Dear Readers:
Each month, you will receive an email from me containing one boredom, one horror, and one glory. This is the twenty-ninth one. They’re all combined together this month.
Boredom/Horror/Glory. I always tell my students not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good in their writing, so I’m going to put my newsletter where my mouth is this month.
In Wayne Koestenbaum’s wonderful book My 1980s (the title essay is one of the most beautiful, beautifully formed/unformed essays I can imagine), there’s this essay “Privacy in the Films of Lana Turner.” Like every essay in this book, “Privacy” has this ambitious, silly-yet-academic title—and twenty-thousand roads, all of which lead us straight back home to Koestenbaum. There’s a moment in this essay where he stops and says, “Later in life I’ll be more organized.” I love that. He just put it in the essay!
If I had time, I’d tell you about this Emily Dickinson essay I’m trying to write. I enthusiastically agreed to write it in March, when September 1 was a mystery, a point hazily visible in the far-off. Easy to agree on a due date like that. But now it’s tomorrow.
I think I was so enthusiastic about it in March because I love having assignments. The assignment was to review and lightly analyze the past two years in Emily Dickinson scholarship. What a fun idea!
But there’s no time to do this. Even if I had started it in March…I mean, if I were a different person, one who would start in March—no not a different person, I am a person who would start in March, but I couldn’t have started in March, because there wasn’t time; but even if there had been, there wouldn’t have been: there isn’t enough time. Because all the best books about Dickinson written in the past two years, especially this one called Emily Dickinson: Poetics in Context, by Melanie Hubbard, are black holes, you just fall into them and disappear.
If I had time, I’d tell you all about them.
If I had time, I’d tell you what it’s like to try to do research after being out of the loop for a couple years. Years that directly coincide with the two years of Emily Dickinson scholarship I’m supposed to be reviewing. But it’s always this way, even when I am in the loop. I read and write research with a mix of embarrassment and arrogance.
I know nothing / I know everything
I don’t understand this and it’s my fault / I don’t understand this and it’s the author’s fault
I am stupid / I am too smart to try to learn this stuff / I’m too stupid to begin to try to know this stuff / No I’m too smart to begin to try
Every great idea--like that Dickinson’s dashes and alternate phrasings (what Sharon Cameron famously called Choosing Not Choosing) weren’t so unusual, that these are actually signs of common mid-nineteenth-century writing pedagogical practices (that’s among the things Emily Dickinson: Poetics in Context argues)-- is buried, by being in a peer-reviewed academic article or monograph.
But I want, I have a desire, to be peer-reviewed. Like, to belong.
A list is for when you don’t have time not write anything else. No, not time. Capacity. My students at Case Western Reserve always wrote to-do lists when I gave them time to freewrite. I told them, write anything, whatever you want to write. After the allotted ten minutes were up, they’d say, I just wrote a to-do list. That’s okay, I said, that counts!
But it doesn’t feel like it counts when I use my own “writing time” to write a to-do list. What’s “counts”? I don’t know. Writing that feels like writing, I guess? So what does writing feel like, then? Boring? Useless? Set apart from the things you need to do, should be doing? Or, more optimistically, outside those structures of should-items. Free.
If I had time, I’d finally write my Joan Didion essay, the one I’ve been thinking about writing, writing, trying to write, for 8 years or so. More than that. 15 years, probably. Jeez.
If I had time, I’d tell you about my new job and leaving my old job. Leaving an email account behind has got to be one of the best feelings. All the hurt feelings and anxiety and things you didn’t do: poof! The dream of living outside those structures. To build a life outside of email! But as you’re imagining that, your new email account at your new job is being loaded.
If I had time, I’d tell you my thoughts on quit lit, the new genre of essay about quitting academe.
If I had time, I’d tell you more, more than all this. I’d write that Didion essay. I really would.
Consider these promises. I’ll fulfill them later. When I’m more organized.
Sincerely,
Lucy
#29: "Later in life, I'll be more organized."
Writing is a promise and you kept yours by giving us this wonderful piece. I am looking forward to Didion and Dickinson from you. What did you think of The Chair on Netflicks? Also, would you do something on writing prompts? Quit Lit? Cool. Promises are what keep us all alive. We have to make them.