What will I do today?

In addition to yardwork, I have a very long list of things to do this summer. One of the blessings of academia is the summertime. The curse, however, is that we (I?) plan to do everything that occurs to me all year long during the summer, which can make for its own breed of stress.

Research and writing:

• I want to finish and send out this article on G. I've drafted it, but it needs some contextual underpinnings. I'd like to send it out by August 1.
• Review this 800-page book I volunteered to review. 800 pages!!!
• Get about 90% of the annual bibliographic essay done. I think that I'm at about 60% right now.
  
• Draft a presentation for a colloquium in the fall; this should be pretty easy.
• Think in some kind of serious way about that sort of book-like project that I'm kind of sort of planning. What's the first step, though?

School stuff:

• Get my syllabi in order. I only have one new class this fall! I don't think that I've ever had fewer than two new preps before--unless you count that anomalous semester when I only taught two classes.
  
• Read the one book that I'm teaching and haven't read before (I read the others earlier this summer).
• Get course packs together.
  
• Revise and reprint the Honors program handbook.
• Clean up some files.

Crafty things:

• Finish knitting my shawl--I'm almost done!
• Knit an afghan.
• Finish a pair of socks (and probably start another one).
• Make paper and bind it into journals for Christmas presents.
• Sew three new curtains for the kitchen (I did one over spring break, and it looks so lonely in there!).

Housy things:

• Organize some files and whatnot.
• Um...the house is in pretty good shape, actually.

Fantasy career things:

• I have a novel that I would like to try to get published, for real.
• I have a few short stories for which I'd like to do the same.
  
  I don't actually want to be a creative writer; it's too weird and exhausting. The truth is that I really like working with people (who knew?); I also find that being absorbed into a story of my own creation, while exhilarating, is also really draining and disorienting. So I don't include this category of projects because I want to move out of academia--I don't. What I would like to do is to try to move some of my better stuff out into the world, so I don't have it hanging distantly in the background of my mind forever. I love me some closure, I do. And if it doesn't get published, at least I'll have tried.
  

All righty! What'll it be today?

Reflections on a Favorite Book, or, The Dangerous Lives of Poets

I leave in a few minutes for the boyfriend's city, and my house is ready(ish) for my sublettor (I accidentally used the clean towel I'd left him, but Oh Well; I was clean at the time). I've been accomplishing many small tasks this week, and am feeling good about that:

• I have selected an apartment
• I have read the first in the long list of books I need to teach this fall
• I have finished revising my article, and resubmitted it
• I have vacuumed and done the laundry.

Etc.

This morning I finished rereading a book that I really loved when I first read it 10 years ago, and am happy to report that I still really love it. It's a little known, out-of-print novel by James Ramsey Ullman called The Day on Fire. You should read this book. It's long, but since when has that been a deterrent?

In brief, The Day on Fire is a fictionalized biography of the poet Rimbaud. From what I've been able to gather, not much is known of Rimbaud's life, but what we do know is pretty interesting: he wrote all of his poetry between the ages of about 15 and 19, he was Verlaine's lover for a time, and he travelled widely through Europe and Africa, mostly on foot. There's good material in there for a novel, and Ullman does a great job with it. I won't go heavily into the plot here. But one of the things I really like the most about the novel is how Ullman uses bits of Rimbaud's poetry to unify the whole story--which is, as I say, long, and involves a lot of different "sections" (e.g. Morel [the Rimbaud-figure] living with Druard [the Verlaine-figure]; Morel teaching in Switzerland; Morel the African gun-runner). The different segments of the story threaten to become disconnected, but Ullman invokes scraps of Rimbaud's own writings as refrains throughout the novel. So, for example, the lines, "The night alone, and the day on fire" are used to at various points to invoke literal heat (in Africa), the torture of Morel's hashish addiction, or the more figurative fire of his drive to write poetry.* These images accrue more and more meanings as the novel progresses, so that when they're used, a whole network of associations comes forward and reminds the reader of all the stages of the character's life.

[*That sounds rather lame as I've described it, but that' s only because I've got to go in a minute and don't have time to think of a better example.]

More personally, I find this book exciting. Not so much because of the story's action--though that's exciting, too, in its own way--but because Morel-Rimbaud is himself so rich and fascinating. The novel is long, and that's good. There's a lot to excavate. He's not a...nice person, to put it mildly, but in a strange way I find myself wanting to be him, as I read; through his poetry and his strange life he created a sort of otherworld, a bizarre and disturbing world of intense symbolic power. I'm glad that I've finally finished reading this book, because there are other things that I have to read, but I regret leaving that world behind.

Rimbaud, like so many poets, died young. He was 37, I think. Byron was 36, and the Scandinavian poet Edith Sodergran was 31. Why have so many poets died at such young ages? It's dangerous, to be a poet.

Active/Passive

So I've been revising my novel manuscript for the past couple of weeks, and I'm struck, as always, by how interesting revising can be. I never used to revise my fiction very much, which is probably why it wasn't all that good, but one thing that the dissertation process taught me was that first drafts are never finished drafts. Revision works.

Anyway one of the comments that my SignifOth gave me when he read the MS was that the main character seemed too passive. I agree; a lot of things happen to her, and she thinks about them and reacts. SO found that this made it harder to relate to/sympathize with her. I can definitely see that. And I didn't want her to be passive; it just sort of happened. So that's one thing that I've been trying to fix in my revisions.

Passivity, shyness, submissiveness--these are things I've tried to overcome throughout my life; they're things a lot of people (maybe more women than men, but I won't get into that) struggle against. And what's interesting is that the changes I've made to the way that my protagonist behaves could actually be a sort of instruction manual on how to be less passive. I've added a few incidents to the story which give her the chance to be more assertive, but the systemic changes that I've made are all actually pretty minor. Mostly, they're a matter of just deleting certain verbs. Here are some of the things that my character is not doing anymore (or not doing as much):

1) shrugging, sighing
2) smiling
3) thinking/considering/pondering after someone else says something
4) agreeing with things she doesn't really think
5) pausing, hesitating, looking away, looking down
6) noticing the strength/power/whathaveyou of other people
7) not asking questions about interesting things that other people say

Once I noticed how pervasive these actions (or non-actions, in the case of #7) were throughout the MS, it really seemed that I'd been consciously constructing her as passive, even submissive. Which I wasn't. But what's particularly interesting, to me, is how just removing most of the instances of points 1-6 (and adding some follow-up dialogue to get rid of 7) totally changes her character.

Hm.

ETA: Another one: looking at people "gratefully." Yuck!