Finished first draft of grant. All this talk about evaluations and outcomes and objectives makes me wonder what assessments, if any, I am using to process my own life and writing. I would say that I have developed no standardized assessment tools that any foundation would accept. I simply proceed based on a vague sense of what I feel.
Do any of you guys assess yourselves more scientifically? Like Ben Franklin with his categories to check off each day?
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
Can’t reread this enough. There is a nice long Slate Auden: Discussed conversation from 2007 that I just found a few days ago. It’s great.
I just super-speed-reread the entire blog. From now through July 24th, 2007. I have often thought in the last month that I ought to dismantle it, in the sulky spirit of “This blog has not brought me happiness. Why should I continue to work on it?” but now I am certain I must not do that. There were so many things in it I would never have remembered, and was happy to be reminded of. I’m so crazy, all for the love of you, where you = theater.
This ought to be enough stalling to be able to work now.
After a long dry heartless and unfathomable spell of silence I thought of another line of a poem last night – I thought that the stars were scars on the sky’s face. Although this is a personification, it does not bother me, because it is a comparison both in rhyme and in content.
It’s probably not good for anything. When you take time off and have to start up again you always think of such bland stuff. Stars, roses, the moon – too much poetry about all of them. Blah.
Speaking of roses, I was in Letizia’s on Division last week, which may as well be last year for how different it is from this week, and a man was handing out pink roses from his garden to all the girls in the muffin line. Chicago springtime – exuberant. Excessive. My friend from the yoga studio calls it “overcompensating,” and she makes it sound like she’s talking about a short man with a big car.
I took a rose, and the man behind me struck up a conversation about roses, and he couldn’t remember the Shakespeare line he wanted to remember, which I was able to supply to him, having assisted on ROMEO AND JULIET.
“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” I said.
He looked at me like I had memorized the OED. I have never impressed anyone so much with so little.
Sometimes I think that if I could only remember everything everyone has said to me, all the conversations with strangers – like the guitar player in the Seattle train station, like the Coors employee in Colorado, the woman in the bathroom in the basement of the downtown Chicago library – I would have enough material to write for the rest of my life.
It’s not Friday but here’s a poem anyway. Maybe it’s Friday somewhere in another world.
NO SECOND TROY
Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great.
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
– W.B. Yeats
I gravitate between wanting to write small perfect poems, like this, and long messy ones. The things I have written lately have been of a more in-between length. But I have always loved poems that are compact and intense. Like Epitaph on a Tyrant or Western Wind or so much of Larkin or Cope.
I have been taking some time off to rest and end the vicious cycle of endless ear infections, which is my latest excuse for not blogging. This has not prevented me from, today, ensconcing myself at the library to finish another grant proposal for a Chicago theater that I should have been done with days ago.
Here is the list of books my brother recommended in response to my Julian Jaynes quandary.
School A
Metaphors We Live By – Lakoff
Women, Fire and Dangerous Things – Lakoff
School B:
Mental Spaces – Fauconnier
Mappings in Thought and Language – Fauconnier/Turner
Synthesis of A and B:
The Literary Mind – Turner (which was the first one he mentioned)
More than Cool Reason Lakoff/Turner
Where Mathematics Comes From Lakoff/Núñez
I am imagining a Saturday in July, or even August, where I have time to sit down at a library with all of them in a stack.
You can get anywhere in America from anywhere else, but some trips are easier than others.
– Terry Teachout
Today I got sick of being ear-infected and quarantined in my apartment. I went up to Ravenswood and wandered: brunch, the library, the Grind, an hour of a movie I’d already seen.
The best part of it was sitting in the sunlight and writing on the granite curb-seat outside the Ravenswood library, and watching the kids who went by – and watching them watch me.
As one little family approached me, I heard the mother saying, with resignation, “Don’t climb up there – DON’T climb up there – ” and I saw the girl looking at me like “She got to climb up there! What the hell, Mom?” She even put one hand up onto the curb, longingly, and kind of looked at me as if she hoped I would overrule her mother. I couldn’t help her out.
I wrote, a very little. (Stop with the Austen constructions.) I found myself wanting to draw, probably because I read SLOTH (graphic novel) at the library, about teenagers in comas and lemon orchards. I drew a planter and a tree and wrote “I can’t draw” on top of them.
At the Grind, I was reading WHEN SHE WAS GOOD, by Philip Roth, and the girl sharing my table with me (tiny cafe) was like, “That book’s really good.” I do like the way Chicago is so demonstratively literary. And I also like the way that strangers tell you what they think.
In Julian Jaynes’s THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND, in the introduction, he says that to imagine inanimate objects as possessing consciousness is an error of understanding. Once I read this, it stopped the clockwork of my thoughts, and I read no more of the book.
I still don’t know how to think about it. Imagining inanimate objects as possessing consciousness is what I do all day. It’s how I direct. How I write. How I make the day turn from time into presence. Without that error of understanding, I have nothing – or a significantly reduced something – to understand. This has bothered me in every line I’ve tried to write in my head since. I think it’s what led me to stop comparing.
I mentioned this to no one for awhile, and then I brought it up to my friend B, who has the credentials to understand it better than I do. She explained to me, over fried fish at Navy Pier before a viewing of the STAR TREK movie, that even though Jaynes is right for philosophy, he does not have to be right for the purposes of art. I suppose I knew this already, but I needed B – a bona fide philosopher – to tell me. She essentially said “Carry on.” But I still feel as if there may be something that I am doing wrong.
I want to be informed by and aware of science. Otherwise what does it mean to be a writer who lives today, as opposed to yesterday? What good is my poetry if it can’t comprehend that paragraph?
I still don’t know if it’s really okay to think of the table as alive. But it’s too late, at least now, to read the rest of the book.
(Created a “philosophy” category w. this post.)
of spending Seattle in Memorial Day (reverse the nouns), with my brother and my cousins, I am spending it here on my Chicago-based couch, watching television and taking antibiotics, in the second installment of Ear Infection 2009. I am watching Eileen’s copy of the BBC Pride and Prejudice, and maudlinly identifying with Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s punchline heiress-daughter, whose “sickly constitution” prevents her from being presented at court.
Earlier, I watched Beyonce videos. You certainly don’t see her sitting around feeling sorry for herself cause she has an ear infection.
Dara Weinberg 