Anxieties

I’m excited about getting into Chicago, but I’m not quite used to this level of elation over my own accomplishments. The last time I can remember having achieved something like this is when I was on the winning intersociety debate team for Demosthenian, almost three years ago. My friends tell me I’m crazy for even thinking about any other place (other than Oxford, perhaps), now that I’ve clinched Chicago. Yes, I suppose that if I’m willing to go, there will be some way to pay for it.

But part of my hesitance is that I just am not used to having this level of success. My perfectionism always builds up this huge, grandiose ideal of achievement. When this standard of achievement is actually fulfilled, it comes with an aura of unreality. The aim of perfectionism is, by definition, beyond one’s abilities; it’s the desire to be other than what one truly is. It feels weird to be me right now, because the person I envisioned getting into Chicago wasn’t me.

Of course, getting in is only part of the success. I could still go and flunk out.

P.S. The Chicago letter came yesterday, which was my half-birthday. Not bad!

Grad school update

Accepted: University of Chicago, humanities master’s; Temple University, philosophy master’s

Chicago was definitely one of my top choices, so I’m pretty thrilled to get that letter from them today. So many of the scholars I want to work with are there, the program is excellent for the literature-philosophy hybrid studies I’d like to pursue, and it’s the only school I’ve applied to that offers Norwegian. Sam wants me to go because of the relative proximity to her family in Michigan, so she can visit me for Thanksgiving; I’d also be pretty close to Amish and Jennifer in Iowa City. Temple was my fall-back school, so while it’s nice to get a letter from them, it’s pretty much out of the running.

Rejected: Oxford, philosophy master’s; U. of Michigan, English PhD

Oxford’s philosophy program isn’t too big a disappointment. I originally wanted to apply after looking at their mammoth faculty list and drooling over their world-renowned scholars, but I think I knew that my writing samples probably weren’t going to be up to their caliber. Philosophical writing doesn’t come to me as easily as writing about literature; I think my chances are better for Oxford’s English program, from which I have yet to hear. I began my application for Michigan in earnest, but realized when I was finished that they probably weren’t going to have what I was looking for. I’m more looking forward to a master’s degree than a PhD at this point, and in a more interdisciplinary program than Michigan would have offered.

Waiting to hear from: Oxford, English master’s; Harvard, English PhD; SUNY Buffalo, philosophy master’s

I’ve also applied for the Oxford one-year master’s in 20th century English lit; even though it’s not at all interdisciplinary, I’d still be very happy to get an acceptance letter from them. It’s a short program, which means I’ll be able to go on to something different if I so wish when the year is finished. I love Oxford, having lived there once and having gone back to see Sam there last fall. I also love the aura that goes with being able to say, “I graduated from (blank) College, Oxford.” So sue me! I don’t think my chances are great for Harvard, but, again, I won’t be too disappointed, for pretty much the same reasons as Michigan. Finally, I have by no means ruled out SUNY Buffalo, even with an acceptance to Chicago. Their master’s in philosophy gives you the option of concentrating in aesthetics, which means you can take courses from the English and comp. lit. departments, both of which are pretty good at Buffalo. My ultimate decision will have to take into account financial aid and other dismal matters I’m too excited to think about at the moment.

Reading and writing (or: the wisdom industry)

“Every great Poet is a Teacher; I wish either to be considered as a Teacher, or as nothing.” Wordsworth

I began reading Moby Dick about a month ago. I was immediately attracted to it by the inimitable first paragraph; it reminded me of the exuberant prose one finds in the likes of Johnson, Smollett, Beckett, or Nabokov. So I included the novel on a list I compiled of “Books I want to read during a much-needed year off.” I intended to work my way through the list, gradually but steadily, and I didn’t think the order in which I read the books would matter much. It would have been worthwhile just as long the experience afforded some enjoyment, in addition to being some serious reading I could take pride in when my year off ended.

Moby Dick, I’ve found, is a rather complex work. And that’s not merely because of the nautical slang I miss completely in this under-edited edition I’m reading from. Melville’s creation has an intricate metaphysical underpinning that demands repeated reading and prolonged consideration. I’ve put off reading it for a while now; I didn’t even make it halfway through the book. I’ve stalled because I don’t know how to strike the appropriate balance between two types of reading: reading for pleasure and the kind of reading that requires a good amount of intellectual heft.

Part of my problem is that I’ve come to expect that reading will afford a light entertainment, never seriously challenging my pre-conceived views, always coming easily and whenever I happen to be in the mood for “learning.” It’s like flipping the switch on the TV and expecting the knowledge to come pre-packaged, laid at your feet. I’ve been duped by all the publishers and the booksellers, what I would call the “wisdom industry,” which promises its consumers that deep knowledge is easily obtained, as long as you can afford their overpriced wares.

I find a similar problem when I come to produce these blog entries, or any writing generally. What do I expect people to get out of reading my blog postings? Is it in any way valuable for them to read my posts and say, “Ah yes, I felt that way once, I am glad to know that someone else feels that way too”? Shouldn’t I rather be challenging their old, stale ideas, and thus challenging myself to overcome my own?

I worry about such matters when I read Johannes’ blog entries. He typically writes about how bland American poetry has become, since (he believes) it has become merely a vehicle for intellectual posturing, preserving antiquated ideas of authorial finesse and ability. He once wrote this great line about how much of American poetry is designed to leave the reader with a meaningless feeling of “Ahh…” at the end of each lyric. I agree with him that this is a problem, and I wonder if that’s what I have come to expect from my reading. Do I approach a work of art, expecting it merely to reaffirm whatever preconceived notions I carry to the work, thus being no more than a light entertainment?

This possibility of teaching and learning seems to be a fundamental problem of literature. What we typically identify as literary irony is the situation where a character is ignorant of some crucial fact to which the audience has exclusive access. This discrepancy demands that you bring some pre-formed beliefs and views to the artwork; otherwise, you would have no frame of reference in order to judge the overall content of the work. But where does this conception of irony leave room for us to be taught by a work of art, if all we are meant to do is glance knowingly to the author when he presents us with his hapless characters? This glance assumes that the author and the reader are born, fully grown, and can simply live a life of contended, knowledgeable ease, passing their knowledge back and forth to one another in ever more “eloquent” and “creative” ways.

Sadly, I’ve come to believe that both reading and writing come from unschooled knowledge that’s an automatic gift at birth. I’m going to have to learn that reading takes as much diligence and hard work as writing, and that a true engagement with great literature is active, not passive. I used to identify an author’s skill with his eloquence, and mistook eloquence for profundity of thought. And when I desired to be a great writer, I thought that this would consist in training my rhetoric, so that people would admire me and want to listen, and that this would prove I had something important to say. I decided to be an English (and later, philosophy major) to obtain wisdom for this enterprise. And I thought that wisdom was something I could buy at Barnes and Noble.

Current goings-on

I guess one use of a blog would be to let people know what’s going on in my life. That’s another difference between this enterprise and the private notebook. In the latter, I always just assumed that “I knew” whatever everyday activities I was engaged in, so there was no need for me to record them if I was the only person who would read about it later.

That idea was part of this desire of mine to always be “advanced,” to be intelligent enough to skip over the first, basic steps in any given enterprise. I’ve become aware of this tendency in an online correspondence philosophy course I’m now taking from Oxford (and yes, that is THE Oxford University in England, not the one in Covington, Georgia). The tutor for that class has had to chastise me, because I naturally want to skip ahead to several different philosophical subjects rather than stay focused on the topic at hand. All the while I ignore the basic rules of validity, consistency, and logical inference because, again, I figure “I should know” these things from my freshman intro class.

Oftentimes, I end up derailing my enjoyment of these activities, because it turns into me trying to prove something rather than learning for its own sake. And since I obviously can’t go to advanced levels before learning the basics, I feel stupid when I’m unable to achieve the impossible expectations I set for myself. In fact, that’s probably the root of the dissatisfaction I often feel with my intellectual activities. It’s not that I don’t naturally enjoy doing these things, not at all—it’s just that I won’t let myself enjoy them because I have to placate my gigantic expectations.

In my private notebooks, I always reached out for some grandiose ideal of self-knowledge, believing that the search for eternal truths would only be hindered by recording day-to-day trivialities. I now realize that such a goal was a flight from my true self, since it wasn't just everyday events I thought would be boring--I actually believed that I was too boring, and that I would have to possess some uncommon intellectual heft if I were to separate myself from the rabble in the eyes of posterity. I think I'd rather be distinguished in the eyes of my loving girlfriend, Samantha (cue the aww's).

So, the twin beneficial aspects of the blog are that I’ll always begin with what’s most ordinary in my life, in addition to keeping all of you, my friends, up to date on what’s going on with me.

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One current going-on is my (sadly) continuing job search. What’s worst about the situation is that I HAD a job—and I let it slip through my fingers. When I got home last November, a new Starbucks in Snellville was doing huge amounts of business and was desperate for new workers. I turned in my application, was interviewed, and accepted—all within a week of my arrival home from Norway! If only I’d taken it, I would have been working these past three months. But I held off on a decision until I heard back from a couple of jobs at the UGA Library that would have paid a little more…they took forever to give me their rejections, and by that time it was too late for Starbucks.

So yeah, I feel pretty stupid about that, and won’t be making that mistake again with the next place that hires me. I’ve turned in applications for several other Starbucks locations, Books-A-Million, Barnes and Noble, and to be a substitute teacher with Gwinnett County Public Schools. I’ll also probably apply to Walgreen’s, which is hiring, according to their sign.

But the one I want most of all, by far, is one I recently discovered on the web, with Google, Inc., which is looking for a “Quality Rater, Nordic Language.” The only qualifications for this job are a basic reading knowledge of Norwegian and some experiences in Norway, both of which I’ve got. The details of the job were scant, but I gather that it involves looking at Norwegian websites for google.no (the Norwegian version of Google) and “rating the quality” of these websites, somehow, for at least 30 hours a week. It sounds perfect for me, given my enthusiasm for all things Norwegian.

And, best of all, the thing with Google is a temporary position, so I don’t have to worry about the dilemma I’d have with other employers, between A) telling them, up front, that I’m going to grad school in a few months, thereby ensuring I won’t get the job, and B) not telling them and thus being a dishonest ass when I abruptly move to Oxford, Chicago, or Buffalo in the fall.

I’m going through caffeine withdrawal, complete with headaches and dull, aching despair. Again, I think a job would help with that, by keeping me busy, at least.

Introduction

[Johnson] recommended to me to keep a journal of my life, full and unreserved. He said it would be a very good exercise, and would yield me great satisfaction when the particulars were faded from remembrance. I was uncommonly fortunate in having had a previous coincidence of opinion with him upon this subject, for I had kept such a journal for some time; and it was no small pleasure to me to have this to tell him, and to receive his approbation. He counselled [sic] me to keep it private, and said I might surely have a friend who would burn it in case of my death. From this habit I have been enabled to give the world so many anecdotes, which would otherwise have been lost to posterity. I mentioned that I was afraid I put into my journal too many little incidents. Johnson. “There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.”
-James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson

In the notes that follow, my friends, you find my first-ever attempt at keeping an online journal, or blog, or whatever. Never before have I kept a “LiveJournal” or any other sort of online diary; to me, a spiral-bound notebook and ball-point pen were not only adequate, but absolutely essential to the task of recording my private recollections. The public sphere of the web, on the other hand, seemed wholly antithetical to what I was trying to do. I’ll try to explain what I mean by this in what follows.

Ever since my first year of college, I’ve been keeping a “journal of my life, full and unreserved.” I think I began doing it because, in high school, I found my attempts at creative writing a little stale and unschooled, and I believed that keeping a traditional diary-type thing would provide the superstructure in “life’s big lessons” I would need before applying them in an ambitious creative writing career. Before long, the creative writing goal faded and I began keeping the journal for its own sake, or rather for the therapeutic comfort of spilling my guts whenever the need became apparent. It was always a secret enterprise; almost never have I considered going public with my scribblings. Except, perhaps, with all the names and dates altered, the minimal change I imagined was necessary to make it “fiction” rather than “autobiography.”

I kept my journal entries to myself because I felt I wouldn’t be, as Johnson says, “free and unreserved” to express everything honestly if I wrote for the public sphere. By keeping the journal private, the only persons who read it were imaginary, and I could thus corroborate whatever praise or derision I felt the entries merited with these imaginary redactors. To reveal my writings to the light of day would have been to invite a multiplicity of interpretations, but I wasn’t willing to relinquish control over my own texts. Now, there’ll be all my Facebook friends who’ll read this when I put the link in my profile, and that’ll bring a whole slew of new readers from all over the collegiate world. The slight, meaningless trickle of “personal details” in the Facebook profile was much more manageable and straightforward. To return to the Boswell and Johnson’s day, I wonder if this is why poems and books that were written at that time were often addressed to one specific person: because to do so focused one’s attention upon a single, stable member of the vast, unmanageable audience the work would inevitably attract.

A number of other considerations, stemming rather from the unspoken habits of my peculiar personality than any deliberate thought, led me to reserve my writerly efforts for a private, handwritten notebook. For instance, to me, a handwritten journal entry seems finished, needing no further revision. I go to my journal to provide a permanent glimpse of what occurred to me on a particular moment; to go back and edit would violate the purity of that moment with other moments. This probably stems from my adolescent interest in the Beat poets, who claimed that the only stuff of value was the unedited mishmash of rapidly hashed-out scribbles; thus, this aspect of my journal-writing is a holdover from the creative-writing days I never managed to shed. In fact, now that I think of it, I realize that the Beat idea of “spontaneous poetics” influenced my entire attitude towards journal-writing. Since my feelings are hardly predictable and ordered, I thought of the journal as the one space where I could dole out the thoughts of any particular occasion with a minimum of external restraint.

In the last paragraph, we see an example of why electronic journal-keeping was out of the question for me. In this Word file, phrases like “now that I think of it” can only achieve a feigned spontaneity, since the PC lacks the linear, “read it as it was written” quality of the handwritten page. Rather, the Word file always retains some element of malleability, which allows one to easily alter the document without leaving any discernable trace of the change. The PC is useful insofar as I want to go back and edit, to create something polished and obviously manufactured, rather than to exhibit raw, unbridled emotion. Thus, I always viewed my typed works as having a forged presence in one particular moment, since one can never be sure how many layers of editing have gone into the creation of an electronic document. The computer seems to crave pre-meditation, planning, a pre-determined means and end.

Another holdover from adolescence was my interest in handwriting analysis, or “graphology,” which is the science (or, arguably, pseudoscience) of reading someone’s handwriting as a fingerprint of his or her personality. I bought into this for a time in high school, and again, I carried it over into my use of handwritten journals. Since the journal was to reveal my innermost feelings as completely as possible, I felt that the unconscious properties of my own handwriting would allow for a whole new layer of meaning that the PC could never achieve. The use of a computer implied shadiness, a lack of openness, a pair of sunglasses to wear in order to hide one’s true feelings.

This was despite the fact that I was more secretive about the journal entries than anything else. Or rather, I was secretive about the journals to my everyday acquaintances; I knew, as Boswell and Johnson did, that there could be no telling whose hands they would fall into after my death. Thus, I imagined that I was being totally candid to future generations of admirers, who would eagerly compile any manuscripts of mine they could find once I had established myself as a legendary writer of novels or essays or whatever. So, the idea of a legacy had something to do with the historical presence I aimed for with each journal entry.

Adding to the notion of a handwritten journal as a snapshot-in-time are the materials you put into the enterprise. For instance, I bought this pen at the WH Smith stationery store on Cornmarket Street in Oxford, I bought this notebook in a Christian bookstore on Kong Oscars Gate in Bergen, Norway, just a few meters away from the hostel where I worked—etc, etc. In woeful contrast stands the PC, which has none of the local color I can bring to a journal. I bought this thing on a tax-free holiday at the Best Buy on ugly, traffic-filled Pleasant Hill Road, right next to smoggy old I-85. Moreover, I can upload and send this document on any old drab computer, urbi et orbi.

Interestingly, I once bought an old, electric Sears typewriter at the Potters House thrift store in Athens, and actually used it for a few of my private journal entries. I liked it for its awkward mechanical feel, the fact that it, too, retained the historical dimension of linearity and finish that the PC could never achieve, and yet in an entirely different way than the notebook. But, sadly, its numerous mechanical problems left me unable to develop any long-term writing habits with it.

So, I’ve always reserved my inmost feelings for cheap, old spiral notebooks rather than an electronic journal. So, why do I now decide to churn out my writings on a blog? Part of it is jealousy. I’ve been reading Amish’s blog and that of his Swedish friend, Johannes, for the past couple of months, and eventually I realized that I, too, want a public spot where I can present my own thoughts and bitch about the decadence of new things.

I think it also has to do with my current state of transition from the undergrad degree to grad school, i.e., from preparing for life to actually living life. If I can keep myself to some degree of consistency with this little blog space, then I will have trained my writerly habits so that they aren’t so random and scattered, as in my private notebook. For, one thing that always strikes me with the private notebook is that I tend to forget each entry the moment I finish writing it. This bump-and-go writing leaves me astonished when I return to the entries a few months or years later to find how little I’ve progressed in my emotional bewilderment, when some sort of development was supposed to be the whole point of keeping the journal in the first place!

This means I’m going to have to learn some degree of patience. In my eagerness to be finished with handwritten entries, I’ve made the error of believing that the end of each entry coincides with the end of whatever problem or dilemma the entry deals with. Of course, the problems that most merit our attention refuse to be so compartmentalized. I’ve just been foiling myself to think otherwise. Plus, the answer to why I’ve decided to do this thing answered itself during the process of writing this piece. By editing and rewriting this piece over the period of a week, I was able to deliver a number of new and interesting thoughts that hadn’t occurred to me during the original, freewriting stage.

Finally, another difference between private and public journals is that my imaginary readers in the former can’t require me to come up with an elegant conclusion. Since I can’t think of one at the moment, I’ll take a rain-check on that. (It’s my first try, give me a break.)

ukens premierer (coming attractions)

I plan to make roughly a post per week on the blog, so keep watching.