I am full of the worst kinds of impulses creatively at present, from sulking with maudlin froideur in front of a blank screen to comparing myself unfavourably with those whose work suggests they are fitter and more productive, if not happier. It is time to mix myself a bowl of hot metaphors, get back on the internet horse and refuse to let my earthquake malaise separate me from my aphoristic lyric glands. Even fragments that don’t yield up their tenor are better than nothing at all.
Thank you to Giovanni for keeping the vehicle open.
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A modest wrecker of this reader
Somewhere around six months into my thesis (which took me four-and-a-half years to complete and submit), my aesthetic broke and I retreated, so far as literature and much of film was concerned, to live amongst subtexts and metanarratives. I can’t tell you why this occurred with any clarity, but I can tell you when: as I read the death of Stephanie in A.S. Byatt’s Still Life, which I was anxious to finish before heading out to a job I had helping a high-school student with English language. That, too, would end badly, but not for a few more weeks. In the meantime, however, my willingness to immerse myself in realist simulacra of human suffering as a form of recreation atrophied, in a manner that seems to have become permanent.
There was still plenty to read: poetry, criticism, archival fragments, all the arcana and ephemera through which I travelled in search of an argument. Within a few years there were extensive online newspapers and journals, and later blogs in all shades of serious- and light-mindedness. There was more reading than ever before. The fact remained however that I was unable to immerse myself in the modern literary novel to any other than a minimal extent, a poor and sure handicap for someone who had continuing aspirations of writing literary fiction herself. Others posted lists of the fifty or one hundred books they had read in a year; I counted myself lucky to make a dozen read start-to-finish, outside of my professional obligations.
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Cross-posted to my Twitter Archive.
I took the liberty of a series of micro-breaks from my working week to participate in #twecon, organised by the capable and innovative @HORansome (Matthew Dentith). I was quite daunted by the prospect of summarising my article-in-process, but primarily because of the other demands on my time, not the subject matter itself. More generally I was struck by the way in which the frisson of anxiety that preceded by presentation was identical to that I’d feel if I were stepping up before a non-virtual live audience and speaking for twenty minutes.
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Inspired by my friend (and new-media artiste) Robyn Gallagher’s tweet, I have discontinued the Twitter archiving function on these, my narrative pages, and transferred it instead here, to a back-end blog with a separate feed to which you may wish to subscribe.
I am more obsessed than ever with archiving my Twitter-presence, seeing it as a short-form narrative whose relationships to these longer essays is both real and polyphonic, but the archive adds clutter here. I hope you will continue to read and comment in back, however, where I have imported and archived the existing Twitter-aggregates and will continue to tinker with the space.
Twitter’s famous lack of archiving offers, I think, a gateway to creativity, since if one is motivated, one may archive portions of the chatter as one pleases.
Here’s what caught my eye this month.
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DandyID
Blogger
Flickr
YouTube
Twitter
Vimeo
Twitpic
Tumblr
Linkedin
LiveJournal
Mobypicture
Facebook
Picasa
Google Profiles
Google Reader
Posterous
Inglorious Readers, Inglorious Viewers
23 January, 2011
in commentatrix,O internet,writing & research
A modest wrecker of this reader
Somewhere around six months into my thesis (which took me four-and-a-half years to complete and submit), my aesthetic broke and I retreated, so far as literature and much of film was concerned, to live amongst subtexts and metanarratives. I can’t tell you why this occurred with any clarity, but I can tell you when: as I read the death of Stephanie in A.S. Byatt’s Still Life, which I was anxious to finish before heading out to a job I had helping a high-school student with English language. That, too, would end badly, but not for a few more weeks. In the meantime, however, my willingness to immerse myself in realist simulacra of human suffering as a form of recreation atrophied, in a manner that seems to have become permanent.
There was still plenty to read: poetry, criticism, archival fragments, all the arcana and ephemera through which I travelled in search of an argument. Within a few years there were extensive online newspapers and journals, and later blogs in all shades of serious- and light-mindedness. There was more reading than ever before. The fact remained however that I was unable to immerse myself in the modern literary novel to any other than a minimal extent, a poor and sure handicap for someone who had continuing aspirations of writing literary fiction herself. Others posted lists of the fifty or one hundred books they had read in a year; I counted myself lucky to make a dozen read start-to-finish, outside of my professional obligations.
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