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.