The aspirational academic article

Certain researchers even when it's academic articles they're writing can impress. Reading such article now. The points are well-organized and the laying down of concepts equally superbly structured. It doesn't try to drown with information. Instead, it builds up its case, piling one clearly stated idea on top of another, and then revealing, at the perfect moment, the argument driven at or connecting the concept on hand to a theory, like a knot, yes, but more accurately like a firm ribbon.

That it keeps the discussion meaty proves that "critical" can be engaging.

Yep, "academic" or "serious" writing doesn't have to be insufferable, filled to the coffers (rhymes with coffin!) with gobbledygookterms.

One day, one day, I shall conquer this Everest. (Everest! Serious kasi eh.)

Never completely lost

Doing what you love can help with this. Doing what you love allows you to remember so well, to feel so closely how you have loved, that you can forget the space between yourself and the words you draw with. Forget the distance between you and everything, everyone, else. Love becomes transmutable. Freud knew this. Writing can be an effective replacement mechanism—and in its solitude, there is antidote for the deepest loneliness.

Lucy McKeon, "Meeting Joan Didion," the Paris Review

...how this essay made me miss writing, earnest writing, about the world and about life. I remember last year (and early this year) and how in the darkest of ruts, this blog was like an anchor.

Satrapi: On choosing to create

Life is too short and we cannot spoil it. I don't have 300 years in front of me. So I just do the things that I really want to do at the moment because that's the only way you will do them well. If you don't believe in yourself, it won't work.

Because creation, you know, it means that you don't have any salary, you don't have any retirement, all of that. So if you don't have the security, at least have the freedom. I go for the freedom.  

- Marjanne Satrapi 

Read the full interview at the 99%.  

Be the sky

The Problem
Richard Siken


The problem (if there was one) was simply a problem with the question. He wants to paint a bird, needs to, and the problem is why. Why paint a bird? Why do anything at all? Not how, because hows are easy, series or sequence, one foot after the other, but existentially why bother, what does it solve? Be the tree, solve for bird. What does that mean? It’s a problem of focus, it’s a problem of diligence, it’s supposed to be a grackle but it sort of got away from him. But why not let the colors do what they want, which is blend, which is kind of neighborly, if you think about it. Blackbird, he says. So be it. Indexed and normative. Who gets to measure the distance between experience and its representation? Who controls the lines of inquiry? He does, but he’s not very good at it. And just because you want to paint a bird, do actually paint a bird, it doesn’t mean you’ve accomplished anything. Maybe if it was pretty, it would mean something. Maybe if it was beautiful it would be true. But it’s not, not beautiful, not true, not even realistic, more like a man in a birdsuit, blue shoulders instead of feathers, because he isn’t looking at a bird, real bird, as he paints, he is looking at his heart, which is impossible, unless his heart is a metaphor for his heart, as everything is a metaphor for itself, so that looking at the page is like looking out the window at a bird in your chest with a song in its throat that you don’t want to hear but you paint anyway because the hand is a voice that can sing what the voice will not and the hand wants to do something useful. Sometimes, at night, in bed, before I fall asleep, I think about a poem I might write, someday, about my heart, says the heart. Answer: be the heart. Answer: be the hand. Answer: be the bird. Answer: be the sky.


*Italics, mine

On writing

That's the good news and the bad news. The bad news, because it means that confronting terror and humiliation is part of the job description. Good news, because it happens to everybody, it comes with the turf, and each time out will be like the first time. First love only happens once, but first-fiction terror and euphoria can happen again and again.

 So haul out your Moleskin or boot up the iBook, and go scare the hell out of yourself. Then fall in love. Repeat when necessary. 

- Tim Tomlinson, "Fiction," The Portable MFA in Creative Writing