Sunday, June 30, 2019

20190630.0430

I have posted to this webspace on 30 June in each of the six most recent previous years, 2013 through 2018. Interestingly enough, each is a work of verse, which I think is the first time I've had such an alignment in the month's retrospection. Looking back, I cringe at some of the poor proofreading I see myself as having allowed; I am supposed to be more professional than to do so, at least as egregiously as I see in my own work. Some errors always sneak through, as a glance at most any work will reveal, so I am in good company. But it still grates on me, with my PhD in English and years of doing this kind of thing, that I let it happen and that I see it again.
It should grate on me more that the quality of my work is as it is. I have occasional bits of goodness, as moving between the fourth and fifth stanzas in the 2015 piece (though it would be better without punctuation, I think, more amenable to the multiple readings). The end of the 2017 piece is another such spot, with the image of the cracked mirror coming up suddenly and speaking to the limits and problems of the backward look. (I should be less nostalgic. I know it's bad. I still indulge in it. I'm not proud of doing so, though I cannot seem to stop it.) Other little bits pop up in the other writing that I do, I'm sure; I could find them did I look for them more assiduously. I am even sure that, taken together, the little bits of goodness add up to a single, solid poem.
But more of my verse is like that in the 2013 piece, with the errors, or the 2014 or 2016 pieces, that read more like prose crammed into verse form than as works that elude and evade, that force a reader to follow along to tease out meaning. No, I too often flatly state my intent, and if there is ambiguity to be found, it is only that which inheres in all language, since every word is itself an abstraction, a set of sounds that certain people agree means the kind of thing that is being described. Poetry should tease, should titillate, should demand more engagement from its readers than prose usually does--and in the engagement, lodge deeper with them than words framed otherwise would do. I am not often of such subtlety of mind as to plan out a path for the reader's thoughts to follow without leaving it wide and straight--and devoid of the scenery that makes travel a joy when it is a joy.
Still, I can but practice more, hoping in that practice to make something of my writing and, having made something of it, make it return to my benefit and that of those about whom I care. I do what I do for them, most of all, even if I do it poorly.

Saturday, June 29, 2019

20190629.0430

I have posted to this webspace on this date in each of the last several years: 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. As has been the case for many of the days in the month now nearly done, the later posts have been poems, the earlier prose. I find myself drawn again and again to composing verse; characters I play in the various RPGs in which I am involved seem ever to put their minds to thoughts in lines, in alliteration or in rhyme, or neither but following formal rhythms and syllable counts. And in reflecting on the years past in this month, I have come back to verse again and again, whether considering the lines I have written before or adding to them in one way or another, giving sequels that may or may not be epilogues for pieces I have put together.
Today is no different. As I look at the 2014 piece, one of the many asides I make stands out. I note "that ether is a good term" for internet-work, as "the online environment does wonders as a sedative." (I know I make many asides. It has been remarked upon as an oddity in my writing; I've been accused of putting my best points in throwaway footnotes or parentheticals such as this one. Such is how my mind works. Here, at least, I need not worry about it. My readers will either read the words or not. But that is always true.) As I think on it, I begin to think the note might serve as the genesis of a poem. To wit:
Sitting amid the too-blue glow
That causes waking by stopping sleep
The scented cloth still covers nose and mouth
Vapors seeping out and filling
Not just lungs
But heart and head
Leaving not sleep
Though the smell is still soporific
Inducing a lingering dream that needs no unconsciousness to arise
And in the minds of many
Stifling many others
The immaterial thought the fifth material
Spanning now from place to place
Suffusing all anymore
Making itself felt
By numbing feeling

Some things do well to not be felt so keenly.
I do not know if it is obscure enough to be "good," as such, even aside from having its source announced earlier in discussion. There are enough clues, I think, to puzzle out the meaning even aside from the earlier note, but I also know that I write from a particular set of experiences that make things clear to me that are not necessarily so to others. Still, I can but write from where I am, as my readers, however few, read from where they are. And I can hope that we make some connection, my readers and I, through that un-thing that seems anymore to mean every thing.

Friday, June 28, 2019

20190628.0430

Of the six posts in this webspace I've made in previous years on this date--2011, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018--that from 2014 seems the most relevant to me at the moment. In that piece, I offer an amateurish review of the Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Game fourth-edition supplement, Sword and Fan. Now, while the game has since progressed into a fifth edition, and with a different company holding the rights to the intellectual property, I find the supplement--and the line of which it is part--still of some use. I play and administer games in it, and am gearing up to help run yet another game that will make much use of the materials in the book. Revisiting the review, therefore, seems like a useful thing to do.
There are problems in the piece, of course. As I note, it is amateurish, overly brief and skimpy on details that would likely make for a better piece of writing. (Indeed, the scholar that is still within me chafes at the lack of specific textual detail and explication thereof. And I was a scholar then, or at least was trying to be so, so the lack is even less acceptable from then than it would be from now, when I am more or less out of academe.) Too, certain features expected of book reviews are flatly absent; I do not give the ISBN or the MSRP, for example, both of which are standard features of book reviews. (I see enough of them, both in my pleasure reading and in the scholarly reading I should have done more of when I was trying to be a scholar. I ought to know better.) Neither is a point in favor of my writing's quality.
But I do follow the overall form of a review, giving a brief synopsis of the contents before identifying problems I found in the text and expounding on what it does well. And, following a form I learned while doing freelance writing I still miss--largely because of the pay, yes, but also because of the ways in which it forced me to sharpen my writing and to expand my skills with it (including working in AP style and beginning to learn HTML coding)--I spend more words on what Sword and Fan does well than what it does poorly. My overall notion is that the book is a good one, and it helps to have subtle textual features align to that idea. Neglecting problems is a foolhardy thing, but if the overall idea is that a thing is good, it makes sense to put more words into noting how it is good than how it is bad. It's not paratext, as such; it is in the words themselves. But it is not in the denotations of those words--or even the connotations of the individual words. It is in the connotations of perceived effort as indicated by the number of words. So that much is to the good in the review, at least.
Written reviews are not particularly prized for RPG products at this point--or even at the point when I wrote my review of Sword and Fan. I should be making videos, probably, or at least including graphics to encapsulate and condense my prose for ease of reading. In another webspace, I likely would. But in this one, I remain bound to text (and with some light attention to paratext, I admit). Whether that is a good thing or not, I am not at all certain.

Thursday, June 27, 2019

20190627.0430

I have posted to this webspace five times in previous years on this date, in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. The first two are prose pieces detailing then-current circumstances; the latter three are poems of not much quality, though perhaps some cleverness of rhyme and meter when they are metrical and rhymed. In none, though, do I see myself as having been particularly inspired. In none do I see some spark of something that promotes more reading, some promise of better things to come, even if I happen to think I did better writing afterward (though a way off; not immediately).
It is possible that this date has been an off day in most of the last few years. Nature tends towards the cyclical, and I am still part of nature in some way or another, indoorsman though I am. I operate on daily and weekly cycles; why would I not have arrived at an annual cycle, as well? I have become more and more regular in my writing here over that time, as a survey of my posts will point out; I have been better about making a daily post, even if there are occasional gaps in the timing of those posts within days. (I still feel poorly about my failure earlier in the week.) So there is some thought that I might, indeed, have a recurring off day.
Such a thought presupposes that I normally have on days, and I am not at all sure that such is the case. I've noted more than once in the past few posts that I am struggling to get written here what I feel I ought to get written, and I know that some of the recent posts have been a bit short of my average or my objective. Word count is not itself a determiner of quality, but it is harder to get ideas across decently in fewer words than more, and there is something to be said for being able to sustain an idea for a longer time. I've not been able to do so in the ways I would like to recently, and I have to wonder if I am losing access to some skill or another that I have had and do not have as much of any longer. It is not a comforting thing, as I am sure others can attest better than I.
It is not only in the insufficient length that I find concern, though. Looking back over the date's posts across the years, I find the quality of writing...lacking. Were I to look over my personal journals at the same date, where I have not flagged due to inattention, distraction, and laziness, I would likely find the same thing. But in a personal journal, at least, there is not an expectation of quality; in writing that faces a public, however small the public might be that my blog posts here reach, there is a demand for more. I write here to practice addressing such a public, but I have been practicing poorly, and I hear in my mind an old professor of mine making a comment about perfect practice and the habituation of error. Another voice from a life I have left behind continues to haunt me; it is far from alone, as seems inevitable when writing about past writing.
All too often, I am my own ghosts.

Wednesday, June 26, 2019

20190626.0430

I am not going to try to move to posting every twelve hours as a rule. I am already having trouble maintaining a single daily post in this webspace and the others I feel the need to make, so I am not about to double workload here. Did I think it would be a paying thing, perhaps, but I know better than to believe such about this. No, this is for practice and for other things, such as looking back a bit more will continue to allow.
I have posted six times in previous years on this date, in 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. The 2017 piece stands out, as it commemorates an event two years ago yesterday, the remembrance of which occasioned my being away recently. I knew that I had put together such a piece, and I recall it being requested at a graveside service and favorably received. Having returned to the site, I do not think I can follow up on it as I did on another years-old piece of work. I would not, as I rail against others doing n the 2016 piece, merely make more of the same, and I do not think I could do otherwise at this point. I am too far removed from it, now, and I know it is still a tender thing for those who are still close to it.
Given what we carried away from the recent trip, though, I wonder if I might say something else on a related topic:
A portion of life enjoyed, encircled,
Now put off through the circle's removal
And given to another who might find joy in it
Who came from another such thing
And bears the symbol of yet another
Humbler, perhaps, than that which was given
But not less enduring for that
And in the gift, memories
Bound up and passed on
The metonym of the ring
Resting on a hand its bearer once held
I am not at all sure if it will help. But I do not know that there is any help for such things. And I do not know if what I might pass on would be any later comfort, either.

Tuesday, June 25, 2019

20190625.1630

Clearly, I missed my normal time with this post. My buffer is gone, as I think I might have motioned towards a couple of days back. Part of the reason is that I have not had the time over the past days to write that I normally do, having been away. That being as it is, I do need to work to catch myself up; I'm not abandoning the project yet.
I note that several of the previous posts I've made on this date have been notes in verse about the half-year of Christmas; 2015, 2016, and 2017 saw me remark on the holiday being half a year away today. The first of them is the best of them, I think, the poetic form tighter and the references more focused. It also reads to me as angry, though I read it from the perspective of knowing the writer well. (I hesitate to call him an author or a poet. It'd give him ideas he probably ought not to have.) How much is satire and how much is sarcastic anger is an open question; knowing the writer, it's more the latter than the former, especially since events at present suggest no change is coming.
Christmas decorations aren't up quite yet, at least not in stores, at least not that I've seen. Admittedly, I do not go shopping much, and I begrudge the expense when I must do so, unless it's going after food. On that, I'm happy to spend money, certainly. I like to eat, after all. That aside, though, I don't know that I have it in me to be so angry about that kind of thing at the moment. There's a damned lot else and worse to be angry about, though I wonder if it is not in the same vein; I am not sure I seek to understand, for fear of becoming too much like that I would have to study to come to understand. And such things as the incarceration of children without basic sanitation, of people without regard to circumstance or dignity, and who have made only the mistake of trying to make a better life for themselves in such a time as this and in such a way as millions in generations past have done, deserve no understanding.
They deserve censure. They deserve rebuke. They deserve resistance. They deserve to be stopped and the people who perpetuate them and encourage them to be mocked and chastised and forgotten, made as nothing save in the trauma they have already too much done and which we can hope will be healed in time once it ceases to be inflicted. And one wonders what kind of worse will have to happen to make any of it come to pass, because it is clear that no gentle measures will prevail.
It has always been clear that no gentle measures will prevail. Those who would act as they are now who put people into cages and make them in their own minds less than human refuse to understand any but the most blatant arguments--fallacies in the utterance, no less than ad populum or ad hominem, but ads the same. And perhaps they ought to be introduced thereto, repeatedly and with heavy, blunt objects. They seem fond of applying them to others, after all; they can't have too much a problem with them, can they? After all, doesn't Matthew 7:12 apply in ostensibly Christian nations?

Monday, June 24, 2019

20190624.0430

I only managed to post five times previously on this date, 2014 though 2018. Most of them have been poems; the one that wasn't (2015) is commentary on the 2014 poem, and it runs with the metaphor of tending a garden by fertilizing it abundantly. (I'm reasonably happy with it, and with the poem it references.) The 2018 poem, again, is one of the limericks I thought to write in something resembling a heroic narrative. The project...did not go quite as well as I might have liked, which is my fault and none other's. But the 2016 and 2017 poems might do with a bit of attention, if not as much as I give the 2014 poem in the 2015 prose.
The 2016 poem is a reference to Brexit, since the referendum that started the still-ongoing-as-of-this-writing process of Great Britain leaving the European Union happened the day before. I do often write topical poetry, though I'll admit I do not always do so well, and I often comment that I ought not to be commenting any more than many do who still make comments about the events of the day. John Bull and Marianne are national emblems; I was not able, in the brief research I remember doing as I wrote the poem, to find the parallel figure for Germany, but that is my failing. The child of John Bull is, of course, Uncle Sam; he is explicitly named as an uncle, and there is a prevailing notion of America and Americans as crude and money-obsessed. (I embody it more than is perhaps comfortable. Again, that is my failing.) Neither of the reactions from that figure are good ones, honestly, though I saw enough of both--and still see them, in fact.
I wonder if I might put together an addendum to that piece, something to the effect of
The music jerkily plays on
And dancers still crowd the floor
Sleep-ready Michel still twirling with Marianne
But John Bull lingers at the exit
Looking back with sadness and anger
Demanding that he be able to hear the music
Drink the drinks
And eat the hors d'oeuvres
Again and again
Without paying for a membership in the club
And the fattest of his children
Whose hands seem small and hair seems thin
Anymore
Still sniggers in the corner
Unwilling to stand on feet that show spurs unmerited
However that may be, as I read the brief 2017 poem, I am glad of it. Short though it is, it still rings true; I am glad to look to my side or behind me and see my wife there, supporting me as I try to make some sense of the world and to find a better place in it for her and for Ms. 8. It is gratifying to have such faith placed in me, and I continue to hope I may someday come to merit it.

Sunday, June 23, 2019

20190623.0430

This webspace has received entries seven previous years on this date, in 2010, 2013, 20142015, 2016, 2017 (if ineptly titled), and 2018. I'm not sure that any of my previous efforts on the date speak to me in any real way at this point; perhaps it is simply the way I feel as I sit down to write this entry, but I do not feel much connection to the writing I put out into the world on those occasions. I think I am beginning to get to the end of my enthusiasm for this month's blogging project, even though there's a week yet for me to cover with it. Again, though, it could simply be that I'm tired at the moment for some reason; I may well feel differently when I return to the task for tomorrow's post.
Honestly, I'm a bit distracted at the moment. As I write this, I am scraping out a bit of time between freelance writing jobs and other tasks to which I need to attend. It's hard to focus my attention on this little bit of work, even though it is important to me. I try to address well those tasks I have appointed to myself as a matter of principle; I'm not much good to anyone if I can't meet my obligations even to myself, after all. And I know that if I want to get better at writing--which I do--I need to practice it, even more than I have been. I average 500 words or so per post to this webspace when I write prose, or I use that number as a benchmark, but I know it's not a lot of writing, overall. I really ought to be hammering out a thousand at a time for a blog entry, if what I've seen is conventional wisdom. It might not have been, but still...
Once again, as near the beginning of this calendar year, I wonder if I ought not to fold more of my writerly efforts into a singly venue. I question whether the work I do here is sufficiently distinct from the work I do in, say, my more professional blog to warrant the added upkeep on this space. (The Tales after Tolkien Society stuff is not all mine, of course, so it will need to stay where it is.) Or, rather, I question whether it is really in my best interest to keep what I have been doing here as distinct from what I have been doing there as I have been. I've calmed down a fair bit in some ways as I have gotten older and taken on more in my life outside academe, and the areas in which I have grown more outspoken are areas I voice in public venues, anyway. I'm not protected by anonymity--not that I'm terribly anonymous here, given what I link and what I've written elsewhere in this webspace.
If I opt to consolidate, it won't be quite yet. As this gets where other people can see it, I'll be away on a trip, and I'm not going to make any major changes while I'm on the road. And, like I note above, I may just be feeling a bit off as I squeeze this in among many other pieces of writing I do.

Saturday, June 22, 2019

20190622.0430

This date has been a good one for posting to this webspace; I've managed to post each year, 2012 on. Not desiring to repeat yesterday's mistake, I am not looking for a common thread among them, though I might note that the 2012 piece marks the onset of summer, and today is the first full day of summer in the part of the world where I am. At least officially; we had a weekend not long ago that felt more like August than anything else, and my fool self was working outside in it.
It has been a long time since I've seen a summer in The City--six years, now. As I look back on that time, doing so while I sit in well conditioned air as the sun shines down with a force that rarely happens in that part of the world, I find there are some things I miss about it. While I do not long to be immersed among the smells of the place--and The City stinks of millions of people in close proximity, not all of whom are able to bathe regularly, so that it cannot help but smell--I do long at times to return to the cultural offerings that are ready to hand there. I miss having access to knowledge and insight that I had then, and not because I was still in academe, but because the sheer mass of people ensured that its public systems could compete with the most rarefied halls of learning, concrete and steel and some marble veneer equaling ivory for the value of what was within the walls.
Where I am now does what it can, I know. But there is only so much a few dozen thousand people can do against what so many millions can.
I miss it, yes, and I appreciate having had the chance to enjoy it, even if looking back on what I've written tells me that I did not make enough of the opportunity while I had it. And I probably ought to move forward with the thought that I should look for what I have the opportunity to do now and seize upon it so that I do not have the same regrets about yet another place.

Friday, June 21, 2019

20190621.0430

This webspace has seen five previous posts on 21 June, in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. Several of the posts are poems, whether free verse (as in 2014 and 2016), a sonnet (2017), or a limerick in a chain of them (2018). The 2015 prose piece mused in part on Father's Day--and it is odd to me that, even days after marking the holiday this year, I am reminded of it by past years. Calendars are funny things, it seems.
As I look on the poems not in sequence, it seems to me that two of them work together: the 2016 and 2017 pieces. I present them again below to ease reading. First, the free verse:
A popular game
Among my people
Could be called
Spot the Problems
Because what we invest in
Is used
And misused
And the misuses attract attention

Some folks' investments
Are not misused
People get the details right
But they do not care
So much
About mine

If we want the real
If we want the authentic
Why do we not attend more to
Small things
From which the bigger things emerge?
And the sonnet:
I sometimes err, of course, as do we all,
Thinking that events are sure to fall
A certain way, but I do well recall
That they unfold full oft to my despite,
And come about in ways I think not right,
While others take in them no small delight.
Why it is so is all unclear to me,
And I question why I seem to be
Always on the losing side, to see
What I think is wrong often to rise.
I wonder why it me will still surprise.
The scene is often placed before my eyes.
I guess I am all unable to learn
That way in which the world is sure to turn.
The free verse reads as a complaint, the sonnet as an acknowledgement that the complaint comes from one not free of the kinds of faults on which the first focuses. The sonnet does turn to self-pity, as I have noticed a fair number of my poems do, and I am not happy about the implications my writing has for me, but it does at least demonstrate that I apply to myself the same scan for failure that the free verse describes.
Honestly, I had thought I might have had more to say. It seems, though, that there's not as much as I might like. I don't know that I'm happy about those implications, either.

Thursday, June 20, 2019

20190620.0430

I've posted six times to this webspace on this date previously, in 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. The 2015 strikes me as relevant to some of my present concerns; in it, I muse on going to an outdoorsy store in the City of Thunder's Bricktown and my ill fit for most of what it presents. There are similar stores in and around the Alamo City, and I have been to them--and I have found that I still fit ill in them, years later and in the part of the world where I would seem to belong. And I still muse upon some of the same concerns that I voiced four years ago; indeed, it is not so long a time, four years, even if there are some ways in which the world seems wholly different than it then did.
In and around the City of Thunder, I found a sense of non-identity in many of the people I encountered. That is, they did not seem to know who they were as much as they did who they weren't. Given such circumstances, I understand why many would cling to such shreds of certainty as they did, why they make so much of themselves being such and such kind of person, usually someone who hunts a particular type of game or shoots a particular brand of gun. But I am not such a person, and I have never been one, so I do not share that particular kind of affiliation; not sharing it, I necessarily stood outside, but I did not expect to remain in Oklahoma even as long as I did, so I was not terribly concerned about it.
In the Texas Hill Country, though, there is a much more affirmative sense of self. Texans, generally, know that they are Texans--and that means the Wild West still, but also arts and sciences in plenty, William Travis and Willie Nelson, both. A lot of that identity, though, still links itself to outdoor life, to hunting and fishing and shooting, and I do not do such things much if at all. (I'll occasionally drop a line in, when I have time and inclination, but the former is a rare commodity, indeed.) My heart may sing at a field of wildflowers such that it brings tears to my eyes to think on such beauty, but there are parts of me that still don't fit here.
It's part of why I am so eager to grill when I can (and I can't always, given work and the unusually wet weather this year--not that I'm complaining about the rain, since I know it might not come back for a good long while). Grilling and barbecuing both are time-honored traditions here, taken from others but not unappreciated, and their enactment and performance is something that does allow me to fit in in at least some ways. Given that I have been and remain somewhat anxious about the ways in which I fit, not least because how I fit affects how others are able to fit, it is some source of ease for me that I do.

Wednesday, June 19, 2019

20190619.0430

This date has seen five previous posts to this webspace, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. It is the first of them that attracts my attention as I look back over things again, the first that suggests itself as still the most relevant to me. In it, I react to an article that argues being over-educated for a first job has negative consequences throughout a career; while I was not overeducated for my first jobs by any means, I have found that, even well after my first, I read as overeducated for most purposes; it is hard for me and for those like me to get jobs other than those for which we are ostensibly trained because we are seen as dangers to higher-ups or poised to seek elsewhere at any time.
Admittedly, my present job does not look at me so, but that is something of a special case. I was hired with the explicit understanding that I would assume a leadership role in my present organization, and I am set to do so at the beginning of September. For that, my advanced education was seen as an asset, and my current supervisor continues to extoll it. And it has helped me to do a fair bit of what has needed doing as I have worked my current work and trained to take on the new work that I expect is coming; I am not certain I'd be doing so well in it as I am did I not have the background in taking in and synthesizing information that I do.
Again, though, it is a rare case. When I was on the job market, I ran into a number of companies for which hiring practice more or less automatically excluded me from consideration. When I would apply for other-than-entry-level positions, I would be rejected because I was not seen as having the experience asked for by the position. Evidently years of teaching writing and being an active scholar does not read as equivalent to years of writing work, at least not to the automated systems frequently deployed by employers. At the same time, when, following the suggestions of those systems, I applied to entry-level jobs, I was rejected as being other than an entry-level applicant; years in the workforce and the cluster of letters at the end of my name quashed such ideas. And leaving the letters off...lying by omission is reason to rescind a job offer.
I am in a position now where I am involved in hiring; I will be taking a position where I will do the hiring. I have already seen a candidate's application that made me ask "Why would this one want a position here?" I know it may seem strange that I would ask such a question; the applicant's credentials and location against the job for which the application was made merit it. Unlike many, though, I believe that there is and answer, and a good one; my own experience tells me I need to at least wait to hear it before I make any kind of determination about hiring or not.

Tuesday, June 18, 2019

20190618.0430

I've posted in this webspace on 18 June in 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2018. The first of them attracts my interest most; it voices a complaint I still feel. Tired as I often find myself--and I do often find myself tired--I am still not fond of having to sleep. It is still the case that I'd not do it if I could get away without, and it is still the case that I am vexed by the biological necessity of sleep. There are better things for me to do abed, and there are more things to do than I have time in the day to do, even absent having to spend between a quarter and a third of each day unconscious while my body repairs itself and my mind works in ways I almost never remember upon waking.
Most of what I wrote five years ago remains true; I don't much need to rehash it, since it can still be read easily. I can add, though, that I have some idea how Ms. 8 feels about the matter--and she is clearly her mother's daughter in that regard. (In most, she seems to take after me at this point. I'm not sure how good a thing that is. I've noted before, and not a few times, that I was a little shit as a kid; Ms. 8 taking after me may not be to her benefit or her parents' comfort.) Getting her up and out of bed on weekdays is not a small task, just as getting her to bed is a challenge. ("Gee, I wonder if the two are somehow related," he comments acerbically.) The juxtaposition is strange to me; she clearly likes her bed, but she hates going to it.
In any event, however much I may resent the fact that I have to sleep, I have to do so. Even as I write this, I am aware of my body being tired, and I am aware of how that tiredness is interfering between my mind and what I want to make happen. I am able to form cogent thoughts, but getting my hands to put them where others can see them is more challenging, and getting my body to set aside its various discomforts so that I am not distracted in doing so is not as easy as it have been at other times. Normally, I am able to press ahead despite my sciatica acting up or the thermostat being set too low or too high; now, I keep having to pause as I type to rub my eyes or shift in my seat so that the tightness running from my kidney down past the back of my knee doesn't edge into pain. And I have to change form to from and from to form more often than I would prefer, because my fingers will not coordinate smoothly.
Resentful as I am, maybe I ought, indeed, to go take a nap.

Monday, June 17, 2019

20190617.0430

I have posted to this webspace on five previous years of 17 June: 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2018. The first of them, the 2013 piece that looks at Dave Neal's 17 June 2013 Inquirer piece "Tweet Hits the Oxford English Dictionary," seems particularly relevant at the moment. Neal's piece reports on the introduction of Tweet and several other words to the OED and the unusually early inclusion of Tweet. My response proceeds, if I recall correctly, from comments made by some people I knew in Stillwater, though it could be a response to others of more literary bent just as easily. And it is not a stance on which I have much softened in six years and across my overall departure from academe, if I have softened at all.
Language changes. New words come into being. Old words are repurposed. Some uses fall away. It is a natural thing as much as the succession of generations, and it is of no more or less moral import than that same succession. And while it is the case that people complain about "kids these days and their newfangled" whatever, it is also the case that people complain about the lingering of the old and their ossified expectations of how things should be. There are problems to both complaints, just as there are problems in the protestations that language should not change, that there was some point at which it was "right," and that all users since have somehow screwed things up.
There are several things I found and still find particularly irksome in such discussions. In many cases, the people making the comments are those whose own usage does not conform to the standards they imagine as in force when the language was "right," and while it is a fallacy to disregard the pot's words about the kettle's color, annoyance knows no logic--and to have people who demonstrate or confess that they do not know make pronouncements as if they do know provokes annoyance in abundance. And it is unfortunately common.
In some cases, some of the people I know who know that language changes, who indeed study the ways in which languages change, make such complaints, that language is being somehow degraded. Yet they do not conduct their business in the older languages that they claim are "better," or even in older forms of modern languages. They do not affect the patterns of decades past, or of centuries. Again, pot-and-kettle annoyance arises, compounded by knowing that they know better--and believing that they ought to act on that knowledge. Somebody damned well needs to.

Sunday, June 16, 2019

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This date, 16 June, has seen five posts in this webspace: in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2018. The first is perhaps most germane today; then, as now, the date marked Father's Day. And what I wrote then holds true now. I remain damned lucky to have the father I have, even if he's a damned hard act to follow. And I still love you, Pop.
What else needs to be said?

Saturday, June 15, 2019

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I have posted in this webspace on five previous 15ths of June: in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. It seems clear to me that I have gotten more diligent about posting as I have moved along. It's a good thing, far better than the opposite. I am uncertain how long I will be able to keep it going, though. There is much that needs my attention, and I am concerned that, at some point, the other work I do will prevent me from attending to this. I do work to foster a buffer, and retrospection is helpful with that (the materials I treat are already present, so I do not have to wait for things like I do when I am commenting on current events), but building a buffer takes time, and I may not always have as much of that available as I would like to have. And I may not be in a good frame of mind to write when I have the time--if I ever am; I know some might look at what I write and argue that I am not.
The two prose pieces among the five I've posted on this date in past years (the other three are verse) attract some attention. The first one, from 2014, reflects a bit on my first Father's Day as a father and upon my then-new fatherhood. (I still sit on the Arc of Attention, though I can already feel myself slipping towards the Trough of Delusion; Dad still floats on the Sea of Sagacity, even if he has to bail out his boat occasionally.) I am still learning how to be a decent father; while I flatter myself in many ways, I do not pretend that I do a good job at it. Honestly, the best I do is get out of the way and let Ms. 8 be her own excellent self, stepping in on occasion to pick something up she can't heft herself--and there seem to be fewer such things each day. That's as it should be; I won't always be here, and she'll need to be able to face the world without me, probably for longer than I'll be here to help her.
The other prose piece recalls a pleasant story. Ms. 8 has at this point long since given up pacifiers, though I think I might still have the one I retrieved from the stagnant ditch in the City of Thunder. (There is something nice about the kenning-like reference to cities; the metonymic names seem make the places less prosaic and more, somehow. But I am a nerd and given to rolling around in fantasy literature, so I would be expected to think such things.) She does still clutch her long-held and well-worn softie, though, and I know that I should be working to wean her away from it as I did her pacifiers and her bottles before. At the same time, I also know that her holding it does no harm. It is a shaped and stuffed piece of cloth given her by her mother's mother; it is a thing had since before she was born, a physical link to her earliest life. I have few such things available to me, and I prize them (though I have not always done so as I likely ought to have done). Why I would take hers from her is unclear to me.
Such questions as whether or not I ought to persuade her away from her softie are frequently in my mind. As I approach another Father's Day, I wonder how common a thing it is to question so.

Friday, June 14, 2019

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I have not been particularly diligent about writing on 14 June, doing so in this webspace only in 2014, 2016, 2017, and 2018. The last three are snippets of verse that I do not want to revisit at the moment, whether because of their context or because of the lack thereof. The prose piece from 2014 might merit a bit of attention, though, in part because I have ended up talking about some similar things in the years since (here and here, for example). I am sure there is some kind of rhetoric that might append itself to more formal treatments of things like Renaissance fairs and historical festivals, some more erudite understanding that accounts for what I miss--but I note a common thread in my musings on such events as the Pawnee Bill show, the ScotFest, and the North Texas Irish Festival, among many others.
The common thread is this: there's an implication that what is on display is "how things were," that the festivals somehow encapsulate the reality of the time and places being depicted, and that those times and places are somehow not universal but moving that way. That is, the "medieval" and the "Wild West" are not conflated, but they are aggregated and expanded in such ways as do not admit of much nuance--or even much recognition of temporal or regional variation. The medieval of Beowulf and the medieval of The Canterbury Tales are different things; so, too, are the medieval of Chaucer and the Gawain-poet. Similarly, frontier life differed from, say, 1836 to 1866 to 1896. Yet the medieval is compressed and homogenized, even as the Old West has been. (And both are made Californian all too often, which annoys for different reasons.)
I understand that festivals and celebrations and shows have to remove themselves from the mundane, the "normal." They have to do so to mark themselves as special events set aside from the broader lives that enfold them. I find no fault with them for it, even if my still-curmudgeonly self tends to prefer to be at work to being at play. (Indeed, this last weekend, while my wife and daughter went to a waterpark, I stayed home to take care of some things around the house that have long needed doing. In the event, I am glad I did; the work needed doing and got done, and they got to have fun without my stolid self slowing them.) What I do find fault with, still, is the idea that many such festivals reinforce, overtly or tacitly, that the way things are shown is the way they always and in all places were. It does not take doctoral research to find that it is not so, and it chafes that even such cursory work is too often elided.

Thursday, June 13, 2019

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As I continue to look back at this webspace, I note writing in it on 13 June in 2010, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. The 2010 was the text of a sermon I delivered--yes, I have done such things, and I am still struck by the similarities between that genre and the conference paper, though it has been long enough since I was a regular attendee of a church that I have forgotten how long sermons tend to run. (I do recall, though, that they tend to restrict their sourcing more than many conference papers--at least those I am prone to writing. Then again, I am not at all certain my conference papers are "normal" by the standards of the genre; given my professional circumstances, I have to think they are generally substandard. But that's as it is.)
The 2014 and 2015 pieces both note family coming to visit at Sherwood Cottage. They are largely expository posts, noting then-current circumstances and my reactions to them. I know I make much in one of them about adjusting to having company, and I'm better about it anymore, though I still prefer to meet people at other locations than my home--or theirs, to be fair. I do still put on a mean cookout, weather and resources permitting, and I largely enjoy doing so. (I need to do one again soon, actually; it's been too long.) I know, too, that it's an easier thing for my wife and daughter to see much of our families now than it was then. We live closer to more of them in the Hill Country than we did in Sherwood Cottage, and we have happier lives that allow us more flexibility. So that much is good.
The last three years have each been taken up with poetry on this date. I seem to write quite a bit of it in this webspace, though I know better anymore than to flatter myself that much of it is any good--if any is. Much of it is occasional or introspective, and I have to think that the work in the former line loses its import with the repeated incidence of what occasions the comments in verse. The 2016 piece was a comment on the Pulse shooting, but there is not enough in the poem itself to confirm that; only the dating makes it obvious, and there have been so many such at this point that they threaten to blend together for those fortunately spared their direct effects. That is a failing of mine and of the cultures in which I am enmeshed, not of the victims of such events. I remain the wrong kind of doctor to prescribe a solution, though, or one that might actually be taken up...

Wednesday, June 12, 2019

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I've posted on 12 June seven times previously in this webspace: 2010, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. The last four years have presented poems, either in sequence or independently. The earlier three are short prose pieces, with the 2014 ranting against disregard for the academic humanities, the 2013 musing on my now long-lapsed study of aikido, and the 2010 reflecting on what was then commonplace in my classrooms and is now far less so (in part because I teach so much less now than I did before). As is often the case, the verse attracts my attention more than the prose, largely because I think the prose explains itself in its own overly verbose way. (I've been accused of writing turgid prose more than once. I could quip that it's more tumescent, but I don't know how well that joke would stand up.)
As I read the 2015 poem, I have to think that I was describing a toilet. I know I have a tendency towards scatological humor; I never have outgrown poop and fart jokes. (I am in good company among Geoffreys for that, as the Miller's Tale attests, among others.) I imagine it's fairly clear to readers that I've not. Whether it's similarly clear that the 2015 poem is a toilet piece or just one fit for a toilet is less certain. Hell, even I'm not really sure, and I wrote it. I suppose it bears out Wimsatt and Beardsley a bit more, anecdotal as it is.
The 2016 piece is a bit more opaque to me. I know I have a tendency to write riddling pieces that describe things or people in oblique terms. I do not think the 2016 poem is such a piece, though. Writing that moves of its own accord might still be an interesting idea, and I might follow up on it in one of the other venues I maintain; I always need to be doing more writing, even when I am writing, and that means I need material about which to write. But I do not think that what I wrote corresponds to any physical object. Then again, it's been years since I wrote the piece; it may simply escape me at the moment. Enough does, certainly.
I am happier with the 2017 piece. I'll admit that my meter gets a bit ragged at times, that the cadence is looser than it ought to be. The rhyme scheme--the four triplets and a couplet I prefer when I try to write sonnets--works well, and I am pleased with the description of the Texas Hill Country I give. I still rise early in the morning, still prize the quiet and look with love on the scrub-clad hills under the moonlight, silver turning cerulean through pinks and golds as the sun rises. And it is still the case that I cannot linger looking as long as I would like; work still wants doing, now as ever, and I yet have responsibilities I must meet.

Tuesday, June 11, 2019

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I wrote on 11 June in this webspace in each of the following years: 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. The last, again, is a short poem in a cycle of them, bearing no real explication on its own. The 2017 is a vaguely Shakespearean sonnet, though I do not claim writerly skill to equal that of Billy Shakes. The 2016 is a bit of free verse, and the 2015 a report on current circumstances. The 2014 was a reflection on my inability to watch the San Antonio Spurs play basketball if I want them to win; I know it ascribes entirely too much agency to me to be accurate, but it was still an interesting thing on which to think at the time.
Looking at the 2015 piece, I remember being paid to read popular novels and write them up. When it was available, it was good work, and I miss it. It played to my strengths, after all--if nothing else, I can read swiftly and well. And, at $100 plus the cost of the book for each job, with me able to do three or four a week, it was a welcome addition to the family finances. It still would be, though I think I could probably only do two each week at this point. Still, I could find ways to use an additional $200 each week. I think most people could. I wonder whatever happened that made it dry up...
Looking at the 2017 piece, with its typical English-language sonnet form, I recognize again that it is something of a paean to the Texas Hill Country, where I grew up and where I live again. (I am not likely to move away from it again, though I do travel away from it from time to time.) It does make reference to other places I have lived: southwestern Louisiana; New York City; and Stillwater, Oklahoma. And it does so obliquely, not naming the places, but giving descriptions of them that take on a mildly riddling function. Louisiana only emerges from the lines for those familiar with its physical and cultural geography. New York City only comes across for those who've heard of Manhattanhenge and are familiar with the squared-off layout of many of New York County's streets. Stillwater pops out for those familiar with a musical and the relatively recent geological instability of the place (occasioned by fracking, as is clear to me and many others, even if denied by some).
Overt, though, is my reaffirmation of belonging in the Hill Country. When my family came here more than thirty years ago, it was because we had been battered. When I returned, bringing my family with me, in 2016, it was because I had been beaten. I continue to recover, if in different ways than recovery often looks here. I have to think it is something about this place that allows me to do so.

Monday, June 10, 2019

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I've posted seven times previously on 10 June, in 2010, 2011, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. The most recent three are poems, and short ones, though the 2017 piece is a sonnet with a rhyme scheme I tend to deploy. (I do not follow the typical models of Shakespearean quatrains or the more intricately braided Spenserian rhymes, but instead offer four triplets and a couplet.) It might be of interest therefore, if not necessarily much. The 2015 piece is a bit of a rant against the circumstances of my job search; it informs why I do not want to go back on the job market if I can avoid it. The 2011 piece is a short rumination on academic regalia; I still do not have answers to the questions I had then.
The 2010 and 2014 pieces remain, and I note that they both make much of my father working as an HVAC/R technician. The latter is something of an angry rant about the state of funding and care at the US Department of Veterans Affairs; so far as I know, little or nothing has been done, and things continue now as they did five years ago. My father still works for the agency, still maintains the systems that keep the staff and patients warm enough or cool enough to do what they need to do. He has not told me that things have much changed for him, and those I know who use the VA's services have been similarly uncommunicative regarding things getting better there. But I did not expect that any words of mine would carry to the eyes or ears of the mighty then, and I expect it even less now.
The 2010 piece is strangely interesting as I look back at it. The second part, wherein I discuss some things that happened in the classes I was teaching as I worked on my dissertation, is particularly interesting. It still flatters me that my students asked after copies of Malory, even these years later; it's not been something that's happened for me many times since, not even when I've had the luxury of teaching literature classes (and that has not been often, to be sure, nor is it likely to be the case again). The bit about jokes in Malory has come up for me in my work since; I tried to get a short paper on one published, but that didn't work well. (I may or may not try it again. I'm not sure.)
My rumination on the value of the academic humanities...I am not sure how to feel about it at this point. It seems entirely too myopic to be of any use; it needs corrective lenses, even as I do, but I am the wrong kind of doctor to determine that prescription. Or perhaps I am more jaded and cynical now than I was nine years ago, while I was still a graduate student with the hope--expectation, really, even more foolishly--that I would land a tenure-line position. I knew better than to think I could change the world, of course, but I thought that I would have a particular portion of that world to call my own and that what I did to push back against human ignorance might actually matter.
Now, though...I am not convinced.

Sunday, June 9, 2019

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9 June has been another decently diligent writing day for me, with posts made in this webspace on this date in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. The last three are poems, and I find once again that I do not want to focus my attention on my own verse at the moment. The 2013 piece is a musing on LinkedIN that I had forgotten I had done, though it is in my frequent model of summary and response and so presents nothing particularly compelling. The 2014 piece is a rumination on an expression of faith that, even then, was waning--and which is now exhausted. I will not say I saw no benefit to my life from participating in organized religion, but I can say that the benefit was more than it has since become, and I am trying to be better about not continuing to do things that don't help me. (Even this webspace, masturbatory as it is, offers me something; it offers me practice in writing for a generalist audience, which I always need.)
As yesterday, then, I return to 2015. In the post, I reflect upon a brief and partial return to bachelorhood; my wife and Ms. 8 had been away to attend a wedding, while I had things that needed doing at Sherwood Cottage. I note in the piece that I was able to keep body and soul together decently enough, that I had not atrophied as much as is commonly ascribed to married men and become dependent upon my wife as a second mother. I am not sure why I took pride in it then; I am not certain that I do so now, even if it does remain the case that I am able to cook meals and keep a clean house. There is no reason why I ought not to be able to, really.
I also note in the piece that "my tendency is to withdraw from things," that even when I have the opportunity to go out on my own and unencumbered, even when I have a bit of money in my pocket that I can dispose of with impunity, I stay in. I have worked at getting better about it in the past few years, and I have had some success at doing so, but it is still a struggle for me to convince myself that it is okay for me to go out and that I can actually occasionally have some fun while I do it. I am not always even partly successful; there continue to be times I stay at home when others in my family go out. And even when I have some success, I find myself counting the cost and looking at how I will be less able to do what I need to do when I need to do it as a result of going out and having fun. Rarely am I able to fully relax in the moment, and even more seldom am I able to avoid regret afterwards.
At the same time, I still feel as I note feeling in the 2015 piece. I know that acting as I do is not to my benefit, but I do not feel that I am making much progress towards improvement. Not having much changed in the four years in it does not make for the best feeling.

Saturday, June 8, 2019

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I have been reasonably good at posting on 8 June, having done so in 2011, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. The 2011 post was a brief one marking my parents' thirtieth anniversary then just past. The 2014 noted the birth of a cousin and work then in progress; the latter parts of it seem quaint to me now, particularly those discussing what was then my "professional" website. (I like to think that matters have improved somewhat since then in that regard; the website where I conduct my professional activities now looks better, and I have used it to learn a bit better how to design and code webpages. I admit I'm not as up as I ought to be, though.) The 2015 was a domestic report, noting small things I had done around Sherwood Cottage to make it a bit more livable. And the last three have been bits of verse, in context or not, that do not suggest themselves to me for analysis quite at the moment.
The domestic piece, though, seems to speak to me at the moment. Now, as then, my family and I rent the place where we live, paying someone else for the privilege of staying in a place we pay enough to be able to buy--if we can but get a down payment put together. The demands of daily life keep us from being able to do that; I admit that there are expenses we could trim slightly, but only slightly, and even when we do so, something crops up that keeps us from keeping much money back for very long. We are making progress, though it is slow, and there are times I do not think I'll ever be able to catch up to where I have been and where I probably need to be again.
Knowing that where we live is not ours, that it could be taken away at most any time (I pay the rent on time, but our landlord is not a young man, and I do not know if his successor will be as decent as he is) does not much motivate me to invest in making things better. I did not do much of it at Sherwood Cottage; what I did was more to reduce my utility costs than anything else. (It had some effect in that line, which I appreciated.) My family and I have done more where we live now, admittedly; Sherwood Cottage and the city in which it stands were never going to be forever homes for us, but the Hill Country town where I live now and where I grew up may well be. Knowing that we are more likely to stay here encourages making even things that are not mine better; I'll be using them longer, so I ought to involve myself in them more.
Still, I know that anything I do to the structure will stay where I put it, even though I will not stay where I put it. No small part of me chafes at the idea of putting my time, effort, and money into things that make others' investments more valuable but do not improve my own. It is a selfish attitude, perhaps, but I note that such selfishness is lauded as thrift in landlords and business owners. I want to wonder why the descriptors change when they are applied to individuals, but I already know that the answer is a de facto caste system--and that I am not at so exalted a rank as to admit of virtuous greed.

Friday, June 7, 2019

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I have not been as diligent in posting on 7 June as on some other days; I've only posted in this webspace on the day four times previously: 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2018. Three of the four are poems; the fourth is another pompously whining piece, and one of the poems is, as might be expected, an entry in an ongoing series of them. Neither needs any significant attention at this point. The 2015 post is another poem that reads more like prose than verse. (I received such a comment about another work of mine, though I have to wonder if the reader did not understand alliteration as a line-unifying device. That does not mean the critique is never valid, though.) It does not provoke even my interest at this point, so revisiting it further seems unhelpful.
The 2014 post, however, still works for me. Part is the stercoraceous language; the poem uses the word "shit" thrice in its thirty-nine irregular lines, twice specifically naming it as "dog shit." I am juvenile enough that I still pay attention to that kind of thing, even if "shit" is attested in English far earlier than is "beautiful" and should be old hat therefore. But the obscenity of the word still reads as being juxtaposed with the presumed formality of verse (formal because marked out as special due to the perceived distance between poetic form and "normal" life, just as "formal" clothing is marked as such in part because it is not "normal" daily wear). Being thus juxtaposed, it attracts attention and consideration.
It is not the only thing in the poem that does so, to be sure. The short second stanza--two unrhymed, arrhythmic lines--subverts the expectations fostered by the first stanza's raised chins. Typically, "chin up" refers either to pride or to a determination to persevere; the second stanza proposes that a raised chin is an invitation to attack. It makes possible that what is normally perceived of as a bad thing is, in fact, a good one, an inversion that the following lines pursue as they point out that the good and useful work of cleaning is work that demands looking down.
The poem continues, though, to note that those who do such work--vital and even pleasant to have done, though often unpleasant to do because of people's unconcern--is complicated and made harder by the active abuse of others. It does often seem that those in positions to care for or serve others are abused in those positions, the uneven power dynamics used to permit exercises in cruelty and disdain that are normally otherwise avoided (but if they are, it is because of fear of consequences rather than due to the sense that people deserve respect because they are people; such are those who need oversight to act well and who assume the same is true of others). The poem speaks to that openly.
There are other readings, of course; the dog shit might not be just dog shit, but a metaphor for any number of other unpleasantnesses often left behind by people who do not care much for the impact of their actions on others' lives. There are enough such to be found, certainly, too many.

Thursday, June 6, 2019

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I have posted on 6 June in six of the nine previous years: 2010 and 2014-2018. In all save the last two, I've commented on the anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Normandy, of which this year is the seventy-fifth. It is the diamond anniversary of an event more marked by steel and lead than any precious stone, and few are left to celebrate who were united then. It's not something to which I think I ought to speak all that much at this point. Honestly, what more can I add to such a conversation, when I have not worked to make myself an expert in it? I know that does not stop many from opining at length, and I am probably among those people, but I will at least not compound the error this time.
In all save the last year, as well (again with the poem-in-sequence), I have noted that the day is my parents' anniversary; they've been married thirty-eight years today. I'm not sure what I can add to that, either, except to say again that I am glad they are and have remained married, and that I love them. But I think they have known it for some time, even if I do not think they weary of hearing it.
The commemorations may not offer much to reflect upon as I sit and write now, but some of the attending comments might. My 2016 post on the day, for example, gives me something to consider as I look back. Aside from a usage error that galls me as I read it (so much so that I've gone back and adjusted it), I find myself somewhat annoyed by the tone I hear in the piece (or perhaps an under- or overtone that sounds in my ear because I remember its composition). Not having steady work was not good for me, I think; the writing reads as having whining notes in it, as well as fundamentals in dark tones, indeed. And why should it not? I was beaten, leaving Oklahoma in defeat, and there are ways in which I've still not recovered from it.
I am not sure I ever will.
This is not to say that things are not better now than they were. I have steady work now, and decently fulfilling. More importantly, I am able to have a good life outside of work; I am not a creature of my professions only, as I had tried (foolishly) to be, or even mostly, as I often was. Instead, I have a life outside my work, and one that is of greater comfort to me than any work I have done. And I can still work on The Work--I am, in fact, getting more of that kind of thing done now than I did when I was making a go of making it in academe, which is a strange thing but not unenjoyable.
Even so, there lingers at the back of my mind a niggling voice that reminds me that I have been beaten. It calls out a cadence to which I still play, and I am not sure how to break away from that rhythm.

Wednesday, June 5, 2019

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5 June has been better for writing than 4 June; I've posted five times on the date in this webspace: 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2018. As is likely to continue to be the case throughout the month, the 2018 piece is one element of a sequence of poems. The 2016 piece is a poem noting an experience in the Texas Hill Country (and marking me as the UTSA graduate I am--BA, English, 2005, cum laude, etc.), and the 2014 piece is a short musing on a dream; neither suggests itself as needing my attention again at this point. But the 2015 piece, talking about a potential teaching exercise that never came to be, and the 2013, looking at a book-as-object, both seem like they could use revisiting.
The teaching piece looks at comparative levels of obscenity in a series of nearly-identical statements. I note in it that I would have to have tenure to get away with offering it, and I've found that's not quite as true as I might have thought--as witness this account on another blog I maintain, incidentally just under a year ago. At the same time, I've not really been in classes where I can deploy the exercise, not because my students wouldn't go for it--they're generally non-traditional at this point, and most such are happy to have something more "real" than they associate with formal education remembered from their youth--but because the teaching I do is in a lock-step curriculum where I do more to regurgitate material passed down to me than anything else.
A lot of the teaching has been online, as well, and while there are benefits to teaching in that venue, one of them is not the development of the kind of rapport that allows such exercises to go off well. Online students tend to engage less frequently and deeply than students who have to have their butts in chairs in a set place on a set schedule, and the engagement is the thing that matters; it is what allows for the development of a space where inquiry into what is obscene, how obscene it is, and why it is so can occur. But even my on-site students cannot engage quite so much; I see them once a week for a three- or four-hour stretch across two months, which is not enough time or exposure to develop rapport with more than a select few. It's not as helpful as might be hoped.
To turn to the 2013 piece: There are other places in this webspace that I've considered books and their paraphernalia as objects rather than as texts, as such. A piece about a bookmark comes to mind as one example, as do some other pieces from earlier this year (here, here, and here). It's been perhaps not a theme so much as a topic of occasional interest to me. And while I no longer own the book in question--I passed it along, in turn, as I made to move from Sherwood Cottage back to the Texas Hill Country--such thoughts as I put to pixels then still occur to me when I look over the "inherited" volumes I still have. A bookstore I shop at deals mostly in used books, and I find things tucked into the pages on occasion; I still wonder about who left them there and why. I've not matched the (likely apocryphal) story of finding money tucked between the pages of dissertations, more's the pity, but I have come across things that offer interesting departure points for thought. Taking that kind of trip might be good to do again...

Tuesday, June 4, 2019

20190604.0430

I have not been as successful on writing on 4 June as I have on a number of other days; I appear to have done so in this webspace only in four years previously: 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2018. The last of them, again, is a poem in a sequence of them and cannot be understood outside of that sequence--and I might someday revisit that project. There was promise in it, but I am not skilled enough a writer to  fulfill that promise. The 2016 piece was an occasional poem, one of many I've written that could do better as prose; I am not sure what I've tried to do with line breaks other than highlight things, but that highlighting doesn't make much sense to me at this point. The 2015 piece ruminates on then-present circumstances at what my Mrs. and I called Sherwood Cottage in something of a romanticizing gesture that had the benefit of being easier to write and reference than "the place we live/d in Stillwater." (We refer to our apartment in Brooklyn as Bedfordside Garden for a similar reason. Other places we've lived get other names.)
The 2014 piece, as I look at it again (and it's been five years since I have), warms my cockles. It talks about the beginnings of the Tales after Tolkien Society blog, with which I was and still am heavily involved, as well as with the Society that operates it. (Clearly so; I was one of its first vice-presidents, and I am currently its president. It's hard to be more involved with it.) I was and still am enthusiastic about that project, though I do not post in it as frequently as I do in other places (such as this one), and being reminded of my early enthusiasm for the project (which helped the Society come in as a World Fantasy Award finalist in, I think, 2016) has not so much rekindled my enthusiasm as it has restored to me a little bit of joy I had not recalled having.
Leaving aside the discussion of scholarship and audience that runs to self-pity--the tendency to it in my writing is one I've yet to outgrow, despite being many years no longer a teenager--I had no way to know at the time that things would progress with the blog as they have. I've been fortunate to see some of the most popular and insightful commentaries about some of the most popular medievalist mass-media to emerge in a while develop, and I've seen the popularity of those commentaries mount; having some small part in it has been gratifying. Having my own work, much more modest, receive some attention alongside it has also been enjoyable--as well as helping my writerly voice develop further. I've worked to improve how I write for broader audiences through the work I've done on that blog, and I flatter myself that it's influenced the other writing I've done since starting on that.
I often use reminiscence and rumination to chastise myself. I look back on what I have done and what I have written, and I think about how stupid I was in whichever then is in question. Occasionally, though, I am happy about what I see. It's a nice thing.

Monday, June 3, 2019

20190603.0430

Continuing on with the idea of retrospection, I note that 3 June has seen me post in each of the past six years (2013-2018). The posts in 2018, 2017, and 2016 were each poems; that in 2015 was itself a retrospection, noting the 2014 post's attempt at humor and the 2013 post's rumination on the quiet of the morning. Again, the 2018 poem is one that exists as part of a sequence and cannot be understood outside of that context; again, too, the 2017 poem is not terribly good. The 2016 post, despite the typo in its title, offers some good, though; it came from one of my several immensely frustrating bouts of job-searching, and I think that it captures a fair bit of the vexation that came from the process. (There is a reason I've written often that I do not want to have to be back on the job market if I can avoid it.)
Since I seem to have laid out a thesis for a short essay, I suppose I ought to follow up on that form and note that the seven-line poem opens with a comment about an unnamed "she" before moving into the second line's "I," setting up a dichotomy that, given the remaining's lines' discussion of difficulty in opposition to the ease "she" enjoyed, makes the poem a complaint. In combination with the ragged poetic form--the seven lines do not rhyme, and they do not follow any particular rhythmic pattern--the complaint helps to express vexation at job hunts. Being at ease would allow for, if not encourage, the kind of reflection and revision that admits of a more regular verse form; the lack of both implies the opposite.
The second pair of lines also speaks to the vexation of the job-search process. Taken together, they raise the idea that offers of work may well be lies--as is no mystery. Claiming that a "vow is perhaps not the best" is far from a ringing endorsement of the speaker's honesty. Pointing out that any offer might well be a lie implies no small amount of mistrust, and it is not an easy thing to have to interact with people while suspecting them of deceit. That it is a concern raised almost as soon as the prospect of work is, then, highlights the immediacy of such thoughts, and, highlighting them, reinforces the vexation associated with them.
The final three lines, generally shorter than the first four, do not detract from the impression of vexation. The last two, particularly, enhance it. The sixth line, consisting only of the word "Perhaps," serves as a pivot--and, structurally, a pivot so close to the end of a work places it into a position of peculiar stress. Given the brevity of the poem, it stands out, calling attention to itself and implying, if subtly, the stress of job-hunting. It also highlights the final line, which ascribes agency not to the searching narrator but to outside forces rendered not-wholly-human through labeling them "the locals" rather than naming them or even assigning personal pronouns. They are certainly an other group, one that excludes the narrator, and being dependent on the good will of a group of which a person is not part is no easy thing. Throughout the poem, then, the idea that job hunting is not a easy or relaxing thing, that the opposite is true, comes out clearly.
Admittedly, I have an interest in having my own work studied and lauded. Admittedly, too, it is somewhat disingenuous for me to look back at my work and explain why it works well; a similar attempt by Poe in "The Philosophy of Composition" led to some problems for him, and I cannot expect that I will fare much better. But it is also good to look back on what I've done and, when occasion warrants, approve of it; I'm critical enough of myself as it is without allowing myself the occasional bit of pride in my efforts.

Sunday, June 2, 2019

20190602.0430

To follow up on yesterday's post and look back at what I have written in this webspace before, I'd note that 2 June has seen posts in each of the past six years (2013-2018). In 2013, I commented on Hobb's The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince; in 2014, I made some random comments. In 2015, I opined about an honorarium; in 2016, 2017, and 2018, I wrote poetry. As such, I have a few things I might look back on and discuss further. The 2018 poem, though, is one in a sequence of them, not really workable outside that context. The 2017 is, frankly, not very good; the 2016 is not much better, if at all. The former might as well be prose; the latter rhymes, at least, but in neither case is there a discourse to be found. They are, as it were, fruits without seeds, and while such may be good for eating, they don't do what fruit ought to do (if we can talk about "ought" in this context).
The 2015 piece reads to me as pompous. Even to my eyes, it seems the writer is struggling to bring in fancy words, and while I recall doing so in an attempt to be clear and exact in my language, I'm not at all sure it succeeds in that. Leaving aside the issue that assessing a piece by its writer's intent isn't a good approach--because I can only try to recall it at this point, and I can't be sure I remember it rightly--I'm not at all sure that what I write is clear. Bringing in the rarer words--not "bigger," because some of them are short, but less common and seemingly "fancier" as a result--seems to get in the way of easy reading; it comes off as showing off, as pompous. The refusal to use contractions reinforces the impression of arrogance; the removal from common speech patters marks off what should be an informal bit as trying to be more formal. It's wearing a tie when a t-shirt is expected.
The last bit, the metaphor about the tie and t-shirt, reminds me: I really seem to have been struggling to make the metaphor of falling fruit work in the 2015 piece. It's not a bad one, really; fruit dropping from trees before it's picked is windfall, and it's often the case that windfall produce starts rotting before a person finds it. Even if it hasn't yet, it still needs to be brushed off before eating. Where the metaphor uses that imagery, it works. But it pivots back into the kind of pompous language that marks the rest of the blog post, shifting away from what might actually work as evocative language and into stilted writing that does as much to say "look at me; I'm a professor--ain't I smart?" as it does anything else.
I was invested in coming off as smart, as deserving of an intellectual position. I was trying to get one at the time, as I am no longer, and I knew that I'd be researched by those I wanted to have hire me. But going about making myself seem a smart guy the way I did didn't work out (obviously). It might even have backfired; the case could be made, and easily, that I ought to have been working on researched writing rather than blogging. (It could be made now that I ought to be working on other projects than this webspace, others that I might use to at least try to make some money.) The 2015 piece was not my best work; understanding better why it wasn't can help in avoiding some mistakes later on.