to quote Dickinson inappropriately:

I’ve ceded– I’ve stopped being theirs.

By which I mean that I’ve moved. Again; semi-permanently. I’ll be messing about with things over there, so it should be entertaining/dismaying/ugly/erratic.

Watchmen Verdict: Uff Da

Preface: I strongly suspect that everything I might say about this book has already been said, and better than I could after just one reading and with other things demanding my time. But it’s worth acknowledging that I could probably agree with 47 different positions on this book, as long as they all acknowledge its complexity and stunning artistry.

Here’s what I told Goodreads on the subject:

Watchmen by Alan Moore
rating: 4 of 5 stars
Awesomely layered, awesomely referential, awesomely complex, awesomely problematic, awesomely mid-eighties, awesomely entertaining, and awesomely troubling.
(All my reviews.)

Since I Left You

So I have sort of abandoned ship here. Sorry about that – here, have a delicious music video to salve your pain for a bit.

In related good news, I am currently employed at a job I like very much, in which I am learning lots about a number of things very quickly. Hurrah!

Oh, do you do creative writing?

This is what people tend to ask when they discover that I’ve attended graduate school in English. In response, I tend to hem and haw awkwardly before answering. I don’t do “creative writing” as they are probably thinking about it; I do not write fiction (at least, not intentionally), and I no longer write poetry (at least, not intentionally). Neither do I write much in the way of the genre somewhat confusingly called “creative nonfiction.” I do—in my scholarly work, in my personal practice, and hopefully eventually in my professional life—write. But I don’t think of myself, primarily, as a writer. I think of myself as a researcher and a problem-solver.

And this is where my hesitation comes in when I’m trying to answer that dang question. Real research, real problem-solving, really good scholarly or professional writing is creative, and its process can resemble the confusing, difficult, twisty-turny process of “creative” work.

Constraints and questions inform the beginning of any written work, but the best writers and researchers are those who can follow the insights they discover in their reading and preliminary writing. The most honest, trustworthy writers are those who can follow their research and its small (and large) epiphanies down dark alleyways and confusing trains of thought, trusting that the result, while less tidy or simple than intended, will be bigger, better, and more effective than they can even conceive of yet. If the process is done right—if the writer or the researcher is fully committed to their work—the results will be deeply creative.

What has me thinking of this now is a book I’m attempting to re-read, with some frustration. It seems to have creativity-as-fundamental-committment-to-researched-truth confused with creativity-as-making-your-research-say-what-you-wanted-it-to. More on that tomorrow. (Yes, tomorrow–not in three months, I promise.)

Payback: Debt and some not-very-interesting a priori assumptions

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is one of those authors I vaguely respect and follow. I’ve read one or two of her novels, and hear lovely things about her, so she’s categorized in my head as a smart, interesting lady. Thus, when I saw her newest book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth while on lunch break from jury selection, I picked it up. She’s a writer and a feminist, I thought; surely her literary approach to the credit crisis can help me make sense of it and expand my ways of thinking about it.

Unfortunately, I’m about to quit less than seventy pages in. To give her the full benefit of the doubt, the chapters were originally written as part of a radio forum and presented orally; that format requires a different level and complexity of thought. I think I might find this book tolerable if I were to hear it on the radio while half-awake or driving or cleaning house, which are the things I usually do while listening to public radio.

Regarding Hope

For the past few weeks, my life was mostly on hold. No, I wasn’t working nonstop on the campaign, although I made a few calls and knocked on a few doors. No, I wasn’t ill or incapacitated. I was waiting for Tuesday, for the decision that became clear at about 9 pm PST.

Some gushing re: Garcia Marquez

After two years of highly academic reading, it can be hard to read books without placing them in a literary context or analyzing the theoretical implications of the plot. Garcia Marquez, however, is the perfect escape from all that. First, it is in translation, so no fair doing close textual analysis on the English version (and I don’t speak or read Spanish). Second, I know next to nothing about Colombian literature, and very little more about Caribbean literature in general, so I have no context in which to lose the book.

Third, Garcia Marquez’s phenomenally rich plots, deeply layered metaphors, and heartbreakingly human characters don’t just allow me to lose myself in his sensual, gorgeously prosaic world; they force me to lay aside my skepticism, my academic lenses, my critical questions. Unlike the nineteenth-century literature that I’m used to and the childrens literature I love to study, Garcia Marquez’s books don’t have good characters or bad characters. The protagonists do nearly unforgivable things, while the apparent antagonists become confusingly lovable.

Love in the Time of Cholera’s vision of love is so expansive, so physical and intellectual and literary and inclusive, that there is no temptation to root for one lover over another, one definition of love over another. Garcia Marquez allows for the complexity, confusion, and ambiguity of real love and the intense disorientation of aging–but by his ending you only feel more grounded, more sure, and more found than before. View all my reviews.

Power[less], Point[less]: an exercise in wide-ranging frustration

This weekend, at the urging of many Obama campaign emails, I attended a Get Out The Vote training. As I walked into the nondescript, poorly-lit building in Seattle, I followed hand-painted signs to a large room where they had set up maybe 75 chairs. I was early, so I stopped into the bathroom (one light out, and a sign informing me not to use one of the sinks) and got back to the big room in time to grab an incredibly uncomfortable wooden folding chair. A nice woman a few seats over passed around “Doonesbury” from the Sunday comics section, and I remarked to the woman next to me that it was heartening to see the room filling with people.

It didn’t stop filling with people. Half an hour later, all visible floor space was full of people, while the walls were lined with others standing awkwardly. An older woman having a hot flash inquired about opening the only outside door anyone could see, but the staff said it was locked. The temperature rose, people started to fan themselves with their pamphlets, and the PowerPoint started. Two extraordinarily young, energetic, probably really smart and engaged people began talking through their presentation.

The NYT Opinion section is basically just a conversation in my head

Or so it would seem, based on Maureen Dowd’s article in Latin right after my post the other day about my old Latin professor, Dr. Madsen.

And hey, if I’m that tied in with it and all, maybe I almost have a Nobel…or maybe I should read something else until these people stop figuring quite so prominently in my dreams.

WORDS [may or may not] HAVE MEANING

Every day between nine and ten am my first semester of college, Dr. Madsen found time to instruct us to pick up our pencils, move to the top of the pages we were writing on, and write in all capital letters: WORDS HAVE MEANING. At the time, it seemed like a frustrated, obvious reminder to write comprehensibly and use the dictionary.

In graduate school, I realized that it wasn’t a simple reminder, but the expression of a theoretical viewpoint. This was his rebellion against Derridean uncertainty, his way of shoring up language against the onslaught of Freshman carelessness, and his plea for stability. If words have meaning, inherently, it matters how we use them; they are, however loosely, tied to truth. If words don’t have meaning, but rather make it or twist it or empty it, they have no relationship to truth. They can’t be trusted, can’t be used as the foundation for anything. They can still be used, but much less reliably. If words have meaning, language is a revolver: you cock it, aim carefully, and fire precisely. If words don’t have inherent meaning, language is a fully automatic rifle: a vague, deadly, scattershot sort of thing.

Lately, the New York Times‘ Opinion page has resembled Dr. Madsen’s emphatic plea for inherent meaning. Several of the Times’s standard columnists have written articles in which language and its relationship to truth receive a rare kind of attention. Most of these have been in the “Most Emailed” lists lately, which I treat as a snapshot of the current anxieties and hopes of Times readers.

In this time of meaningless babble, crashing stocks, and terrifying uncertainty, this strikes me as a strangely natural response: those of us who are lettered, who are educated, who were taught that words matter, cling to words. We pick up our pencils, our computers, our pens and our voices, and we write, in all capital letters, WORDS HAVE MEANING. WORDS HAVE MEANING. WORDS MATTER. WORDS HAVE MEANING AND THAT MATTERS.

Because if they don’t, we simply don’t know what to do about it. If they don’t, we are impotent. If they don’t, we have to completely rethink how we use them.