After a very successful gathering last night at Mayorga in Silver Spring with the local UMD Digital Studies group (under the fine leadership of MattK), I’m finally here to blog. I finally have a little something to write about. That is, to blog about. Joseph (over at jeblog) and I talked about it for a long time. What is the blog for? What writing goes here? It depends on the person, of course. I was blogging for a little while last Spring but never really got into the groove of it, partially this was due to the birth of my daughter (who is currently snotting all over my black shirt–hard to be hip with a baby-in-tow), but mostly this was due to a very confused feeling of “what the heck is this space for?” I didn’t feel super comfortable doing the personal thing; I’m not entrenched enough in my field to be too successful at the shcolarly thing–with MattK and all the rest of the Wordherders it’s a pretty erudite crowd; I dropped fiction so long ago (that’s what an M.F.A. can do for you) that I didn’t feel so inclined to drag that box out of the basement of my writing life–yet, I liked the community: I wanted to participate.
So, here I am, making a stab at it again. I’ve added new categories this time–fiction, poetry, readings, jobs, personal, and blogging–to keep it straight. These are the things I want to attend to and I’ll do it here:
- Fiction: I AM going to drag that box out and here I’ll probably mostly just transcribe what I have–it’s an exercise I enjoy. I haven’t look ed at the stuff in 5 years and re-typing it as lame as it sounds gets me back into the . . . uh . . . physicality (?) of the thing. If it’s up, then maybe I’ll feel inclined to rewrite . . . hopes and dreams.
- poetry: This REALLY may not happen. I’m not a poet, but I have some stuff and I thought I would add it in there. Maybe I’ll just write new love poems to John and Betty . . . hahaahahaha.
- Readings: I got to take a comp exam in the fall for my PhD. At some point I got to figure out how to organize and retain the readings. Why not here? Then maybe the kind folks out there in Wordherders land would come by and say, oh, you read that . . . well, you should read this too . . . then they can tell me what the book is about and I won’t have to read it! 😉
- Jobs: ‘nuf said. I’m just looking for anything that might be interesting to me some day. I’m not married to the idea of teaching. I like the field and I think there are a variety of ways of participating in it–plus, teaching still makes me want to puke (note: this is not a BAD thing. Someone pointed out to me that it makes me want to puke because it means a lot to me to do ‘well’–nice notion, but it still makes me want to puke).
- Personal: also ‘nuf said. I was also talking to Marc last night who admitted that he had essentially been bagging on me (in the kindest way possible I am sure!) behind my back to Natalie about my not blogging. And Natalie (the wonderful woman that she is) got riled up and said She had a baby! So there, Marc. I did have a baby. And she is awesome, so every so often I’m going to have to write about her. Plus, she is the extent of my personal life right now (and John, but if I wrote about him, he’d kill me and she can’t read).
- Blogging: Now, as a textual studies person and a potential modernist (is self-referentiality even a modernist thing–or is that strictly postmodernis? See, I still have a lot of reading to do!), it seems appropriate that I should remark on my remarking–again, ‘nuf said.
Betty is currently switching her activities among snotting on my black shirt, chewing on the laptop cord–I know, but the battery was dying–and crawling off the cliff that separates our dining area from the sitting area. So, I got to go, but the point I’m trying to make here is that I figured out that I’m writing here for me–a work space for my writing, a space to organize my readings, a space to get down in writing the amazing transformation of my amazing daughter. So, if anyone is out there and reading–well, it may be a little boring, but here’s to another Spring and another attempt at a writing life.
I highly recommend just writing down a few notes and quotations as you work your way through your exam list. I still go back to my paper notes and only wish I had more of them in a digital format.
Glad to have you back! I’ll admit that my own blogging is much more personal than professional, but how are we humans if we don’t mix the two together? Good luck picking it back up again. 🙂
Please do keep blogging. And I repeat what Jason said about taking notes on your exam readings: it helps a great deal later not only when you are writing your diss, but also when you have to teach this stuff later.
And putting them in a digital format (and online) will make them more accessible and will allow others to participate in your thinking. See, e.g., this.
Don’t stress about how “erudite” you do or don’t appear: just write.
> erudite
Gazoontite.
You could blog about texts and patterns too.
One might think “erudite” is rude, but it looks likke it’s back in favor (this, of course, is how I mean it):
WORD HISTORY: One might like to be erudite but hesitate to be rude. This preference is supported by the etymological relationship between erudite and rude. Erudite comes from the Latin adjective rudtus, “well-instructed, learned,” from the past participle of the verb rudre, “to educate, train.” The verb is in turn formed from the prefix ex–, “out, out of,” and the adjective rudis, “untaught, untrained,” the source of our word rude. The English word erudite is first recorded in a work possibly written before 1425 with the senses “instructed, learned.” Erudite meaning “learned” is supposed to have become rare except in sarcastic use during the latter part of the 19th century, but the word now seems to have been restored to favor.