cold discipline for solo travellers
From the category archives:
I am not much enamoured of my lyrical gifts at the moment, but am writing my way through the funk in hope of producing something that’s less, to my reading, jejune. I can’t think of a better solution (ignoring the cheap seats’ solution which is always, stop for a while).
It is my hope that Giovanni’s readers’ results may vary.
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Ten years ago I wrote a novel, for which I had positive feedback both from my reader-commentator locally and from the publisher who rejected it.
Eighteen months after that I spent another eighteen months rewriting the story, to the extent that it was a different novel with mostly different characters, settings and events. This was also rejected, again in a kindly manner, by the same publisher and by the agent whom I shopped it to thereafter.
A little under six years ago I got an assessment for the manuscript, along with some excellent advice, and began rewriting, again with extensive points of difference, perhaps a year after that. The voyage to that point was accounted for in this article in New Zealand Books.
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A little while ago I asked what I should do with my tumblelog. I’d given up on the limited formatting and code mismatches that came with syndicating its poems and idle frippery to these pages and decided to keep all my musings in a single source. Since then, tumblr itself has continued developing its particular character as a perpetual scroll of site-themed scraps, images, small reflections and aggregates. In this, I’ve started to go with the flow once again, aggregating there my links from delicious, digg, and flickr, along with this site and the White Mist, and also occasionally using the “reblog” option to circulate what I like elsewhere within the tumbled network. The last of these activities relies on reading more widely the tumbled sites of others, and this is proving a further strand of leisured amusement (not least the prevalence of sites that, following on from this one, including “fuck yeah” in their title).
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My employment in my current position began in June, eight years ago, when I was grateful to have a job, a salary and a desk to call my own. Indeed, I still am. Since then I have taught continuously for anywhere between thirty-six and forty-five weeks a year, running parallel to, but not in sync with, the wider university’s teaching schedule. In the early start-up days, this included teaching from April to October with no non-teaching time, thanks to two overlapping twenty-four week programmes. In October there was one week’s break and then straight on until Christmas. In 2002, my first year full-time on the job, I went more-or-less mad. I had an office to myself behind the covered bike-stands, which was a fairly grim view but offered privacy for when I needed to cry between classes. You get the idea.
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Posterous
Cultural Learnings for Make Benefit
16 January, 2010
in commentatrix,teaching & learning,writing & research
I honed my essay writing and editing skills on Wallace Stevens, Shakespeare and Katharine Susannah Pritchard at a time when I didn’t expect to use them for anything except the most esoteric of pursuits. My explanation to my students of these skills’ value has never pushed much beyond these boundaries, except to say that if you are well-trained in writing and editing, you can turn your hand to most writing tasks, including those of future employers that you can’t imagine yet. The primary function for me, however, of the ability to write and edit has been for my own enjoyment, with the latter, more recently, also for sale in the service of others’ work. [Hustler's aside: my business welcomes your recommendations and referrals].
[click to continue…]
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