New Blog For All You Writers!

Since I work from home right now (hello, have i mentioned that before? oh! i have. that's right) and have large amounts of time to complete a large amount of work, i am obsessed with finding the perfect writing routine. I've played around with different writing locations, schedules, ideas....I've settled into a pretty good rhythm but I'm still obsessed with this blog Daily Routines which chronicles how writers and artists manage their time. The entries range from Emily Dickinson to Thomas Friedman and my favorite entry is Jonathan Safran Foer. But that's just because he's dreamy.

(via Blogora)

This is me...blogging

And it feels weird....

You know all those lame, awful, ridiculous things people say when they break up? The whole "its not you, its me..." genre? Or, better yet, "We're the two right people but at the wrong time..." That's what I feel like saying to my blog.

I just can't get it together. Let's be honest, it isn't the blog's fault. Last week I actually said the words "I guess I'll go to Target today since I got dressed." Since. I. Got. Dressed. I've turned into one of those stay at home moms with the wild hair and crazy eyes desperate for contact with the outside world. But instead of nurturing a small child, I'm nurturing my dissertation. And it is slowly sucking the life out of me...but in a good way. As if that makes sense. I'm in a routine. A routine that doesn't really include thinking about anything other than the media representation of Muslim women. A routine that doesn't, obviously, include blogging. This is the point where I should apologize for being a bad friend about not returning phone calls...or sending holiday mail...or having anything to say when we talk.

But perhaps the real reason I don't blog is that I feel guilty. I feel guilty for feeling like I have nothing to say. I feel guilty for being silent. It is a privilege to stay at home and write. It is a privilege to get paid to think. It is a privilege not to have to wait in line for unemployment payment. It is a privilege to be removed from reality.

I don't fool myself. I know you don't look here for insight or knowledge so you aren't expecting the great American blog post. But I also know you don't look here for completely self-absorbed posts about my writing and whining.

But hopefully you look here for memes because I've got one coming up*....

hugs...

*thanks, slightly

Wherein I say hello...

And that I've missed you. You know I don't apologize for neglecting this (optional) blog. But I will say that I'm missing the blog. If not the blog, the things the blog is indicative of. I miss having time to watch movies, read for pleasure, and think critically about political happenings. Generally speaking, if the blog is silent, my life is out of whack. I'm not in balance. I'm spending too much time thinking, obsessing, self-loathing and not enough time writing, arguing and enjoying. Alas, I fear this will be the story for the next 9 months or so. My dissertation is staring at me. And, believe me, it has crazy eyes. Most days, I do as well.

So bear with me...and think happy, intellectual thoughts for me.

Some words about keeping and reading diaries

This week's [The] New Yorker has an article about why we read diaries. The article also delves into the reasons we keep (or try to keep) diaries as well.

My own journaling has really fallen off in recent years. I attribute it to a variety of things but mainly to the fact that I have to write so much day to day that I can barely bring myself to blog let alone chronicle my life on a daily basis. So my moleskines are filled with lists of books I want to read, movies I want to see or have enjoyed, and tasks I need to complete. Oh! And reflections and notes to myself when I fail to accomplish the tasks. And as Louis Menand reminds me--"Diary-keeping, on this account, is just neurotic, since the last thing most people want to do with their unconsummated longings and petty humiliations is to inscribe them permanently in a book."

Well, I am nothing if not neurotic.

But I really appreciated the insight about why we read diaries of people who are long gone. I've often wondered this same thing and assumed it had something to do with looking to people smarter than me for insight on a life far more complicated than me. The reading experience was simultaneously depressing and hopeful. I'd become depressed that my diaries were not anything near this complex but I'd be hopeful that the reading would inspire me to become an actualized person.

I prefer Menand's reflections:
The obvious assumption is that we read diaries because we want to know what the diarist was really like as a person, but how plausible, even in the case of famous diarists, is this? It’s true that we read the diaries of Virginia Woolf because they were written by Virginia Woolf, who, in addition to being an interesting novelist, was an interesting character. But (a paradox of representation) we would actually feel that we had a more intimate sense of Virginia Woolf if we read about her in someone else’s diary. Woolf described from the outside by another person is likely to give us a more vivid picture of what Virginia Woolf was really like than Woolf described from the inside by herself. Introspection is not as reliable as observation. (That’s why we have shrinks.)

Inside, everyone sounds, more or less eloquently, like the same broken record of anxiety and resentment. It’s the outside, the way people look and the things they say, that makes them distinct. We read Woolf’s diaries so that we can see other people through Woolf’s eyes.

Some words about writing

Before bed, I'm working my way through Gay Talese's A Writer's Life. It is a lovely, uplifting work. I love reading writer's observations about writing. They are always so descriptive and moving. I'm constantly nodding my head and thinking "yes, yes. exactly!" Especially on this passage:

Often I involve myself with two or three unrelated subjects at the same time, and I shift from one to another when I become bogged down and believe it wiser to put aside what I am doing and reappraise it at some point in the future...My curiosity drives me in different directions, but I until I have invested lots of my time--months, years--I have no idea whether a chosen subject will sustain my interest. Sometimes I toss into the trash various drafts of what I have written, while at other times I put them aside, file them away, reread them a year or two later, rewrite and refile them perhaps, or decide that they are not worth saving after all, and so I tear them up and rid myself of them forever. Writing is often like driving a truck at night without headlights, losing your way along the road, and spending a decade in the ditch.

I am still working on a piece that I started my first semester of my PhD work. It is now two years later and I still don't have it. I'm working on a new section of the literature review and I find myself really deflated and the excitement has most definitely waned. But the sad part is that it has taken me two years of aimless "driving" to arrive at this argument (the correct one) and now that I'm finally here, I want to stop. But I won't. Because that would be dumb.

My Inner Voyeur

has come out [again] and is interested in the following:

The Paris Review Interviews: Literary interviews with Dorothy Parker, T.S. Eliot, Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway AND MORE. Thoughtful, self deprecating and witty comments about self, writing and life.

The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: Excerpts from the first decade of her personal journal. Not only about her personal and writing life but also about her friendships with the likes of Updike and Sexton.

The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers: Conversations between the best writers of today. Love it.

Also...I've recently become obsessed with a great idea of mine. HOW AWESOME WOULD IT BE if Borders/Barnes and Noble would do with books what Blockbuster and Netflix has done with movies? I want to pay a monthly fee. I want to have a queue of books. I want to return them at a convenient location and pick them up at my mailbox if I'm so inclined. And don't tell me to "go to the library." Um, I DO. And it isn't good enough. I want a book store at my fingertips. I don't want to wait for Ms. Slowpoke reader to get done with the book I want. Nor do I want to buy all the books I want to read and plan on only reading once.

There is Booksfree but it is too limiting. I demand more selection.

If this whole PhD thing doesn't work out...

More words about reading

Ok, I know I've been talking a lot about reading and writing. I think I'm about done. I'm pretty much through this phase. I have one more book about reading and writing beside my bed but I may return it to the library without even reading it. I need to get reading for my dissertation* and writing things of educational relevance rather than living in my fictional "leisure reader and writer" world.

Anyway...I almost held back on this post for fear you all are sick of reading about reading. That would make sense. But then I was typing up my favorite quotes from a recent read (a strange habit that I'm glad I have...I love looking back at little gems I've picked up from a variety of authors) and I realized that I have a passage too beautiful not to share.

I finished Anna Quindlen's How Reading Changed My Life a few weeks back. It was fantastic. She does a nifty thing at the end--she lists a variety of "top ten" books. 10 Books Recommended by a Really Good Librarian. 10 Good Book Club Suggestions. 10 of the Books My Exceptionally Well-Read Friend Ben Says He's Taken the Most From. But the best! thing from the book was this passage:

Yet in her sorrow there was joy, the remembered joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others. Perhaps it is true that at base we readers are dissatisfied people, yearning to be elsewhere, to live vicariously through words in a way we cannot live directly through life. Perhaps we are the world’s great nomads, if only in our minds. I travel today in a way I once dreamed of traveling as a child. And the irony is that I don’t care for it very much, I am the sort of person who prefers to stay at home, surrounded by family, friends, familiarity, books. This is what I like about traveling: the time on airplanes spent reading, solitary, happy. It turns out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

I. LOVE. THAT. I wish desperately that I had written it.

Of course, Quindlen broke my heart when she suggested that my life-changing book (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter) is a bit of a cliché.

And more than a few were like one woman, who said of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, “I read it when I was fourteen, when I didn’t feel like anybody understood how I felt. And here is this book about a fourteen-year-old girl who had the same feelings I did.”

Apparently, I'm predictable. *sigh*

A lovely work. You should pick it up.

Obviously

I love this....

The Guardian has a special report about "writer's rooms." 19 authors provided a picture and description of where their genius happens. Click on the name for their intimate information.

I think my favorites are Hanif Kureish and Will Self.

Some words about reading and writing

Last weekend we watched a rather unremarkable movie The History Boys. I found the movie incredibly boring save for one line--

Hector, the aged and weary teacher, told a student the best thing about reading:

"The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours."

I loved that. Very much.

I've been thinking a lot about reading lately as I'm currently reading Jonathan Franzen's How to be Alone and Anna Quindlen's How Reading Changed My Life. Both are fantastic and should be very easy to get through but my reading has been interrupted a lot by life recently. But, in a way, I appreciate the slow way I am working my way through. It has read to a very meditative look at both works. I've had lots of time to dwell on the words and the messages.

I've always liked reading. Can reading be a skill? Because if it is, I have that skill. I read my first "novel" in second grade--Charlotte's Web. I very vividly remember sitting in our large yellow rocker and when I read the last word I yelled out to my mom that "I was done" and she smiled a proud smile. It was in that moment that I became a bit of a...um...reading snob. I connected reading to a proud smile. Connected reading to goodness. Connected reading to superiority. I devoured books. I locked my sister in our room when she was a mere toddler and taught her to read. I know now that she was merely memorizing the words I said and repeating them back to me but I felt proud that I shared the gift of reading with her at a young age. It was also convenient that I really only had one friend and she was a reader as well. I spent a lot of time in my room reading. Alone. I wasn't shy. Not at all. Quite the contrary-- as evidenced by my propensity to offer to read aloud in front of the class. And (I'm quite embarrassed about this now) correct my fellow classmates' reading errors publicly and loudly. Not shy. Never been shy. But I do like to immerse myself in a good book. I like the solitude a book provides. A sense of escapism. A sense of simultaneous closeness and distance from life.

How convenient, then, that I would choose a profession that demands a tremendous amount of reading and writing (which I'm beginning to finally conclude go hand in hand as interests). Further, it demands a tremendous amount of silence and voice. A connection to people yet the space to analyze on your own. I struggle with the amount of solitude connected to my writing. Long days in front of the computer, alone, being contemplative does horrible things to a psyche. At least to my psyche. I crave companionship and conversation. But it is also very romantic. And there is nothing like a great day of writing to make you feel like you've had a very rewarding chat with the ultimate conversationalist.

Anyway, I digress...the History Boys quotation... Jonathan Franzen speaks my feelings exactly. I know I was hard on his 27th City but this work of collected essays is fantastic. Truly fantastic. The type of fantastic that means I am dreading coming to the last essay...

In particular, when I read his generalizations about readers I felt he had very clearly grown up with me and was actually featuring me in his essay. He wrestles with the idea that reading is a bit of a socially isolated experience but not one necessarily dependent on social isolation.

Pride compels me, here, to draw a distinction between young fiction readers and young nerds. The classic nerd, who finds a home in facts or technology or numbers, is marked not by a displaced sociability but by an antisociability. Reading does resemble more nerdy pursuits in that it's a habit that both feeds on a sense of isolation and aggravates it. Simply being a "social isolate" as a child does not, however, doom you to bad breath and poor party skills as an adult. In fact, it can make you hypersocial. It's just that at some point you'll begin to feel a gnawing, almost remorseful need to be along and do some reading--to reconnect to that community.

Arguably, I'm a bit of a nerd as well...but I prefer to think of myself as hypersocial who craves alone time.

And speaking of writing as a profession....phew....

Writers and readers have always been prone to this estrangement. Communion with the virtual community of print requires solitude, after all. But the estrangement becomes much more profound, urgent, and dangerous when that virtual community is no longer densely populated and heavily trafficked; when the saving continuity of literature itself is under electronic and academic assault; when your alienation become generic rather than individual, and the business pages seem to report on the world's conspiracy to grandfather not only you but all your kind, and prince of silence seems no longer to be obscurity but outright oblivion.

There are so many great things about this work...his description of his father in the first essay (which may very well be my favorite thing that Franzen has ever written), his critique of our political world and his complete honesty about his limitations and weaknesses as a husband, writer and citizen. But I want you to read it for yourself and pick out the good parts. The parts at when you feel Franzen taking your hand.

Apparently I talk about technology now...

No topic is safe....

Have you heard that the new Microsoft software includes a voice command/speech recognition feature? You wear a headset and dictate text--including punctuation. I heard the story on NPR this morning and immediately started envisioning how I could use this feature in my writing life. It went something like this....

*relaxing on the couch, holding my tea cup, wrapped in a blanket*

"BRILLIANT THINGS *period* MORE BRILLIANT THINGS*comma*THE MOST BRILLIANT THINGS*period*"

Obviously everything I dictate would be art. How could it not be art? I would be wrapped in a blanket. I would be drinking tea. I would let the words come forth...spewing out a stream of brilliant. There would be no keyboard clicking to distract me from my thoughts...I could even walk around and think if I needed to....I talk with enough volume for the computer. Uh huh. There would be walking. There would be conversation. It all sounded so organic. So romantic. SOFREAKINGPERFECT. Yes. I HAVE TO HAVE THIS, I thought. I need the space to walk...and sit...and dictate. I must wear this headset.

(The fact that I am willing to overlook the extreme ridiculousness that headsets represent is significant. I once dated a guy who used a headset for his cell phone. I should have seen that as a warning. But THIS headset. THIS headset is better. More worthwhile)

I will buy it. I will have many, many lovely papers.

But then....then... I remembered what kind of writer I am.

*sitting upright at a table, with many tea cups beside me, staring blankly at the screen for hours*

"SOMEWHAT SMART THINGS*sigh*NO SMART THINGS*expletive*SILENCE*head in hands, much self loathing*STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS*including ellipses and many parenthesis to really explain things in a way that may turn into something smart later*MORE STREAMING*paragraphs that take up multiple pages*"

I don't think this would translate well. How would I dictate ellipses? Would the computer type "bang, bang, bang" when I was beating my head against the wall? Would it type "siiiigh?" If it did, I would throw my computer into the street...and watch from the window until it got run over by a bus. No. Two busses. Yes, the voice command system would force me to throw my computer into the street. I'm sorry, computer.

On a very related note (involving NPR and my writing style)....I just finished reading Sarah Vowell's (contributor to This American Life) Take the Canolli. Here is the best part of the very funny book:

Phone rang. It was Dave, a writer friend. We talked for over an hour, mainly about punctuation. He has big plans for the ellipsis. He’s mad for ellipses. I tell him, yeah, I have similar affection for the parenthesis (but I always take most of my parenthesis out, so as not to call undue attention to the glaring fact that I cannot think in complete sentences, that I think only in short fragments or long, run-on thought relays that the literati call stream of consciousness but I like to think of a disdain for the finality of the period). Dave is trying to decide whether he wants there to be a space before of after the ellipsis. He’s unsure. Is the ellipsis powerful because of what is not said after the dot dot dot, or is it a cheap excuse for not being able to verbalize? Conversely, do we parentheticals want to communicate by cramming more in, thus slapping what we’re not saying in between what we are, officially saying? Or is it because we can’t decide?

Exactly.