Moving on
Christian Reading His Book— one of William Blake’s illustrations for Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress
For the last week, I’ve been mostly reading and exploring. It’s amazing the number of things there are to see/do here in the Twin Cities. I like it. However, once I laid down my burden, what surprised me most was the desire I had to read—and not just anything, but something hard.
I’ve been reading The Confidence Man: His Masquerade by Melville. I’m starting my second pass through it now, and it is a truly rich book. I suppose that’s what I miss most about being a literature geek—the fun of unpacking really dense things and examining them closely.
Stay the Course
The end of the semester has been more/less brutal than usual. I stopped writing for a number of reasons, not the least of which being kindness to an imagined audience. It seemed to me that it was just too weird to do what I’ve been doing for the last few years—writing down bits of thought as they occurred to me. I did limit myself to things that at least a few people might share an interest in, but eventually the things I began to explore were beginning to even strike me as arcane. That’s no mean feat—I have a taste for bizarre trivia.
I’m almost done with coursework. It seems like I’ve finally figured out how to manage taking classes productively, and soon I won’t have to do that any more. For the past few years, perhaps starting in the second year of my Master’s degree, I began to get upset about having to take things that had nothing to do with my research. It’s terrible when you start to feel like school is getting in the way of your education. But I haven’t felt that way since I got to Minnesota, really. I think it’s because my powers to twist and stretch almost anything to match what I’m actually interested in got better. But that comes at a price. The things you write about tend to be too far away from the conversation occurring in those topics, and they derail your focus on your own topic. In short, it helps almost no one. But the lessons learned in the attempt are necessary I suppose.
I can never restrain my taste for trivia for long, so I suppose there will probably be the usual spare time outpouring of oddities into this notebook of a sort soon. I need to catch my breath a bit, and try to figure out what just happened (last few weeks, at least). I may write about it/ or not. Nothing happened personally, just intellectually. But that’s the way it usually is.
