Now, where'd I put my A-game? I swear it's around here somewhere....

This essay I'm working on was going breezily enough until I got the email with the list of contributors to the volume, and suddenly it has become much, much more important to produce a solid piece of scholarship. Which is unfortunate, because I've sort of weighted my summer increasingly on the non-academic side of things, and am enjoying that very much indeed, thank you.

Okay, RG. Focus. Focus.

Rage, rage: race results

So, that mercifully night-scheduled half-marathon was last night. So fun. SO FUN. I think I may have to seek out more aggressively the nighttime races. It was, for me, just like going for a run like I always do at night, except that more people started off at the same time. Everyone wearing elaborate arrangements of glow-sticks and necklaces. And out on the course, away from the more populated start- and endpoints, it was surreal and a little psychedelic to see these disembodied glow-accoutrements bouncing along in the dark air. Fun, fun.

My goal was to finish in 100 minutes. I missed my goal by 5 minutes (dang!--I hit this wall around mile 11 and slowed down until around mile 13) (but I did run my first 7 miles in 49 minutes, which makes me happy). Still, I did come in around 40th out of a field of 1500. I was the 8th woman to finish, and placed second in my division. Of course, as you will recall, my division is now the over-40 set. So, among all those women who are not going gentle into that good night, I am going the second least gently.

I'm going on Google now to see when and where I can do this again.

Greetings from the actual world.

So last year, really, was the year that wasn't. From the time my leave started April 10 2010 to the time I started teaching again in January 2011, I spent every free minute I had at this computer drafting my book. I didn't hike, really, other than maybe a time or two with the things. I didn't ski. I didn't watch movies. (I haven't seen many movies since I had Thing 1, to be honest.) I didn't do anything. I said, "All those things will wait until I finish this @*$%S book."

This summer, I have decided that I could dribble away all the minutes of my life at this computer. So. I bought myself my first bike since I was, like, preteen. The technology has advanced since then! It has gears and shocks! And I've been riding it EVERYWHERE! Also, have been rockclimbing much. Also, will be skydiving in a couple of weeks. Also, going back to Nerudaland for one last visit before he returns from exile. And then there was the extendo-camping-hiking-fishing-mountain-to-desert-trip from which I posted photos last post.

And guess what? I'm still getting work done. I'm still productive. I'm not, you know, drafting a book or anything, and I haven't been writing every day, but certainly making good progress, working consistently (if not obsessively) on my 2nd article for the summer. And I don't think I'll hit this fall semester feeling like I got run over by a truck, for a change.

I got so focused on the checklist for a while there that I forgot to have a life.

Some summer.

Some fishing. Some hiking. Some scenery. Some olfactory-identification of the trees. Some megafauna. Some microfauna.

80 minutes.

I don't tend to run distance races, because I don't (can't) run in the morning: I'm not a morning person, never have been, and I don't do well in heat/sun (headaches, overheating). But there's this halfmarathon in two weeks that starts at 10pm. So I figured I'd do a long run tonight, and if my time was okay, I'll enter the race. It'd be fun. And cool. And dark. And I ran 10 miles in 80 tonight. Not Olympic quality, to be sure, but I'm not technically trying to qualify for the Olympics. And it was 100 degrees when I started (earlier than 10pm)(can you believe that shit?!)(I miss winter)(though I did go up to 9500 feet today and there were still several feet of snow, and loads of shorts-wearing skiers). And I didn't take water tonight, so I kept having to ask lawn-watering dudes to give me a drink and to water my steaming hot head. So anyway, about this race, I think I'm in. I could easily have gone 3 more tonight. I'll do a 12 next week, which should ready me well enough to eat the whole banana. (Is that a real expression? I may have just made that up. It sounds vaguely lewd, actually.)

The fun part.

As I mentioned, the Book and I are on a break right now. I've been working on an article on an entirely different subject, and what has been most amazing to me in this process is how much freaking fun I'm having! I've now finished the article and mailed it off to what I think is its appropriate home (we'll see, whatever), and I felt nothing but pleasure in mailing it off, but not in the way that would indicate a sudden unburdening, a sigh of relief. Rather, the pleasure of having written something good and then, without fanfare or crisis, finishing it.

This sensation has been, a bit, lost for me in the process of writing the Book. I have at various times felt exhausted by the Book, exasperated, overwhelmed, overmastered, and outclassed. I have at times felt like my entire human potential dangled from the Book's thin thread. And it made me forget how much pleasure there is in writing a persuasive argument about something cool you've noticed. There's something exciting about seeing some old text in a new way and drawing other folks' attentions to that new discovery.

I have another essay that I must get to work on, due at the end of the summer. And instead of feeling laden and stressed about writing it, I'm really just looking forward to it. This may be, after all, the fun part.

I may actually have landed in the right profession after all.

Book report.

So it's now been some months since I posted anything about my book, I think. Perhaps since MLA. I returned from MLA to the suckerpunch of the semester, and since my term ended I've been working on an article, and I have another to write that's due before the end of summer. So my book and I are on a little bit of a break right now. Which is, I think, healthy.

If you read earlier posts, you may recall that I met with an editor from a Big UP at MLA. He was generous, thoughtful, full of both goodwill and evident care for good scholarship. He was what one hopes all academic editors are, and no matter what happens with this point I'm really happy to have had the chance to meet him, because he changed my sense of what a good editor is and does.

Our conversation was helpful, and both encouraging and daunting. What became clear over the course of our discussion of my project's argument is that my book, as it stood back in December, was at a kind of crossroads. See, I had written a book that gestured toward a very big argument--gestured so far as to propose a wildly ambitious concluding chapter that may or may not have imagined itself as surveying the entirety of poetic history to the present time. This very big argument, the kind of argument that, if I did it right, could actually be a game-changer in my field and possibly in the wider field of literary criticism, about the relationship between poetic structures and cultural systems of thought. This big argument was anchored, to that point, by a series of chapters with far narrower focus, examinations of particular writers in a particular tradition. These chapters are strong, solid pieces of argumentation, but their focus is narrow. Really, too narrow to arrive at the big game-changing argument that my proposal promised they would.

The editor in question asked to see my chapters, which was very nice, and I finally got around to sending them his way in late April. But it's pretty clear that he's really interested in publishing the Big Argument book--no surprise, given his press's roster of studies.

And here's the thing: ten years ago, it would have been crucial to my sense of self-worth to write that Big Book, to be a game-changer. But I'm not sure that my psychology requires it anymore. I am really good at textual scholarship, and my project has something very smart and important to say about the poetry I love most, the poetry that, to my mind, does influence all the rest until now. But do I need to aspire to be the Greenblatt of poetic theory? Do I really need to change any games? Really, I don't, especially knowing what it will cost me--both in time and in stress, and in the way that it would trap me in this moment of my life for unknown months or years more. I sort of need to be able to move on with my life, to put this project to bed and start working on other interests that I have, to stop being held hostage to this one set of ideas. Because really, I could keep refining and expanding these ideas--any of us could, I suspect, keep working on the ideas that rock our minds, producing ever wider and more far-reaching projects. Indeed, I can envision the arc of another version of my book, the Big version of it, can see how its argument develops and the conclusions it suggests. I see it. But to write that book would require at least a couple more years of intensive labor. Probably more, given the other responsibilities in my life.

I love this subject, and my future projects will--perhaps inevitably--be informed by the discoveries I've made while I've been working on this book (they are, in so many ways, my pet issues, the questions that drive all kinds of productivity in various genres for me). But I like my modest project. I like what I've discovered. And I'm ready to let it go.

----------------------------------

The other press I've been in conversation with is, and has always been, my fave UP. I get a ton of use out of what they publish. I read and learn, and that seems like the kind of company one would want to keep. It's not the hugest name in UPs, but it's certainly very reputable in my field, and I really, really want to place the book there. Like, really. (Like, I'm almost afraid to type these words, not because I might jinx it but because in doing so I am admitting my desire in clear terms, which will make potential disappointment all the more profound.) As I mentioned in an earlier post, the editor there, who expressed real enthusiasm for the project many months ago when it was still in progress, died. The press just named hir replacement a month or so ago. I've emailed the new editor a whole new proposal and indicated the predecessor's interest, but really I'm starting from scratch, and I don't even have a body of existing books to give me a sense of what kind of work this new editor will be sympathetic toward. I wish I knew the magic words. I'll just have to hope that they're somewhere in my writing sample.

Stage one of grief: denial.

Went to campus today, after nearly 2 months away, for a grad thesis defense. And thank goodness I did. Got into my office to find that some kind of leak--busted pipe? rain?--had occurred. Don't know when, but clearly the damage has been going on for some time. My office smells like a low-rent English hotel. There's mold growing on shelves. And the books: well, on the upside, very few books were damaged, along with a couple of years' worth of RQ. But those books that WERE damaged: damn sam. The shelves and shelves of Amazon.com replaceable books are fine. What got ruined: every last one of my poetry mentor's books, each one lovingly inscribed, each one infolding all his correspondence to me over the years. And also a 19c edition of Piers Plowman that used to be owned by another dear sorta mentor friend of mine from my PhD program, the Shakespeare Sonnet guy, also lovingly gifted to me with an irreplaceable inscription. Now its cover print isn't even make-out-able through the mold.

I'm sure the library's conservation folks can fix it. Right? RIGHT?

Game on, Thing 2

Upon seeing a life-sized animatronic T-Rex today:

"I could take him."

Practical rapture

I’m not one of those who is expecting the end of the world tomorrow. My own tradition takes more a “No man knoweth the hour” approach to the whole question. But I do have to say that I’ve been surprised and a little disturbed by the cultural response to this little calendrical phenomenon. I’ve heard hostility, sarcasm, dismissal. I’ve heard these believers called “nut cases,” “superstitious” and “frauds.” “False prophets.” “Insane.” “Brainwashers.”

There’s a Jewish teaching that you should treat everyone you meet as if he or she might be the Messiah, because hey, you never know. I don’t think it would be the worst thing in the world if large or even small numbers of people behaved as if they were hoping to welcome the divine.