my nefarious agenda

[radfrac_archive_full]

Let's see, uh...

That, you know, is the beginning to the Laurie Anderson piece about the Garden of Eden and nameless Eve falling in love with the snake.

I feel like there are stories to tell, so many that I can't start.

This morning's class was the last on Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. I'd heard the title as representative of the Angry Young Men. Therefore I conceived a desire to have read it (though not necessarily to read it.) Now I have read it. This education of mine is at least good for accumulating novel points.

(I wish there were an adventure game that let you rack up reading points. "You have read ULYSSES. You have gone up a level!" Different classes of reader. Various sorts of spectacles. Graduated Lenses of Insight for inlandsea.)

(Have, you may discern, been playing D&D Tiny Adventures on Facebook. Just when they'd killed Scrabulous and replaced it with a Scrabble app too irritating to bother with. I thought I was free. In games like this, the activities are interchangeable, except in how they stimulate your imagination. It's just a bunch of very basic operations plus your love of narrative.)

Right. How was the morning good? It contained several small pleasing fortuities all in a row. I ran into Poet Prof and we et wraps and talked about my SSHRC proposal and my increasingly horrified conviction that I have no idea what I'm interested in or ought to write about. We had about a half-hour of this, which is just about the right length of time to be allowed to ruminate before being given bracing advice and sent back to work.

The deal is that I am trying to come up with a convincing SSHRC proposal, but I cannot convince even myself of anything, so far. Bee says: look for something interesting in the archive. I pootle about in there on several separate occasions. I find that there are extensive and somewhat inexplicable George Barker holdings in the archive. I have a vague interest in George Barker because of the thing E. Smart said about him and a boy at a bookstore who had armpits like chalices, the boy not the bookstore, and his, Barker's, not the boy or the bookstore, concomitant fathering of something like 14 children.

I am really only in the field of literature at all in order to further my goal of proving that everyone in the world is queer.

What I do is I go around picking up SSHRC ideas off the ground and showing them to professors, hoping to evoke some interest. So far I have about the success you would expect from showing people things you've picked up off the ground.

I have no epithet for the Current Active Prof. Prof I am Trying Not to Try Too Hard With? That being any given prof in my immediate vicinity. I am getting to be an old hand at this transference thing. I also wish they gave points for doing that well.

I ducked down the hall to see if he was there. He was, so I spoke to him. OUTSIDE OF OFFICE HOURS. I asked him (rather abruptly) what he thought of George Barker. He said he tried to avoid poetry on principle. I also recently proposed he bring a play into his novels class. It must seem as though my brain got left in direct sunlight and "genre" got burned out.

I thought we didn't believe in genre any more. I thought it was a self-policing illusion. There was a whole essay about it. In French.

(I did know the thing was a play when I proposed it. It's just he keeps saying there aren't any postwar British novels about female youth subcultures, and I keep thinking, "Taste of Honey" -- it isn't a novel, but it's a brilliant counterpart to Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Not exactly subculture, but working-class experience. Plus, gay.)

I went to the library, got chased out of the computer room by a seminar after about an hour, caught the most direct bus home just as it was leaving, and returned to discover my combined GST and You're Poor, Fix the Climate tax rebate.

So: money, ideas, self-pity, research, timely public transit. These are the tiles of the daily mosaic.

No, they're not. I wish they were. Mostly it's eight grey hours of work.

I've made some sort of progress on my ungainly first paper. I started trying to do excessive research again (convincing myself that the history of the sociology of deviance will fit into a 2000 word paper), which is why on the whole it's good that I was kicked out of the library.

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Comments

[stitchinmyside.livejournal.com]

Anytime someone says that some literature doesn't exist, it gives me a burning desire to prove them wrong.

[radiantfracture]

In fact I spent a happy afternoon at the university library when I could have been working on my paper, just going through reference books of all the works published in various years to see if I could find anything.

But I'm sure he's already done all that.

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