guess I chase ideas a little further--into their first complexities rather than into their first potentialities--which is in itself a worthwhile activity. I really need to go back and re-read everything, whether slowly or in a rush. I think it'd help me figure out what work this space is accomplishing--besides just as a psychological valve for me.

I love the ivy outside my indow. It's just so green, in a way that's really relaxing.

I wonder why I'm always using this space to generalize about things I should be doing and am not? It seems like an overactive superego, to use the common parlance. What is there that I can celebrate?

I finished the scanning for Stuart. German seems to be going well, even if I'm always on the verge of falling off the ball. I'm really enjoying reading. I'm ready to dive into reading some criticism. Oops--a things-I should-do jumped in. Go get it!

Resolution: to let my anxiety about my current knowledge and my future motivate concrete achievements rather than stress.

Thing to celebrate: I'm still writing for 10 minutes a day, 6 days a week. Good for me!