“Do you know what I would answer to someone who asked me for a description of myself, in a hurry? This:
?? !!
For indeed my life is a perpetual question mark–my thirst for books, my observations of people, all tend to satisfy a great, overwhelming desire to know, to understand, to find an answer to a million questions. And gradually the answers are revealed, many things are explained, and above all, many things are given names and described, and my restlessness is subdued. Then I become and exclamatory person, clapping my hands to the immense surprises the world holds for me, and falling from one ecstasy into another. I have the habit of peeping and prying and listening and seeking–passionate curiosity and expectation. But I have also the habit of being surprised, the habit of being filled with wonder and satisfaction each time I stumble on some wondrous thing. The first habit could make me a philosopher or a cynic or perhaps a humorist. But the other habit destroys all the delicate foundations, and I find each day that I am still…only a Woman!”
“My importance to the world is relatively small. On the other hand, my importance to myself is tremendous. I am all I have to work with, to play with, to suffer and to enjoy. It is not the eyes of others that I am wary of, but of my own. I do not intend to let myself down more than I can possibly help, and I find that the fewer illusions I have about myself or the world around me, the better company I am for myself.”
1. If possible, be Russian. And live in another country. Play chess. Be an active trader between languages. Carry precious metals from one to the other. Remind us of Stravinsky. Know the names of plants and flying creatures. Hunt gauzy wings with snares of gauze. Make science pay tribute. Have a butterfly known by your name.
2. Do not be awed by giant predecessors. Be ill-tempered with their renown. Point out flaws. Frighten interviewers from Time. Appear in Playboy. Sell to the movies.
3. Use unlikely materials. Who would choose Pnin as hero, but how did we live before Pnin?
4. Delight in perversity. Put a noun into the dictionary. Now we recognize the Lolita at every corner, see her sucking sweetened milk through straws at every soda fountain, dream her through all our fantasies.
5. Burn pedants in pale fire. Accept no fashions. Be your own fashion. Do not rely on earlier triumphs. Be new at each appearance.
6. Age indomitably, in the European manner. Do not finish your labours young. Be a planet, not a meteor. Honor the working day. Sit at your desk.
Friends, I am giving myself over to NaNoWriMo for the month of November. It may come to naught, but between that and writing comedy sketches, which, I hasten to add, are like academic-level hard, my frequency of posting will be intermittent at best for the next month or so. If I do it will very likely be whining about process or something like that. It promises to be quite dull.
I have not forgotten you, internet. I will be engaged in a war with some words, of which I am simultaneously the mistress and the bitch. A girl’s gotta be versatile in this day and age.
My apologies for the long absence, internet. Sketch writing is hard. REALLY HARD. Like, opening a document and staring at it for nine straight hours hard. Kind of like academic paper writing, come to think of it, but without the ability to quote from giant stretches of someone else’s text. A pity, that.
But here I am, with thoughts. And my chief concern is about tonality. I stress all the time about striking the right tone, especially when I get excited. And I don’t see any virtue in adapting some kind of jaded hipster attitude and pretending that I think everything is shit. I certainly don’t feel that way at all. I genuinely like a lot of stuff, and some of it I get downright Dug-enthusiastic over.
I was trying to hammer out some kind of piece on America– why, despite the Tea Party and vasectomy-reversal billboards, it’s kind of an amazing place. That contrary to what Fitzgerald said, there are second acts in American lives. I’m not a nationalist, nor am I a patriot, really, in the modern sense of the word. But I believe you can recognize that modern nation-states are ideological abstractions and still feel affection for them, as this Onion piece would have it.
But the tone. The tone is what’s tricky. So I shelved it. Because I am not Sarah Vowell. I find sincerity quite hard to transmit without sounding twee, or over-intellectualized, or facetious. It’s why I also have difficulty striking the right balance when I like something.
Right now I am watching The Thick of It, an amazing show about political spin in modern UK politics. I am attaching a clip, but it is sweary beyond compare. So NSFW, unless you happen to work in a mine or a pirate ship.
I fucking love it. The swearing alone rivals The Sopranos. (And we know how I feel about epic baroque cursing. It is one of my greatest joys in life. This stuff could be Slavic in its morphology, I kid you not). Granted, the camera work, which is done in that jolty docu-cam style, does make me a little sick to my stomach. But if you power through (and you should, you should, you should) you will be rewarded.
I like to think it rivals Mad Men in its nuance, especially with regard to the constructed nature of masculine worlds. It’s like that feminist revelation, that men have a gender, too. That it’s all just one great big pissing contest. And it’s funny. Ridiculous, awkward — bilious and bizarre simultaneously. It bristles with an amazing ensemble energy; it’s spectacularly cast. I cannot enthuse enough. I could write a whole post that consisted solely of CAPSLOCK SCREAM FLAIL OMG WTF !!!!. But I don’t want to sound like a maniacal tween girl chasing R. Pattz down the street any more than I want to sound like these guys.
RT @bibezhik: Helping students learn is something we can all do intentionally, no matter whether we are faculty, librarians, archivists, ... 23 hours ago
