Just finished going through the giant file box. Threw out a small stack of papers, discovered a giant and much-needed stash of scratch paper, realized I was hanging on to a lot of these files for psychological and not documentary reasons (but continued to hang on to them anyway)… and all this has diminished the giantness enough that I can now transfer these files to a smaller box. Progress!
I found among these files one of the first papers I ever wrote in grad school: an essay on my family’s tradition of dim sum brunches. Felt drawn to it, read it, and was shocked at how thoughtful and evocative it was. I can’t write like this anymore; I could only write it then because I was taking Valerie‘s wonderful class and we were reading and discussing this sort of thing regularly. That’s what I’m missing now and have been missing since we moved here, and I’ve known it, too, and ignored it. I’m not reading as critically as I used to (though my baseline has improved a lot), I’m not discussing my readings seriously, and I’m not writing as critically as I should either.
I don’t miss grad school at all. But I think, if I’m going to write seriously — or even just sincerely — I need to be putting myself through the same kind of critical discipline as I would if I were in school. But… how to do? Where to find the time?
The trouble is — and the trouble was, even when I was still in school — that being at school imposes a discipline on the students by forcing them to read, discuss, and write within a narrow framework (usually their field of study). But I was never happy just aspiring to be a great critical historian; I wanted (want) to apply that same critical eye to other kinds of writing and reading and thinking, as well as drawing, visual art, and crafts… and, while we’re at it, heck, life in general. But I don’t know how to build a discipline for that. I’ve tried to, many times, with my various projects and personal creative “syllabi,” but in the end I always neglect and eventually give up on the vast majority of my readings and exercises. They just don’t fit into my life, and I kind of don’t fit into them either — I’m not fine arts, I’m not serious literary prose, I’m not comics, I’m not purely decorative arts, I’m not even really a public blogger, and I don’t aspire to be any of these things either. So it’s quite difficult to figure out how to continue to train myself rigorously, when there’s no obviously relevant course of study. I guess it’s the same quandary as always: how to pave my own path, when by definition there’s no one to show me how.
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