in a haze

I'm a liar. I didn't make more time to blog about what I read. I'm still stuck in the disability to fully process anything I'm reading, for one thing.

I strongly recommend reading William Gibson's Pattern Recognition.

And Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair. It's pure fantasy for English nerds.

That's all I have right now. I'm drained.

The Angst of a PhD Student

I am reading so much right now, I don't know where to start with my blog. I'm quite behind in my entries - I've read many many things since I last posted, and now I have absolutely no idea where to start, in order to catch up.

I'm taking a Composition Pedagogies class (again), and a Travel Writing course. Food for thought in both courses, but I'm still processing.

I will say this: the more I read and the study, the smaller I feel, and, sometimes, the less I actually learn.

I've managed to fall into some type of rhythm for studying and reading now, so hopefully, more blog posts will be forthcoming.

Vampires

It's been quite a while since I've written anything. That doesn't mean I haven't been reading. I read quite a bit over the spring semester, for my last semester as a master's student at UCO. Finishing my thesis, taking Hemingway and Composition Pedagogies, as well as reading a few pages for fun here and there, in order to clear my brain of all the academics, kept me reading far too much for me to have time to write anything on this blog.

And now, when I am writing, instead of reflecting on reading, I'm going to reflect on what I've been viewing, because it directly relates to my writing, which is connected to my reading. So it counts.

I went to see a musical tonight (or rather last night, since it is now the wee hours of the morning) entitled [Title of Show]. It's about a couple of guys writing a musical about a couple of guys writing a musical. As they work, they are faced with the difficulties of writer's block, and later, with the difficulties of maintaining the integrity of their project or giving in to mainstream demands in order to make a profit and make it to Broadway.

The friend I attended this musical with insisted that I go see it with him, while we were having a chat conversation about writing. I'm grateful that he did, because it particularly pertained to me. There's a song that relates self-doubt and despair to vampires, and I can relate. Sometimes I question my own ability to the point that I am drained of the capability of writing anything at all.

It makes me think again of something Ira Glass said, about producing massive amounts of work that isn't really that good, in order to get to the work that is. If I continually doubt myself and block myself from creating anything at all, how will I manage to work through all the mediocre and even down right shitty writing in order to get to something that actually has merit?

I've been attempting to work on a novel I started a couple years ago, and writer's block keeps plaguing me. My intention when I started this novel was to write, simply, a romance novel I could market easily for some quick cash. As the story develops, however, I've realized that it's not going to be marketable as a good old fashioned bodice ripping romance, you know, the kind with Fabio on the cover, holding a fainting woman in a tight corset that looks ready to burst. At first I thought I should keep out the plot tendencies that were making my book more than a silly romance. After all, why was I writing it? To have a marketable book for some quick cash. The thing is, I don't want to write something that's just quick cash, and that I have to publish under a pseudonym so I can look at myself in the mirror every day. I want to write something good. And as I struggle to write something good, I am concerned with what my readers will think, concerned that it really is only bodice ripping romance after all (even though no bodices have yet been ripped, in the literal sense).

A line from the musical, and a line that my friend quoted to me (unbeknownst to me until we were actually watching the musical) said that if any stranger on the street walked up to us and expressed the doubts we harbor in our minds every day, we would think that stranger was crazy, and be offended. Yet we tell them to ourselves daily.

The question I am left with: how do I stop doubting myself long enough to free up my mind to generate mediocre text so that I can later polish it into something shiny? The only answer I've been able to find so far is to tell myself to shut up and just write.

Theories of Composition and Pedagogy, Quest Narrative in Hemingway, Ecocriticism and Hobbits, American Identity, and Medieval Mysticism

So it's been an unforgivably long time since I've blogged. As you can tell from the title, I have many many different pursuits going on with my reading right now. Perhaps that's why I haven't written - I really wouldn't know what to write about.

I'm taking Composition Pedagogies this semester, and it's quite the intriguing, and at times frustrating, course. It is intriguing because the various theoretical approaches and the justification for these approaches encourages and challenges me to examine my own teaching methods. It is frustrating because much of the theory loses touch with actual practice, and much composition theory doesn't seem to concern itself with what goes on outside of the composition classroom. As a professor in training, I worry about the future of my field, and this kind of isolationism threatens the future of my field. I feel like it is imperative that composition studies, as well as studies in literature, find a way to become relevant outside of the classroom, as well as outside of the university. It seems obvious that learning written communication is important, and it is important. In the text-dependent culture we live in (whether the internet or Facebook or writing grant and business proposals or texting) a certain understanding of how language works and how to communicate most effectively in speech or text is necessary. The problem, then, is determining how that communication should be taught, and what type of discourse should be taught.

I have too many thoughts on this to go into now - I'm working on a research paper for my course that will propose a first year composition program. Ambitious, I know, but I have some ideas floating in my brain that I want to attempt to put into practice. I'll write more on my thoughts on composition theory and discourse relevance as I continue to research for my project.

My other reading - I'm taking a Hemingway course right now, and loving every moment of it. Every time I read a new or revisit a familiar Hemingway text, I fall more in love with Papa's prose, and with his investigation of human experience. My paper for that class involves researching quest narratives and religion. Lots of interesting reading going on there as well, and I also have too many thoughts on them to address right now.

Finally, ecocriticism and Hobbits - I'm writing a paper dealing with environmentalism in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings Trilogy and the Silmarillion for a conference in April in Montreal. Needless to say, lots of different thoughts going on there as well, all of which I will revisit once the paper is written and I have successfully (I hope) presented my findings at the conference.

Oh, and I'm occasionally revisiting concepts of narratology, sonnet convention, medieval mysticism, and Renaissance ideology as I continue to work on and revise my thesis.

And, the readings I've assigned my students in my American Identity themed research course. I'm thinking I'll have to take each of these topics for separate blog entries. I'm not sure what kind of convoluted connections I'll make otherwise.

More soon (which is a relative term - more when I have time)