,I decided to start blogging again, like, every day or something. Why? Just because I enjoy it. That's all.
So here is the tomato update: each cherry tomato plant has five baby tomatoes, for a total of ten. The two regular tomato plants are doing fine, but no sign of babies yet. One of the basil plants is mysteriously droopy, which is worrying. I keep meaning to go to Home Despot and get some more herbs, and probably some more tomatoes too, so I have a real collection.
I'm in love with a certain chord on the guitar. E7/G#. I'm not sure why. I've never felt this way about a chord before.
One year + one week into the PhD, and school is still confusing. My poetry idol told me that I would know if I should be doing this or not, that if it wasn't right for me I would hate it. But, well, I do kind of hate it, I feel like I'll never be able to do and/or be satisfied doing what's expected of me, that the available lines of inquiry either a) are boring or b) require more knowledge than I'll ever be able to acquire or c) obviously, both. And yet, when it comes time to do my own work, I break what I understand to be the rules and write exactly what I want to write and I love pretty much every paper I've written this year and, well, love's a strong word but for the most part I'd say so do my professors. So is this just a grad school bubble where I'm getting good responses because the standards are relatively low but I'll eventually have to stop writing what I want and start playing the game? Have I just chosen the old-fashioned and/or easy professors? Or are the rules more flexible than they sound? I kind of hope so because sure, I complain about academic inbreeding and the narrowness of professional discourse, but it's not like Harper's is looking for an incisive discussion of the role of the comma splice in contemporary poetry . . . for better or worse, if I want to write about poems, academia is probably the place.
And finally, meet my friend Carafe, who counts being the coiner of the phrase "Summer of Excess" among his many important accomplishments.
1 comment:
I think it's great that you love every paper you've ever written--this seems to be the only way to survive in academia. Yet there are ways to write what you want and play the game. Figuring out how to do that still eludes me, but I won't have to worry about that for a while, if ever.
Now, to add to my list of important accomplishments: the expanded understanding of what counts as "excess."
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