As is readily apparent to
friends and strangers who have read my Debblog posts, I’ve taken a summer
vacation.
Reasons? First, it’s summer (duh!) – time for hiatuses
from workaday activities (particularly if one’s yearly schedule is predicated
on an academic schedule, and even if such schedule-bound activities are now completely
self-generated). Second, writing about
Donald Trump, week after week, is debilitating. I’ve done that for a year. Although
there are always new permutations on the madness that is the Trump campaign, my
vocabulary for reacting to the gilded yeti’s stupifications is pretty much
exhausted. Third, I’ve discovered that
short-short commentary (my weekday cocktail hour rants) satisfy my urge to
weigh in on what’s happening now.
As if department: if Trump actually read anything, it would be
easier to comment about/confute him. But he’s an information-free candidate,
which makes it harder to write anything more trenchant than ‘he’s an idiot – a
dangerous idiot.’
What have I learned from
substituting week-daily rants for more extensive blogs? For one thing, many ideas that I could have
spun into longer (equivalent of, say, four typed pages) commentaries can be
addressed adequately in a generous paragraph. (This is a general observation/argument
I floated many years ago, suggesting that bloated M.A. theses serve little
purpose and that a single, publishable article would be more useful.)
For another thing, and one
that’s a bit surprising to me: what I miss most on retiring from academia is
writing papers, proposals, chapters, articles, books. I LIKE spinning an inchoate idea into a more
precise, longer-form argument or condensing it into a proposal. I really thought I’d most miss students and teaching.
But I’ve been lucky enough to maintain fantastic friendships with many former
students, and honestly, my last couple years as a professor were rather
discouraging, as class members increasingly relied on quick and shoddy
googling, if not downright plagiarism from the internet, rather than honest
(even if maladroit) wrestling with ideas and texts.
Yet writing per se remains a
pure pleasure. Having a reaction to a
book, or a political speech, or an artwork, or a family story – and grappling
with how to convey that reaction in words, and often in research-informed words
– is so damned fun.
Percy Bysshe Shelley ruminating on –
himself? – in the Baths of Caracella.
I’ve never subscribed to the
Romantic myth of the suffering, alienated writer. Most writers are engaged with the world, and
happily interact with others’ words and ideas and, yes, requests. I started writing professionally as an ad
writer (when I was seventeen); there’s no better schooling that writing is not
‘all about you,’ that it’s about your audience, your clients, your publishers
(plus you, and your pleasure in plying your craft as deftly as you can).
Thus I keep writing, in a
variety of forms, some of which in a way now mimic academic writing tasks (as
in: a proposal for an interesting-to-attend
conference is due in two days, so come up with something pronto = you’ve
committed, to yourself, to write a thoughtful blog post every week [or a daily
rant], so come up with something pronto).
Re other motivations, and family stories:
my mother would refer to ‘Beta baths’ as a quick wash up of armpits and private
parts. For decades, my sister and I
thought the phrase referred to prostitutes’ hasty ablutions, but it actually
referred to the Beta Theta Pi fraternity’s (c. early 1940s) reputation for
personal slovenliness.
There are other motivations
for writing, of course. Some of what I
write concerns family history, addressed because it’s good to have an
accessible record of the stories that oral transmission may not capture in any
permanent sense. Other things are mere
bagatelles, written for amusement (of readers and, perhaps more honestly, of
myself). Maybe some blogs or rants are just
solipsistic demonstrations that I still have (I hope) the mental acuity to
write something comprehensible and interesting, about whatever topic presents
itself.
Risking redunduncy for for the sake of emphasis, I’ll keep writing, in one
form or another (look for blogs to resume after Labor Day). You actual or would-be writers out
there: write!
